Design space exploration is essential for optimizing deep neural network accelerators, which face increasing computational and energy demands as model complexity grows. Previous approaches rely heavily on local insights, often neglecting the need for extensive exploration to improve the global perspective. This leads to challenges such as blind exploration and a higher likelihood of getting trapped in local optima. Without dynamic adjustments or adaptive strategies, these methods struggle to navigate large, complex design spaces effectively. In this paper, we propose PRDSE, a design space exploration framework based on reinforcement learning that integrates both intrinsic and extrinsic metrics, guided by prior knowledge. The proposed method incorporates an adaptive adjustment mechanism that dynamically balances intrinsic and extrinsic rewards based on the progress of exploration, improving both search efficiency and optimization performance. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, PRDSE achieves substantial improvements, with latency speedups of up to$3.49 \mathrm{x}$in the cloud environment and$3.43 \mathrm{x}$in the edge environment, respectively. This work demonstrates that PRDSE effectively balances exploration and optimization objectives, providing a more efficient and scalable approach to design space exploration in accelerator design.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) operations contain a large number of irregular data operations and sparse matrix multiplications, resulting in the under-utilization of computing resources. The problem becomes even more complex and challenging when it comes to large graph training. Scaling GNN training is an effective solution. However, the current GNN operation accelerators do not support the mini-batch structure. We analyze the GNN operational characteristics from multiple aspects and take both the acceleration requirements in the GNN training and inference process into account, and then propose the SaGNN system structure. SaGNN offers multiple working modes to provide acceleration solutions for different GNN frameworks while ensuring system configurability and scalability. Compared to related works, SaGNN brings 5.0x improvement in system performance.

Customized accelerators for Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) can achieve better energy efficiency than general computing platforms. However, the design of a high-performance accelerator should take into account a variety of parameters and physical constraints. The increasing parameters and tighter constraints gradually complicate the design space, which poses new challenges to the capacity and efficiency of design space exploration methods. In this paper, we provide a novel design space exploration method named ACDSE for optimizing the design process of CNN accelerators. ACDSE implements the adaptive compression mechanism to dynamically adjust the search range and prune low-value design points according to the exploration states. As a result, it can focus on valuable subspace while also improving exploration capacity and efficiency. Additionally, we implement ACDSE to address the problem of CNN accelerator latency optimization. The experiment indicates that, compared to former DSE methods, ACDSE can reduce latency and increase efficiency by 1.39x-5.07x and 2.07x-43.87x, respectively, under the most stringent constraint conditions, demonstrating its superior adaptability to the complicated design space.