Sapo: Reachability Computation and Parameter Synthesis of Polynomial Dynamical Systems

Sapo is a C++ tool for the formal analysis of polynomial dynamical systems. Its main features are: 1) Reachability computation, i.e., the calculation of the set of states reachable from a set of initial conditions, and 2) Parameter synthesis, i.e., the refinement of a set of parameters so that the system satisfies a given specification. Sapo can represent reachable sets as unions of boxes, parallelotopes, or parallelotope bundles (symbolic representation of polytopes). Sets of parameters are represented with polytopes while specifications are formalized as Signal Temporal Logic (STL) formulas

A logic programming framework for modeling temporal objects

Published versio

FINITE H-DIMENSION DOES NOT IMPLY EXPRESSIVE COMPLETENESS

Accepted versio

Three-dimensional memory vectorization for high bandwidth media memory systems

Vector processors have good performance, cost and adaptability when targeting multimedia applications. However, for a significant number of media programs, conventional memory configurations fail to deliver enough memory references per cycle to feed the SIMD functional units. This paper addresses the problem of the memory bandwidth. We propose a novel mechanism suitable for 2-dimensional vector architectures and targeted at providing high effective bandwidth for SIMD memory instructions. The basis of this mechanism is the extension of the scope of vectorization at the memory level, so that 3-dimensional memory patterns can be fetched into a second-level register file. By fetching long blocks of data and by reusing 2-dimensional memory streams at this second-level register file, we obtain a significant increase in the effective memory bandwidth. As side benefits, the new 3-dimensional load instructions provide a high robustness to memory latency and a significant reduction of the cache activity, thus reducing power and energy requirements. At the investment of a 50% more area than a regular SIMD register file, we have measured and average speed-up of 13% and the potential for power savings in the L2 cache of a 30%.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Automata guided hierarchical reinforcement learning for zero-shot skill composition

An obstacle that prevents the wide adoption of (deep) reinforcement learning (RL) in control systems is its need for a large amount of interactions with the environment in order to master a skill. The learned skill usually generalizes poorly across domains and re-training is often necessary when presented with a new task. We present a framework that combines methods in formal methods with hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL). The set of techniques we provide allows for convenient specification of tasks with complex logic, learn hierarchical policies (meta-controller and low-level controllers) with well-defined intrinsic rewards using any RL methods and is able to construct new skills from existing ones without additional learning. We evaluate the proposed methods in a simple grid world simulation as well as simulation on a Baxter robot