Temporal Neural Networks (TNNs), a special class of spiking neural networks, draw inspiration from the neocortex in utilizing spike-timings for information processing. Recent works proposed a microarchitecture framework and custom macro suite for designing highly energy-efficient application-specific TNNs. These recent works rely on manual hardware design, a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. Further, there is no open-source functional simulation framework for TNNs. This paper introduces TNNGen, a pioneering effort towards the automated design of TNNs from PyTorch software models to post-layout netlists. TNNGen comprises a novel PyTorch functional simulator (for TNN modeling and application exploration) coupled with a Python-based hardware generator (for PyTorch-to-RTL and RTL-to-Layout conversions). Seven representative TNN designs for time-series signal clustering across diverse sensory modalities are simulated and their post-layout hardware complexity and design runtimes are assessed to demonstrate the effectiveness of TNNGen. We also highlight TNNGen's ability to accurately forecast silicon metrics without running hardware process flow.

Crafting automation systems tailored for specific domains requires aligning the space of human experts' semantics with the space of robot executable actions, and scheduling the required resources and system layout accordingly. Regrettably, there are three major gaps, fine-grained domain-specific knowledge injection, heterogeneity between human knowledge and robot instructions, and diversity of users' preferences, resulting automation system design a case-by-case and labour-intensive effort, thus hindering the democratization of automation. We refer to this challenging alignment as the abstract hardware grounding problem, where we firstly regard the procedural operations in humans' semantics space as the abstraction of hardware requirements, then we ground such abstractions to instantiated hardware devices, subject to constraints and preferences in the real world -- optimizing this problem is essentially standardizing and automating the design of automation systems. On this basis, we develop an automated design framework in a hybrid data-driven and principle-derived fashion. Results on designing self-driving laboratories for enhancing experiment-driven scientific discovery suggest our framework's potential to produce compact systems that fully satisfy domain-specific and user-customized requirements with no redundancy.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in automatically generating and optimizing (meta)heuristics, making them valuable tools in heuristic optimization tasks. However, LLMs are generally inefficient when it comes to fine-tuning hyper-parameters of the generated algorithms, often requiring excessive queries that lead to high computational and financial costs. This paper presents a novel hybrid approach, LLaMEA-HPO, which integrates the open source LLaMEA (Large Language Model Evolutionary Algorithm) framework with a Hyper-Parameter Optimization (HPO) procedure in the loop. By offloading hyper-parameter tuning to an HPO procedure, the LLaMEA-HPO framework allows the LLM to focus on generating novel algorithmic structures, reducing the number of required LLM queries and improving the overall efficiency of the optimization process. We empirically validate the proposed hybrid framework on benchmark problems, including Online Bin Packing, Black-Box Optimization, and the Traveling Salesperson Problem. Our results demonstrate that LLaMEA-HPO achieves superior or comparable performance compared to existing LLM-driven frameworks while significantly reducing computational costs. This work highlights the importance of separating algorithmic innovation and structural code search from parameter tuning in LLM-driven code optimization and offers a scalable approach to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of LLM-based code generation.

Researchers are investing substantial effort in developing powerful general-purpose agents, wherein Foundation Models are used as modules within agentic systems (e.g. Chain-of-Thought, Self-Reflection, Toolformer). However, the history of machine learning teaches us that hand-designed solutions are eventually replaced by learned solutions. We formulate a new research area, Automated Design of Agentic Systems (ADAS), which aims to automatically create powerful agentic system designs, including inventing novel building blocks and/or combining them in new ways. We further demonstrate that there is an unexplored yet promising approach within ADAS where agents can be defined in code and new agents can be automatically discovered by a meta agent programming ever better ones in code. Given that programming languages are Turing Complete, this approach theoretically enables the learning of any possible agentic system: including novel prompts, tool use, control flows, and combinations thereof. We present a simple yet effective algorithm named Meta Agent Search to demonstrate this idea, where a meta agent iteratively programs interesting new agents based on an ever-growing archive of previous discoveries. Through extensive experiments across multiple domains including coding, science, and math, we show that our algorithm can progressively invent agents with novel designs that greatly outperform state-of-the-art hand-designed agents. Importantly, we consistently observe the surprising result that agents invented by Meta Agent Search maintain superior performance even when transferred across domains and models, demonstrating their robustness and generality. Provided we develop it safely, our work illustrates the potential of an exciting new research direction toward automatically designing ever-more powerful agentic systems to benefit humanity.

The ubiquity of deep learning algorithms in various applications has amplified the need for assuring their robustness against small input perturbations such as those occurring in adversarial attacks. Existing complete verification techniques offer provable guarantees for all robustness queries but struggle to scale beyond small neural networks. To overcome this computational intractability, incomplete verification methods often rely on convex relaxation to over-approximate the nonlinearities in neural networks. Progress in tighter approximations has been achieved for piecewise linear functions. However, robustness verification of neural networks for general activation functions (e.g., Sigmoid, Tanh) remains under-explored and poses new challenges. Typically, these networks are verified using convex relaxation techniques, which involve computing linear upper and lower bounds of the nonlinear activation functions. In this work, we propose a novel parameter search method to improve the quality of these linear approximations. Specifically, we show that using a simple search method, carefully adapted to the given verification problem through state-of-the-art algorithm configuration techniques, improves the average global lower bound by 25% on average over the current state of the art on several commonly used local robustness verification benchmarks.

Using computational (Vorobyeva et al., 2018) for a single target, resulting methods to reduce the number of candidates in expensive, time-consuming, and inefficient screens. It for the screen could drastically decrease is common knowledge that the length, the secondary structures, these costs. However, existing computational approaches their diversity, and the nucleotide composition of the do not fully satisfy all requirements for sequences in the initial library are crucial for a successful the design of such initial screening libraries. In SELEX (Vorobyeva et al., 2018; Kohlberger & Gadermaier, this work, we present a new method, libLEARNA, 2022). However, random libraries of fixed-length sequences capable of providing RNA focus libraries of diverse are still most widely used. Focused design can help to decrease variable-length qualified candidates. Our the size of the initial library and therefore drastically novel structure-based design approach considers reduce the costs of these SELEX pipelines.

Applying deep neural networks (DNNs) in mobile and safety-critical systems, such as autonomous vehicles, demands a reliable and efficient execution on hardware. Optimized dedicated hardware accelerators are being developed to achieve this. However, the design of efficient and reliable hardware has become increasingly difficult, due to the increased complexity of modern integrated circuit technology and its sensitivity against hardware faults, such as random bit-flips. It is thus desirable to exploit optimization potential for error resilience and efficiency also at the algorithmic side, e.g. by optimizing the architecture of the DNN. Since there are numerous design choices for the architecture of DNNs, with partially opposing effects on the preferred characteristics (such as small error rates at low latency), multi-objective optimization strategies are necessary. In this paper, we develop an evolutionary optimization technique for the automated design of hardware-optimized DNN architectures. For this purpose, we derive a set of easily computable objective functions, which enable the fast evaluation of DNN architectures with respect to their hardware efficiency and error resilience solely based on the network topology. We observe a strong correlation between predicted error resilience and actual measurements obtained from fault injection simulations. Keywords Neural Network Hardware · Error Resilience · Hardware Faults · Neural Architecture Search · Multi-Objective Optimization · AutoML 1 Introduction The application of deep neural networks (DNNs) in safety-critical perception systems, for example autonomous vehicles (A Vs), poses some challenges on the design of the underlying hardware platforms. On the one hand, efficient and fast accelerators are needed, since DNNs for computer vision exhibit massive computational requirements [55]. On the other hand, resilience against random hardware faults has to be ensured. In many driving scenarios, entering a fail-safe state is not sufficient, but fail-operational behavior and fault tolerance are required [48]. However, fault tolerance techniques at the hardware level often entail large redundancy overheads in silicon area, latency, and power consumption. These overheads stand in contrast to the low-power and low-latency requirements of embedded real-time DNN accelerators. Reliability concerns in nanoscale integrated circuits, for instance soft errors in memory and logic, represent an additional challenge for the realization of fault tolerance mechanisms at the hardware level [2, 33, 36, 68, 83]. Moreover, techniques such as near-threshold computing [26] and approximate computing [65] are desirable to meet power constraints, but can further increase error rates.

What is a genetic algorithm? Bayesian inference ([1] links to particle methods in Bayesian statistics and hidden Markov chain models and [2] a tutorial on genetic particle models) Bioinformatics multiple sequence alignment.[1] SAGA is available on:.[4] Bioinformatics: Motif Discovery.[5] Calculation of bound states and local-density approximations. Code-breaking, using the GA to search large solution spaces of ciphers for the one correct decryption.[8]

We propose a new perspective on the automated design of combinatorial search algorithms through an approach that operates at a much higher semantic level than previous algorithm configurators do. Instead of blindly tuning numerical or categorical parameters based on black-box optimization or resorting to a handful of predefined strategies, we propose to automatically search over compositions of search strategies using a light-weight language, while exploiting the semantic knowledge of the modeling language itself to guide the configuration process. Although somewhat reminiscent of the old AI vision that machines will be able to program themselves to solve novel tasks, we believe that the idea restricted to this simple but powerful search language has a chance of success in practice.

Communications frequent criticism against this approach, however, is that verification Research Division, Institute for Defense Analysis, is done after significant resources have already been 1957.