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Joint Hardware-Workload Co-Optimization for In-Memory Computing Accelerators

arXiv:2603.03880v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software-hardware co-design is essential for optimizing in-memory computing (IMC) hardware accelerators for neural networks. However, most existing optimization frameworks target a single workload, leading to highly specialized hardware designs that do not generalize well across models and applications. In contrast, practical deployment scenarios require a single IMC platform that can efficiently support multiple neural network workloads. This work presents a joint hardware-workload co-optimization framework based on an optimized evolutionary algorithm for designing generalized IMC accelerator architectures. By explicitly capturing cross-workload trade-offs rather than optimizing for a single model, the proposed approach significantly reduces the performance gap between workload-specific and generalized IMC designs. The framework is evaluated on both RRAM- and SRAM-based IMC architectures, demonstrating strong robustness and adaptability across diverse design scenarios. Compared to baseline methods, the optimized designs achieve energy-delay-area product (EDAP) reductions of up to 76.2% and 95.5% when optimizing across a small set (4 workloads) and a large set (9 workloads), respectively. The source code of the framework is available at https://github.com/OlgaKrestinskaya/JointHardwareWorkloadOptimizationIMC.
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Characterizing VLA Models: Identifying the Action Generation Bottleneck for Edge AI Architectures

arXiv:2603.02271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are an emerging class of workloads critical for robotics and embodied AI at the edge. As these models scale, they demonstrate significant capability gains, yet they must be deployed locally to meet the strict latency requirements of real-time applications. This paper characterizes VLA performance on two generations of edge hardware, viz. the Nvidia Jetson Orin and Thor platforms. Using MolmoAct-7B, a state-of-the-art VLA model, we identify a primary execution bottleneck: up to 75% of end-to-end latency is consumed by the memory-bound action-generation phase. Through analytical modeling and simulations, we project the hardware requirements for scaling to 100B parameter models. We also explore the impact of high-bandwidth memory technologies and processing-in-memory (PIM) as promising future pathways in edge systems for embodied AI.
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TinyIceNet: Low-Power SAR Sea Ice Segmentation for On-Board FPGA Inference

arXiv:2603.03075v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate sea ice mapping is essential for safe maritime navigation in polar regions, where rapidly changing ice conditions require timely and reliable information. While Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides high-resolution, all-weather observations of sea ice, conventional ground-based processing is limited by downlink bandwidth, latency, and energy costs associated with transmitting large volumes of raw data. On-board processing, enabled by dedicated inference chips integrated directly within the satellite payload, offers a transformative alternative by generating actionable sea ice products in orbit. In this context, we present TinyIceNet, a compact semantic segmentation network co-designed for on-board Stage of Development (SOD) mapping from dual-polarized Sentinel-1 SAR imagery under strict hardware and power constraints. Trained on the AI4Arctic dataset, TinyIceNet combines SAR-aware architectural simplifications with low-precision quantization to balance accuracy and efficiency. The model is synthesized using High-Level Synthesis and deployed on a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ FPGA platform, demonstrating near-real-time inference with significantly reduced energy consumption. Experimental results show that TinyIceNet achieves 75.216% F1 score on SOD segmentation while reducing energy consumption by 2x compared to full-precision GPU baselines, underscoring the potential of chip-level hardware-algorithm co-design for future spaceborne and edge AI systems.
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RPU -- A Reasoning Processing Unit

arXiv:2602.18568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) inference performance is increasingly bottlenecked by the memory wall. While GPUs continue to scale raw compute throughput, they struggle to deliver scalable performance for memory bandwidth bound workloads. This challenge is amplified by emerging reasoning LLM applications, where long output sequences, low arithmetic intensity, and tight latency constraints demand significantly higher memory bandwidth. As a result, system utilization drops and energy per inference rises, highlighting the need for an optimized system architecture for scalable memory bandwidth. To address these challenges we present the Reasoning Processing Unit (RPU), a chiplet-based architecture designed to address the challenges of the modern memory wall. RPU introduces: (1) A Capacity-Optimized High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM-CO) that trades capacity for lower energy and cost; (2) a scalable chiplet architecture featuring a bandwidth-first power and area provisioning design; and (3) a decoupled microarchitecture that separates memory, compute, and communication pipelines to sustain high bandwidth utilization. Simulation results show that RPU performs up to 45.3x lower latency and 18.6x higher throughput over an H100 system at ISO-TDP on Llama3-405B.
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CORVET: A CORDIC-Powered, Resource-Frugal Mixed-Precision Vector Processing Engine for High-Throughput AIoT applications

arXiv:2602.19268v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This brief presents a runtime-adaptive, performance-enhanced vector engine featuring a low-resource, iterative CORDIC-based MAC unit for edge AI acceleration. The proposed design enables dynamic reconfiguration between approximate and accurate modes, exploiting the latency-accuracy trade-off for a wide range of workloads. Its resource-efficient approach further enables up to 4x throughput improvement within the same hardware resources by leveraging vectorised, time-multiplexed execution and flexible precision scaling. With a time-multiplexed multi-AF block and a lightweight pooling and normalisation unit, the proposed vector engine supports flexible precision (4/8/16-bit) and high MAC density. The ASIC implementation results show that each MAC stage can save up to 33% of time and 21% of power, with a 256-PE configuration that achieves higher compute density (4.83 TOPS/mm2 ) and energy efficiency (11.67 TOPS/W) than previous state-of-the-art work. A detailed hardware-software co-design methodology for object detection and classification tasks on Pynq-Z2 is discussed to assess the proposed architecture, demonstrating a scalable, energy-efficient solution for edge AI applications.
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Generative Logic: A New Computer Architecture for Deterministic Reasoning and Knowledge Generation

arXiv:2508.00017v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Generative Logic (GL), a deterministic architecture that starts from user-supplied axiomatic definitions, written in a minimalist Mathematical Programming Language (MPL), and systematically explores a configurable region of their deductive neighborhood. A defining feature of the architecture is its unified hash-based inference engine, which executes both algebraic manipulations and deterministic logical transformations. Definitions are compiled into a distributed grid of simple Logic Blocks (LBs) that exchange messages; whenever the premises of an inference rule unify, a new fact is emitted with full provenance to its sources, yielding replayable, auditable proof graphs. Experimental validation is performed on Elementary Number Theory (ENT) utilizing a batched execution strategy. Starting from foundational axioms and definitions, the system first develops first-order Peano arithmetic, which is subsequently applied to autonomously derive and prove Gauss's summation formula as a main result. To manage combinatorial explosion, GL algorithmically enumerates conjectures and applies normalization, type constraints, and counterexample (CE) filtering. On commodity hardware, an end-to-end run completes in under 7 minutes. Generated proofs export as navigable HTML so that every inference step can be inspected independently. We outline a hardware-software co-design path toward massively parallel realizations and describe future integration with large language models (LLMs) for auto-formalization and conjecture seeding. The Python, C++, and MPL code to reproduce these experiments, along with the full proof graphs in HTML as well as machine-readable text format, are available in the project's GitHub repository at github.com/Generative-Logic/GL commit 1771330 and are permanently archived at doi:10.5281/zenodo.17206386.
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Qute: Towards Quantum-Native Database

arXiv:2602.14699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper envisions a quantum database (Qute) that treats quantum computation as a first-class execution option. Unlike prior simulation-based methods that either run quantum algorithms on classical machines or adapt existing databases for quantum simulation, Qute instead (i) compiles an extended form of SQL into gate-efficient quantum circuits, (ii) employs a hybrid optimizer to dynamically select between quantum and classical execution plans, (iii) introduces selective quantum indexing, and (iv) designs fidelity-preserving storage to mitigate current qubit constraints. We also present a three-stage evolution roadmap toward quantum-native database. Finally, by deploying Qute on a real quantum processor (origin_wukong), we show that it outperforms a classical baseline at scale, and we release an open-source prototype at https://github.com/weAIDB/Qute.
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From Fuzzy to Exact: The Halo Architecture for Infinite-Depth Reasoning via Rational Arithmetic

arXiv:2601.18702v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The prevailing scaling paradigm of Large Language Models (LLMs) rests on a substrate of "Fuzzy" floating-point arithmetic. To mitigate the inherent instability of this approximate foundation, modern architectures have erected a complex scaffolding of structural and numerical heuristics--Complex Residuals, Pre-RMSNorm, Attention Scaling, and Gradient Clipping--consuming significant compute solely to prevent numerical collapse. We propose a paradigm shift to the "Exact". We introduce the Halo Architecture, grounded in the Rational Field (Q) and powered by a custom Exact Inference Unit (EIU). To resolve the exponential bit-width growth of rational arithmetic, Halo employs a Dual-Ring Topology that unifies two complementary control mechanisms: (1) The Micro-Ring (Continuum Maintenance), which strictly bounds memory complexity via Diophantine Approximation; and (2) The Macro-Ring (Symbolic Alignment), which enforces logical consistency via periodic state collapse. This stable dual-ring substrate allows for the "Great Dismantling" of numerical scaffolding, reducing the Transformer block to its "Clean" algebraic form (Tabula Rasa). Furthermore, we verify the "Efficiency Paradox": the elimination of gradient noise (sigma -> 0) allows for Macro-Learning Rates, potentially reducing the Total Time-to-Convergence by orders of magnitude. Halo demonstrates that General Intelligence requires the hybridization of continuous fields and discrete chains under a rigorous mathematical framework.
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