Enabling Scalable AI Computational Lithography with Physics-Inspired Models

Computational lithography is a critical research area for the continued scaling of semiconductor manufacturing process technology by enhancing silicon printability via numerical computing methods. Today's solutions for these problems are primarily CPU-based and require many thousands of CPUs running for days to tape out a modern chip. We seek AI/GPU-assisted solutions for the two problems, aiming at improving both runtime and quality.

Efficient Arithmetic Block Identification with Graph Learning and Network-flow

Arithmetic block identification in gate-level netlists plays an essential role for various purposes, including malicious logic detection, functional verification, or macro-block optimization. However, current methods usually suffer from either low performance or poor scalability. To address the issue, we come up with a novel framework based on graph learning and network flow analysis, that extracts desired logic components from a complete circuit netlist.

Physics-Informed Optical Kernel Regression Using Complex-valued Neural Fields

Lithography is fundamental to integrated circuit fabrication, necessitating large computation overhead. The advancement of machine learning (ML)-based lithography models alleviates the trade-offs between manufacturing process expense and capability. However, all previous methods regard the lithography system as an image-to-image black box mapping, utilizing network parameters to learn by rote mappings from massive mask-to-aerial or mask-to-resist image pairs, resulting in poor generalization capability.

Planning for Multi-Object Manipulation with Graph Neural Network Relational Classifiers

Objects rarely sit in isolation in human environments. As such, we'd like our robots to reason about how multiple objects relate to one another and how those relations may change as the robot interacts with the world. To this end, we propose a novel graph neural network framework for multi-object manipulation to predict how inter-object relations change given robot actions. Our model operates on partial-view point clouds and can reason about multiple objects dynamically interacting during the manipulation.

Shai Cohen

Shai has joined NVResearch on may 2023, before joining research, Shai acted an a Principle Architect in Nvidia CTO Office focused on Silicon Photonics, Advanced Packaging and Thermal management. Prior to that, at Mellanox (which was acquired by Nvidia) Shai has established and managed Mellanox “Phy architecture and algorithms” team to provide simulation tools, architectural definitions, and link tuning method for various products.

Shai Holds a double B.Sc in Physics and electrical engineering as well as an M.Sc in condensed matter Physics, from Tel-Aviv University. 

Neuralangelo: High-Fidelity Neural Surface Reconstruction

Neural surface reconstruction has been shown to be powerful for recovering dense 3D surfaces via image-based neural rendering. However, current methods struggle to recover detailed structures of real-world scenes. To address the issue, we present Neuralangelo, which combines the representation power of multi-resolution 3D hash grids with neural surface rendering. Two key ingredients enable our approach: (1) numerical gradients for computing higher-order derivatives as a smoothing operation and (2) coarse-to-fine optimization on the hash grids controlling different levels of details.

IndustReal: Transferring Contact-Rich Assembly Tasks from Simulation to Reality

Robotic assembly is a longstanding challenge, requiring contact-rich interaction and high precision and accuracy. Many applications also require adaptivity to diverse parts, poses, and environments, as well as low cycle times. In other areas of robotics, simulation is a powerful tool to develop algorithms, generate datasets, and train agents. However, simulation has had a more limited impact on assembly.

The Best Defense is a Good Offense: Adversarial Augmentation against Adversarial Attacks

Many defenses against adversarial attacks (\eg robust classifiers, randomization, or image purification) use countermeasures put to work only after the attack has been crafted. We adopt a different perspective to introduce A5 (Adversarial Augmentation Against Adversarial Attacks), a novel framework including the first certified preemptive defense against adversarial attacks. The main idea is to craft a defensive perturbation to guarantee that any attack (up to a given magnitude) towards the input in hand will fail.