Homomorphic Encryption (HE) provides strong data privacy for cloud services but at the cost of prohibitive computational overhead. While GPUs have emerged as a practical platform for accelerating HE, there remains an order-ofmagnitude energy-efficiency gap compared to specialized (but expensive) HE ASICs. This paper explores an alternate direction: leveraging existing AI accelerators, like Google's TPUs with coarse-grained compute and memory architectures, to offer a path toward ASIC-level energy efficiency for HE. However, this architectural paradigm creates a fundamental mismatch with SoTA HE algorithms designed for GPUs. These algorithms rely heavily on: (1) high-precision (32-bit) integer arithmetic to now run on a TPU's low-throughput vector unit, leaving its high-throughput low-precision (8-bit) matrix engine (MXU) idle, and (2) fine-grained data permutations that are inefficient on the TPU's coarse-grained memory subsystem. Consequently, porting GPU-optimized HE libraries to TPUs results in severe resource under-utilization and performance degradation. To tackle above challenges, we introduce CROSS, a compiler framework that systematically transforms HE workloads to align with the TPU's architecture. CROSS makes two key contributions: (1) Basis-Aligned Transformation (BAT), a novel technique that converts high-precision modular arithmetic into dense, low-precision (INT8) matrix multiplications, unlocking and improving the utilization of TPU's MXU for HE, and (2) Memory-Aligned Transformation (MAT), which eliminates costly runtime data reordering by embedding reordering into compute kernels through offline parameter transformation. Our evaluation on a real single-host Google TPU v6e refreshes the SoTA Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) throughput record with up-to$1.43 \times$throughput improvement over WarpDrive on a NVIDIA A100. Furthermore, CROSS achieves$451 \times, 7.81 \times, 1.83 \times, 1.31 \times, 1.86 \times$, and$1.15 \times$higher throughput per watt than OpenFHE, WarpDrive, FIDESlib, FAB, HEAP, and Cheddar, respectively, establishing AI ASIC as the SotA efficient platform for HE operators. Code: https://github.com/EfficientPPML/CROSS.

Modern reconfigurable AI accelerators rely on rich mapping and data-layout flexibility to sustain high utilization across matrix multiplication, convolution, and emerging applications beyond AI. However, exposing this flexibility through fine-grained micro-control results in prohibitive control overhead of fetching configuration bits from off-chip memory. This paper presents MINISA, a minimal instruction set that programs a reconfigurable accelerator at the granularity of Virtual Neurons (VNs), the coarsest control granularity that retains flexibility of hardware and the finest granularity that avoids unnecessary control costs. First, we introduce FEATHER+, a modest refinement of FEATHER, that eliminates redundant on-chip replication needed for runtime dataflow/layout co-switching and supports dynamic cases where input and weight data are unavailable before execution for offline layout manipulation. MINISA then abstracts control of FEATHER+ into three layout-setting instructions for input, weight, and output VNs and a single mapping instruction for setting dataflow. This reduces the control and instruction footprint while preserving the legal mapping and layout space supported by the FEATHER+. Our results show that MINISA reduces geometric mean off-chip instruction traffic by factors ranging from $35 \times$ to $\left(4 \times 10^{5}\right) \times$ under various sizes under 50 GEMM workloads spanning AI (GPT-oss), FHE, and ZKP. This eliminates instruction-fetch stalls that consume $96.9 \%$ of micro-instruction cycles, yielding up to $31.6 \times$ end-to-end speedup for $16 \times 256$ FEATHER+. Our code: https://github.com/maeri-project/FEATHER/tree/main/minisa.

The rapid advancements in AI, scientific computing, and high-performance computing (HPC) have driven the need for versatile and efficient hardware accelerators. Existing tools like SCALE-Sim v2 provide valuable cycle-accurate simulations for systolic-array-based architectures but fall short in supporting key modern features such as sparsity, multi-core scalability, and comprehensive memory analysis. To address these limitations, we present SCALE-Sim v3 (GitHub Repository), a modular, cycle-accurate simulator that extends the capabilities of its predecessor. SCALE-Sim v3 introduces five significant enhancements: multi-core simulation with spatio-temporal partitioning and hierarchical memory structures, support for sparse matrix multiplications (SpMM) with layer-wise and row-wise sparsity, integration with Ramulator for detailed DRAM analysis, precise data layout modeling to minimize memory stalls, and energy and power estimation via Accelergy. These improvements enable deeper end-to-end system analysis for modern AI accelerators, accommodating a wide variety of systems and workloads and providing detailed full-system insights into latency, bandwidth, and power efficiency. A$128 \times 128$array is$6.53 \times$faster than a$32 \times 32$array for ViTbase, using only latency as a metric. However, SCALE-Sim v3 finds that$32 \times 32$is$2.86 \times$more energy-efficient due to better utilization and lower leakage energy. For EdP,$64 \times 64$outperforms both$128 \times 128$and$32 \times 32$for ViT-base. SCALE-Sim v2 shows a 21 % reduction in compute cycles for six ResNet18 layers using weight-stationary (WS) dataflow compared to outputstationary (OS). However, when factoring in DRAM stalls, OS dataflow exhibits 30.1% lower execution cycles compared to WS, highlighting the critical role of detailed DRAM analysis.

Emerging machine learning (ML) workloads, such as those in AR/VR applications or drones, exhibit real-time multitask multi-model (RT-MTMM) characteristics. These workloads demand efficient executions of diverse combinations of multiple models within strict real-time constraints and tight energy budgets. Consequently, optimizing hardware accelerator design and dataflow choices for such ML models becomes imperative. Flexible dataflows in hardware have been explored to enhance performance and energy efficiency for diverse models. However, this flexibility involves substantial hardware costs, potentially outweighing the performance benefits. While coarse-grained flexible accelerators, including heterogeneous dataflow accelerators [1], have been proposed to mitigate such costs, they may prove suboptimal depending on combinations of models, potentially leading to under-performance of the hardware. Hence, this paper investigates the desired balance between the benefits and costs of flexibility. We present a systematic and quantitative exploration of medium-grained flexible accelerators, demonstrating that constrained yet judicious domain-aware flexibility choices in tile sizes (T), loop order (O), parallel dimensions$(\mathrm{P})$, and array shape (S) can allow RT-MTMM accelerators to achieve comparable real-time performance ($\times 1.06 / \times 1.13$) and energy efficiency ($\times 1.09 / \times 1.07$) to fully flexible designs with significantly lower area overhead ($\times 0.67 \times 0.91$) on edge/mobilescale accelerators.

The inference of ML models composed of diverse structures, types, and sizes boils down to the execution of different dataflows (i.e. different tiling, ordering, parallelism, and shapes). Using the optimal dataflow for every layer of workload can reduce latency by up to two orders of magnitude over a suboptimal dataflow. Unfortunately, reconfiguring hardware for different dataflows involves on-chip data layout reordering and datapath reconfigurations, leading to non-trivial overhead that hinders ML accelerators from exploiting different dataflows, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this challenge, we propose FEATHER, an innovative accelerator that leverages a novel spatial array termed NEST and a novel multi-stage reduction network called BIRRD for performing flexible data reduction with layout reordering under the hood, enabling seamless switching between optimal dataflows with negligible latency and resources overhead. For systematically evaluating the performance interaction between dataflows and layouts, we enhance Timeloop, a state-of-theart dataflow cost modeling and search framework, with layout assessment capabilities, and term it as Layoutloop. We model FEATHER into Layoutloop and also deploy FEATHER end-to-end on the edge ZCU104 FPGA. FEATHER delivers $1.27 \sim 2.89 \times$ inference latency speedup and $1.3 \sim 6.43 \times$ energy efficiency improvement compared to various SoTAs like NVDLA, SIGMA and Eyeriss under ResNet-50 and MobiletNet-V3 in Layoutloop. On practical FPGA devices, FEATHER achieves $2.65 / 3.91 \times$ higher throughput than Xilinx DPU/Gemmini. Remarkably, such performance and energy efficiency enhancements come at only $6 \%$ area over a fixed-dataflow Eyeriss-like accelerator. Our code is released at https://github.com/maeri-project/FEATHER.

This work identifies the architectural and design scaling limits of 2-D flexible interconnect deep neural network (DNN) accelerators and addresses them with 3-D ICs. We demonstrate how scaling up a baseline 2-D accelerator in the$X/Y$dimension fails and how vertical stacking effectively overcomes the failure. We designed multitier accelerators that are$1.67\times $faster than the 2-D design. Using our 3-D architecture and circuit codesign methodology, we improve throughput, energy efficiency, and area efficiency by up to$5\times $,$1.2\times $, and$3.9\times $, respectively, over 2-D counterparts. The IR-drop in our 3-D designs is within 10.7% of VDD, and the temperature variation is within 12 °C.

In order to fulfill the rich functions of the application layer, robust and accurate Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technique is very critical for robotics. However, due to the lack of sufficient computing power and storage capacity, it is challenging to delpoy high-accuracy SLAM in embedded devices efficiently. In this work, we propose a complete acceleration scheme, termed ac2SLAM, based on the ORB-SLAM2 algorithm including both front and back ends, and implement it on an FPGA platform. Specifically, the proposed ac2SLAM features with: 1) a scalable and parallel ORB extractor to extract sufficient keypoints and scores for throughput matching with 4% error, 2) a PingPong heapsort component (pp-heapsort) to select the significant keypoints, that could achieve single-cycle initiation interval to reduce the amount of data transfer between accelerator and the host CPU, and 3) the potential parallel acceleration strategies for the back-end optimization. Compared with running ORB-SLAM2 on the ARM processor, ac2SLAM achieves 2.1 × and 2.7 × faster in the TUM and KITTI datasets, while maintaining 10% error of SOTA eSLAM. In addition, the FPGA accelerated front-end achieves 4.55 × and 40 × faster than eSLAM and ARM. The ac2SLAM is fully open-sourced at https://github.com/SLAM-Hardware/acSLAM.

Collaborative exploration in an unknown environment without external positioning under limited communication is an essential task for multi-robot applications. For inter-robot positioning, various Distributed Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (DSLAM) systems share the Place Recognition (PR) descriptors and sensor data to estimate the relative pose between robots and merge robots’ maps. As maps are constantly shared among robots in exploration, we design a map-based DSLAM framework, which only shares the submaps, eliminating the transfer of PR descriptors and sensor data. Our framework saves 30% of total communication traffic. For exploration, each robot is assigned to get much unknown information about environments with paying little travel cost. As the number of sampled points increases, the goal would change back and forth among sampled frontiers, leading to the downgrade in exploration efficiency and the overlap of trajectories. We propose an exploration strategy based on Multi-robot Multi-target Potential Field (MMPF), which can eliminate goal’s back-and-forth changes, boosting the exploration efficiency by 1.03 ×∼1.62 × with 3 % ∼ 40 % travel cost saved. Our SubMap-based Multi-robot Exploration method (SMMR-Explore) is evaluated on both Gazebo simulator and real robots. The simulator and the exploration framework are published as an open-source ROS project at https://github.com/efc-robot/SMMR-Explore.

In the domain of data parallel computation, most works focus on data flow optimization inside the PE array and favorable memory hierarchy to pursue the maximum parallelism and efficiency, while the importance of data contents has been overlooked for a long time. As we observe, for structured data, insights on the contents (i.e., their values and locations within a structured form) can greatly benefit the computation performance, as fine-grained data manipulation can be performed. In this paper, we claim that by providing a flexible and adaptive data path, an efficient architecture with capability of fine-grained data manipulation can be built. Specifically, we design SOM, a portable and highly-adaptive data transmission network, with the capability of operand sorting, non-blocking self-route ordering and multicasting. Based on SOM, we propose the processing-in-transmission architecture (PITA), which extends the traditional SIMD architecture to perform some fundamental data processing during its transmission, by embedding multiple levels of SOM networks on the data path. We evaluate the performance of PITA in two irregular computation problems. We first map the matrix inversion task onto PITA and show considerable performance gain can be achieved, resulting in 3x-20x speedup against Intel MKL, and 20x-40x against cuBLAS. Then we evaluate our PITA on sparse CNNs. The results indicate that PITA can greatly improve computation efficiency and reduce memory bandwidth pressure. We achieved 2x-9x speedup against several state-of-art accelerators on sparse CNN, where nearly 100 percent PE efficiency is maintained under high sparsity. We believe the concept of PIT is a promising computing paradigm that can enlarge the capability of traditional parallel architecture.

In domain of parallel computation, most works focus on optimizing PE organization or memory hierarchy to pursue the maximum efficiency, while the importance of data contents has been overlooked for a long time. Actually for structured data, insights on data contents (i.e. values and locations within a structured form) can greatly benefit the computation performance, as fine-grained data manipulation can be performed. In this paper, we claim that by providing a flexible and adaptive data path, an efficient architecture with capability of fine-grained data manipulation can be built. Specifically, we propose COCOA, a novel content-oriented configurable architecture, which integrates multi-functional data reorganization networks in traditional computing scheme to handle the contents of data during the transmission path, so that they can be processed more efficiently. We evaluate COCOA on various problems: complex matrix algorithm (matrix inversion) and sparse DNN. The results indicates that COCOA is versatile enough to achieve high computation efficiency in both cases.