Graph Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning for Proactive Application Image Placement
Harokopio University of Athens（雅典哈罗科皮奥大学）；National Technical University of Athens（雅典国家技术大学）；Institute of Information Science and Technologies, National Research Council (CNR)（国家研究委员会信息科学与技术研究所）；University of Pisa（比萨大学）
The shift from Cloud Computing to a Cloud-Edge continuum presents new opportunities and challenges for data-intensive and interactive applications. Edge computing has garnered a lot of attention from both industry and academia in recent years, emerging as a key enabler for meeting the increasingly strict demands of Next Generation applications. In Edge computing the computations are placed closer to the end-users, to facilitate low-latency and high-bandwidth applications and services. However, the distributed, dynamic, and heterogeneous nature of Edge computing, presents a significant challenge for service placement. A critical aspect of Edge computing involves managing the placement of applications within the network system to minimize each application's runtime, considering the resources available on system devices and the capabilities of the system's network. The placement of application images must be proactively planned to minimize image tranfer time, and meet the strict demands of the applications. In this regard, this paper proposes an approach for proactive image placement that combines Graph Neural Networks and actor-critic Reinforcement Learning, which is evaluated empirically and compared against various solutions. The findings indicate that although the proposed approach may result in longer execution times in certain scenarios, it consistently achieves superior outcomes in terms of application placement.
Fog/Edge computing is a novel computing paradigm supporting resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices by the placement of their tasks on the edge and/or cloud servers. Recently, several Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based placement techniques have been proposed in fog/edge computing environments, which are only suitable for centralized setups. The training of well-performed DRL agents requires manifold training data while obtaining training data is costly. Hence, these centralized DRL-based techniques lack generalizability and quick adaptability, thus failing to efficiently tac…
Recent advances in GPU accelerated global and detail placement have reduced the time to solution by an order of magnitude. This advancement allows us to leverage data driven optimization (such as Reinforcement Learning) in an effort to improve the final quality of placement results. In this work we augment state-of-the-art, force-based global placement solvers with a reinforcement learning agent trained to improve the final detail placed Half Perimeter Wire Length (HPWL). We propose novel control schemes with either global or localized control of the placement process. We then train reinforcem…
A long-term goal of reinforcement learning is to design agents that can autonomously interact and learn in the world. A critical challenge to such autonomy is the presence of irreversible states which require external assistance to recover from, such as when a robot arm has pushed an object off of a table. While standard agents require constant monitoring to decide when to intervene, we aim to design proactive agents that can request human intervention only when needed. To this end, we propose an algorithm that efficiently learns to detect and avoid states that are irreversible, and proactivel…
Chip placement has been one of the most time consuming task in any semi conductor area, Due to this negligence, many projects are pushed and chips availability in real markets get delayed. An engineer placing macros on a chip also needs to place it optimally to reduce the three important factors like power, performance and time. Looking at these prior problems we wanted to introduce a new method using Reinforcement Learning where we train the model to place the nodes of a chip netlist onto a chip canvas. We want to build a neural architecture that will accurately reward the agent across a wide…
We present a hybrid ML-heuristic approach that we name "Heuristically Assisted Deep Reinforcement Learning (HA-DRL)" to solve the problem of Network Slice Placement Optimization. The proposed approach leverages recent works on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for slice placement and Virtual Network Embedding (VNE) and uses a heuristic function to optimize the exploration of the action space by giving priority to reliable actions indicated by an efficient heuristic algorithm. The evaluation results show that the proposed HA-DRL algorithm can accelerate the learning of an efficient slice placem…
Recently, successful applications of reinforcement learning to chip placement have emerged. Pretrained models are necessary to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Currently, the weights of objective metrics (e.g., wirelength, congestion, and timing) are fixed during pretraining. However, fixed-weighed models cannot generate the diversity of placements required for engineers to accommodate changing requirements as they arise. This paper proposes flexible multiple-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) to support objective functions with inference-time variable weights using just a single pre…
The emergence of technologies such as 5G and mobile edge computing has enabled provisioning of different types of services with different resource and service requirements to the vehicles in a vehicular network.The growing complexity of traffic mobility patterns and dynamics in the requests for different types of services has made service placement a challenging task. A typical static placement solution is not effective as it does not consider the traffic mobility and service dynamics. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based dynamic (RL-Dynamic) service placement framework to …
The growth of 5G and edge computing has enabled the emergence of Internet of Vehicles. It supports different types of services with different resource and service requirements. However, limited resources at the edge, high mobility of vehicles, increasing demand, and dynamicity in service request-types have made service placement a challenging task. A typical static placement solution is not effective as it does not consider the traffic mobility and service dynamics. Handling dynamics in IoV for service placement is an important and challenging problem which is the primary focus of our work in …
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Google（谷歌）
In physical design, human designers typically place macros via trial and error, which is a Markov decision process. Reinforcement learning (RL) methods have demonstrated superhuman performance on the macro placement. In this paper, we propose an extension to this prior work (Mirhoseini et al., 2020). We first describe the details of the policy and value network architecture. We replace the force-directed method with DREAMPlace for placing standard cells in the RL environment. We also compare our improved method with other academic placers on public benchmarks.
Physical design and production of Integrated Circuits (IC) is becoming increasingly more challenging as the sophistication in IC technology is steadily increasing. Placement has been one of the most critical steps in IC physical design. Through decades of research, partition-based, analytical-based and annealing-based placers have been enriching the placement solution toolbox. However, open challenges including long run time and lack of ability to generalize continue to restrict wider applications of existing placement tools. We devise a learning-based placement tool based on cyclic applicatio…
Network Slice placement with the problem of allocation of resources from a virtualized substrate network is an optimization problem which can be formulated as a multiobjective Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem. However, to cope with the complexity of such a continuous task and seeking for optimality and automation, the use of Machine Learning (ML) techniques appear as a promising approach. We introduce a hybrid placement solution based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and a dedicated optimization heuristic based on the Power of Two Choices principle. The DRL algorithm uses the so-ca…
Volkswagen Group（大众汽车集团）；L3S Research Center, University of Hannover（汉诺威大学L3S研究中心）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）
The transition from conventional mobility to electromobility largely depends on charging infrastructure availability and optimal placement.This paper examines the optimal placement of charging stations in urban areas. We maximise the charging infrastructure supply over the area and minimise waiting, travel, and charging times while setting budget constraints. Moreover, we include the possibility of charging vehicles at home to obtain a more refined estimation of the actual charging demand throughout the urban area. We formulate the Placement of Charging Stations problem as a non-linear integer…
In this work, we present a learning-based approach to chip placement, one of the most complex and time-consuming stages of the chip design process. Unlike prior methods, our approach has the ability to learn from past experience and improve over time. In particular, as we train over a greater number of chip blocks, our method becomes better at rapidly generating optimized placements for previously unseen chip blocks. To achieve these results, we pose placement as a Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem and train an agent to place the nodes of a chip netlist onto a chip canvas. To enable our RL p…
University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of Colorado, Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）
The placement of charging stations in areas with developing charging infrastructure is a critical component of the future success of electric vehicles (EVs). In Albany County in New York, the expected rise in the EV population requires additional charging stations to maintain a sufficient level of efficiency across the charging infrastructure. A novel application of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is able to find optimal locations for new charging stations given the predicted charging demand and current charging locations. The most important factors that influence charging demand prediction includ…
Miami University（迈阿密大学）；Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院）
Energy-aware control for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is one of the major research interests in UAV based networking. Yet few existing works have focused on how the network should react around the timing when the UAV lineup is changed. In this work, we study proactive self-remedy of energy-constrained UAV networks when one or more UAVs are short of energy and about to quit for charging. We target at an energy-aware optimal UAV control policy which proactively relocates the UAVs when any UAV is about to quit the network, rather than passively dispatches the remaining UAVs after the …
Exploring the most task-friendly camera setting -- optimal camera placement (OCP) problem -- in tasks that use multiple cameras is of great importance. However, few existing OCP solutions specialize in depth observation of indoor scenes, and most versatile solutions work offline. To this problem, an OCP online solution to depth observation of indoor scenes based on reinforcement learning is proposed in this paper. The proposed solution comprises a simulation environment that implements scene observation and reward estimation using shadow maps and an agent network containing a soft actor-critic…
Optimizing Electric Vehicle Charging Station Placement Using Reinforcement Learning and Agent-Based Simulations
organization= Center for Environmental Intelligence, VinUniversity , city= Hanoi , country= Vietnam；organization= College of Engineering \& Computer Science, VinUniversity , city= Hanoi , country= Vietnam
For its advantage in GPU acceleration and less dependency on human experts, machine learning has been an emerging tool for solving the placement and routing problems, as two critical steps in modern chip design flow. Being still in its early stage, there are fundamental issues: scalability, reward design, and end-to-end learning paradigm etc. To achieve end-to-end placement learning, we first propose a joint learning method termed by DeepPlace for the placement of macros and standard cells, by the integration of reinforcement learning with a gradient based optimization scheme. To further bridg…
TDPNavigator-Placer: Thermal- and Wirelength-Aware Chiplet Placement in 2.5D Systems Through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局（A*STAR）信息通信研究院（I2R））；Institute of Microelectronics (IME), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局（A*STAR）微电子研究院（IME））
Google Brain（谷歌大脑）；Google Brain Residency Program（谷歌大脑驻留计划）；Google（谷歌）
The past few years have witnessed a growth in size and computational requirements for training and inference with neural networks. Currently, a common approach to address these requirements is to use a heterogeneous distributed environment with a mixture of hardware devices such as CPUs and GPUs. Importantly, the decision of placing parts of the neural models on devices is often made by human experts based on simple heuristics and intuitions. In this paper, we propose a method which learns to optimize device placement for TensorFlow computational graphs. Key to our method is the use of a seque…
For deep neural network accelerators, memory movement is both energetically expensive and can bound computation. Therefore, optimal mapping of tensors to memory hierarchies is critical to performance. The growing complexity of neural networks calls for automated memory mapping instead of manual heuristic approaches; yet the search space of neural network computational graphs have previously been prohibitively large. We introduce Evolutionary Graph Reinforcement Learning (EGRL), a method designed for large search spaces, that combines graph neural networks, reinforcement learning, and evolution…
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd（芬兰VTT技术研究中心）；University of Electro-Communications（电气通信大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Shizuoka University（静冈大学）；University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）
In this paper, we investigate the problem of age of information (AoI)-aware radio resource management for expected long-term performance optimization in a Manhattan grid vehicle-to-vehicle network. With the observation of global network state at each scheduling slot, the roadside unit (RSU) allocates the frequency bands and schedules packet transmissions for all vehicle user equipment-pairs (VUE-pairs). We model the stochastic decision-making procedure as a discrete-time single-agent Markov decision process (MDP). The technical challenges in solving the optimal control policy originate from hi…
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE)（伯南布哥联邦大学（UFPE））；Dublin City University (DCU)（都柏林城市大学（DCU））；Universidade de Pernambuco (UPE)（伯南布哥大学（UPE））
Software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV) are making networks programmable and consequently much more flexible and agile. To meet service level agreements, achieve greater utilisation of legacy networks, faster service deployment, and reduce expenditure, telecommunications operators are deploying increasingly complex service function chains (SFCs). Notwithstanding the benefits of SFCs, increasing heterogeneity and dynamism from the cloud to the edge introduces significant SFC placement challenges, not least adding or removing network functions while maintaini…
Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering, Concordia University（康考迪亚大学康考迪亚信息系统工程研究所）；Lebanese American University（黎巴嫩美国大学）
Cloud computing is a reliable solution to provide distributed computation power. However, real-time response is still challenging regarding the enormous amount of data generated by the IoT devices in 5G and 6G networks. Thus, multi-access edge computing (MEC), which consists of distributing the edge servers in the proximity of end-users to have low latency besides the higher processing power, is increasingly becoming a vital factor for the success of modern applications. This paper addresses the problem of minimizing both, the network delay, which is the main objective of MEC, and the number o…
The evaluation of the impact of using Machine Learning in the management of softwarized networks is considered in multiple research works. Beyond that, we propose to evaluate the robustness of online learning for optimal network slice placement. A major assumption to this study is to consider that slice request arrivals are non-stationary. In this context, we simulate unpredictable network load variations and compare two Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms: a pure DRL-based algorithm and a heuristically controlled DRL as a hybrid DRL-heuristic algorithm, to assess the impact of these …
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；SUTD（新加坡科技设计大学）；Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)（联邦科学与工业研究组织（CSIRO））；NTU（南洋理工大学）
This paper proposes an effective and novel multiagent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL)-based method for solving the joint virtual network function (VNF) placement and routing (P&R), where multiple service requests with differentiated demands are delivered at the same time. The differentiated demands of the service requests are reflected by their delay- and cost-sensitive factors. We first construct a VNF P&R problem to jointly minimize a weighted sum of service delay and resource consumption cost, which is NP-complete. Then, the joint VNF P&R problem is decoupled into two iterative subtasks…
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Urban Air Quality Management: Multi-Objective Optimization of Pollution Mitigation Booth Placement in Metropolitan Environments
School of Computer Science（计算机科学学院）；Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology（工程学院，维洛雷理工学院）；Chennai Campus（钦奈校区）；Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600127, India（钦奈，泰米尔纳德邦600127，印度）
Development of autonomous cyber system defense strategies and action recommendations in the real-world is challenging, and includes characterizing system state uncertainties and attack-defense dynamics. We propose a data-driven deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework to learn proactive, context-aware, defense countermeasures that dynamically adapt to evolving adversarial behaviors while minimizing loss of cyber system operations. A dynamic defense optimization problem is formulated with multiple protective postures against different types of adversaries with varying levels of skill and per…
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）
We present Placeto, a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to efficiently find device placements for distributed neural network training. Unlike prior approaches that only find a device placement for a specific computation graph, Placeto can learn generalizable device placement policies that can be applied to any graph. We propose two key ideas in our approach: (1) we represent the policy as performing iterative placement improvements, rather than outputting a placement in one shot; (2) we use graph embeddings to capture relevant information about the structure of the computation graph, withou…
Advancing Forest Fire Prevention: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Effective Firebreak Placement
University of Chile（智利大学）；Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana（大都会技术大学）；Complex Engineering System Institute - ISCI（复杂工程系统研究所）；Rey Juan Carlos University（胡安卡洛斯国王大学）；Centre de Ciència i Tecnologia Forestal de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚森林科学与技术中心）
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be utilized as aerial base stations (ABSs) to assist terrestrial infrastructure for keeping wireless connectivity in various emergency scenarios. To maximize the coverage rate of N ground users (GUs) by jointly placing multiple ABSs with limited coverage range is known to be a NP-hard problem with exponential complexity in N. The problem is further complicated when the coverage range becomes irregular due to site-specific blockage (e.g., buildings) on the air-ground channel in the 3-dimensional (3D) space. To tackle this challenging problem, this paper appli…
NTT Communication Science Laboratories（NTT通信科学实验室）；Institute of Mathematics for Industry, Kyushu University（九州大学数学工学研究所）；Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, RIKEN（理化学研究所高级智能项目中心）
We propose a data-driven method for controlling the frequency and convergence rate of black-box nonlinear dynamical systems based on the Koopman operator theory. With the proposed method, a policy network is trained such that the eigenvalues of a Koopman operator of controlled dynamics are close to the target eigenvalues. The policy network consists of a neural network to find a Koopman invariant subspace, and a pole placement module to adjust the eigenvalues of the Koopman operator. Since the policy network is differentiable, we can train it in an end-to-end fashion using reinforcement learni…
Edge computing is naturally suited to the applications generated by Internet of Things (IoT) nodes. The IoT applications generally take the form of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), where vertices represent interdependent functions and edges represent data streams. The status quo of minimizing the makespan of the DAG motivates the study on optimal function placement. However, current approaches lose sight of proactively mapping the data streams to the physical links between the heterogenous edge servers, which could affect the makespan of DAGs significantly. To solve this problem, we study both …
High quality standard cell layout automation in advanced technology nodes is still challenging in the industry today because of complex design rules. In this paper we introduce an automatic standard cell layout generator called NVCell that can generate layouts with equal or smaller area for over 90% of single row cells in an industry standard cell library on an advanced technology node. NVCell leverages reinforcement learning (RL) to fix design rule violations during routing and to generate efficient placements.
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）
This paper aims to develop resilient transmission mechanisms to suitably distribute traffic across multiple paths in an arbitrary millimeter-wave (mmWave) network. The main contributions include: (a) the development of proactive transmission mechanisms that build resilience against network disruptions in advance, while achieving a high end-to-end packet rate; (b) the design of a heuristic path selection algorithm that efficiently selects (in polynomial time in the network size) multiple proactively resilient paths with high packet rates; and (c) the development of a hybrid scheduling algorithm…
