Supporting GENP with Random Multipliers

We prove that standard Gaussian random multipliers are expected to stabilize numerically both Gaussian elimination with no pivoting and block Gaussian elimination. Our tests show similar results where we applied circulant random multipliers instead of Gaussian ones.Comment: 14 page

autoAx: An Automatic Design Space Exploration and Circuit Building Methodology utilizing Libraries of Approximate Components

Approximate computing is an emerging paradigm for developing highly energy-efficient computing systems such as various accelerators. In the literature, many libraries of elementary approximate circuits have already been proposed to simplify the design process of approximate accelerators. Because these libraries contain from tens to thousands of approximate implementations for a single arithmetic operation it is intractable to find an optimal combination of approximate circuits in the library even for an application consisting of a few operations. An open problem is "how to effectively combine circuits from these libraries to construct complex approximate accelerators". This paper proposes a novel methodology for searching, selecting and combining the most suitable approximate circuits from a set of available libraries to generate an approximate accelerator for a given application. To enable fast design space generation and exploration, the methodology utilizes machine learning techniques to create computational models estimating the overall quality of processing and hardware cost without performing full synthesis at the accelerator level. Using the methodology, we construct hundreds of approximate accelerators (for a Sobel edge detector) showing different but relevant tradeoffs between the quality of processing and hardware cost and identify a corresponding Pareto-frontier. Furthermore, when searching for approximate implementations of a generic Gaussian filter consisting of 17 arithmetic operations, the proposed approach allows us to identify approximately $10^3$ highly important implementations from $10^{23}$ possible solutions in a few hours, while the exhaustive search would take four months on a high-end processor.Comment: Accepted for publication at the Design Automation Conference 2019 (DAC'19), Las Vegas, Nevada, US

Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Probabilistic Model Predictive Control

Trial-and-error based reinforcement learning (RL) has seen rapid advancements in recent times, especially with the advent of deep neural networks. However, the majority of autonomous RL algorithms require a large number of interactions with the environment. A large number of interactions may be impractical in many real-world applications, such as robotics, and many practical systems have to obey limitations in the form of state space or control constraints. To reduce the number of system interactions while simultaneously handling constraints, we propose a model-based RL framework based on probabilistic Model Predictive Control (MPC). In particular, we propose to learn a probabilistic transition model using Gaussian Processes (GPs) to incorporate model uncertainty into long-term predictions, thereby, reducing the impact of model errors. We then use MPC to find a control sequence that minimises the expected long-term cost. We provide theoretical guarantees for first-order optimality in the GP-based transition models with deterministic approximate inference for long-term planning. We demonstrate that our approach does not only achieve state-of-the-art data efficiency, but also is a principled way for RL in constrained environments.Comment: Accepted at AISTATS 2018

Preconditioning For Matrix Computation

Preconditioning is a classical subject of numerical solution of linear systems of equations. The goal is to turn a linear system into another one which is easier to solve. The two central subjects of numerical matrix computations are LIN-SOLVE, that is, the solution of linear systems of equations and EIGEN-SOLVE, that is, the approximation of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a matrix. We focus on the former subject of LIN-SOLVE and show an application to EIGEN-SOLVE. We achieve our goal by applying randomized additive and multiplicative preconditioning. We facilitate the numerical solution by decreasing the condition of the coefficient matrix of the linear system, which enables reliable numerical solution of LIN-SOLVE. After the introduction in the Chapter 1 we recall the definitions and auxiliary results in Chapter 2. Then in Chapter 3 we precondition linear systems of equations solved at every iteration of the Inverse Power Method applied to EIGEN-SOLVE. These systems are ill conditioned, that is, have large condition numbers, and we decrease them by applying randomized additive preconditioning. This is our first subject. Our second subject is randomized multiplicative preconditioning for LIN-SOLVE. In this way we support application of GENP, that is, Gaussian elimination with no pivoting, and block Gaussian elimination. We prove that the proposed preconditioning methods are efficient when we apply Gaussian random matrices as preconditioners. We confirm these results with our extensive numerical tests. The tests also show that the same methods work as efficiently on the average when we use random structured, in particular circulant, preconditioners instead, but we show both formally and experimentally that these preconditioners fail in the case of LIN-SOLVE for the unitary matrix of discreet Fourier transform, for which Gaussian preconditioners work efficiently