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Researcher profile

Niraj K. Jha

Niraj K. Jha contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Machine LearningComputation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceComputer VisionNeural and Evolutionary ComputingApplicationsDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computingeess.SPHardware ArchitectureHuman-Computer InteractionMethodologyRobotics

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Published work

14 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

CD4LM: Consistency Distillation and aDaptive Decoding for Diffusion Language Models

Autoregressive large language models achieve strong results on many benchmarks, but decoding remains fundamentally latency-limited by sequential dependence on previously generated tokens. Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel generation but suffer from a fundamental static-to-dynamic misalignment: Training optimizes local transitions under fixed schedules, whereas efficient inference requires adaptive "long-jump" refinements through unseen states. Our goal is to enable highly parallel decoding for DLMs with low number of function evaluations while preserving generation quality. To achieve this, we propose CD4LM, a framework that decouples training from inference via Discrete-Space Consistency Distillation (DSCD) and Confidence-Adaptive Decoding (CAD). Unlike standard objectives, DSCD trains a student to be trajectory-invariant, mapping diverse noisy states directly to the clean distribution. This intrinsic robustness enables CAD to dynamically allocate compute resources based on token confidence, aggressively skipping steps without the quality collapse typical of heuristic acceleration. On GSM8K, CD4LM matches the LLaDA baseline with a 5.18x wall-clock speedup; across code and math benchmarks, it strictly dominates the accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier, achieving a 3.62x mean speedup while improving average accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/yihao-liang/CDLM

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

HEED: Density-Weighted Residual Alignment for Hybrid Vision-Language Model Distillation

Distilling vision-language models into faster hybrid architectures, such as 3:1 Mamba-2/attention mixes, is now standard practice for making inference efficient. Aggregate benchmarks suggest that this works but they hide selective failures. When we distill Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct into a 3:1 Mamba-2/attention hybrid, student model stays within 2 points of the teacher across visual reasoning benchmarks like MMStar, MMBench, and MMMU-Pro, while dropping 13 points on optical-character-recognition and document tasks. The student can still understand the scene but loses the fine-grained text needed to answer. We localize much of the failure to a specific kind of position. In a high-resolution image, most patches are sky, wall, or smooth texture, while a small fraction carries text, edges, object boundaries, or other local details. In a token-level diagnostic, the top 10% highest-density patches have 3.6$\times$ larger residual drift than the bottom 10% lowest-density patches and 3.5$\times$ larger teacher-masking answer contribution. Uniform weighting devotes many loss terms to low-information background patches, whereas sparse answer-bearing patches receive no special protection. The required intervention is minimal: we replace uniform residual alignment with density-weighted residual alignment, using patch self-dissimilarity as a training-free proxy for position importance. We call this HEED. Compared with normal end-to-end distillation, HEED increases performance by 8.7 points on OCRBench v2 and 5.13 points on a 10-benchmark average. The gain is realized on different teacher models and hybrid architectures. After standard post-training, the student reaches teacher-level performance on the 10-benchmark average with a 4.12$\times$ throughput and a 68% memory saving at 128k context, with no additional parameters and no inference-time cost.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2024arXiv

TAD-SIE: Sample Size Estimation for Clinical Randomized Controlled Trials using a Trend-Adaptive Design with a Synthetic-Intervention-Based Estimator

Phase-3 clinical trials provide the highest level of evidence on drug safety and effectiveness needed for market approval by implementing large randomized controlled trials (RCTs). However, 30-40% of these trials fail mainly because such studies have inadequate sample sizes, stemming from the inability to obtain accurate initial estimates of average treatment effect parameters. To remove this obstacle from the drug development cycle, we present a new algorithm called Trend-Adaptive Design with a Synthetic-Intervention-Based Estimator (TAD-SIE) that appropriately powers a parallel-group trial, a standard RCT design, by leveraging a state-of-the-art hypothesis testing strategy and a novel trend-adaptive design (TAD). Specifically, TAD-SIE uses SECRETS (Subject-Efficient Clinical Randomized Controlled Trials using Synthetic Intervention) for hypothesis testing, which simulates a cross-over trial in order to boost power; doing so, makes it easier for a trial to reach target power within trial constraints (e.g., sample size limits). To estimate sample sizes, TAD-SIE implements a new TAD tailored to SECRETS given that SECRETS violates assumptions under standard TADs. In addition, our TAD overcomes the ineffectiveness of standard TADs by allowing sample sizes to be increased across iterations without any condition while controlling significance level with futility stopping. On a real-world Phase-3 clinical RCT (i.e., a two-arm parallel-group superiority trial with an equal number of subjects per arm), TAD-SIE reaches typical target operating points of 80% or 90% power and 5% significance level in contrast to baseline algorithms that only get at best 59% power and 4% significance level.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Fast Design Space Exploration of Nonlinear Systems: Part I

System design tools are often only available as input-output blackboxes: for a given design as input they compute an output representing system behavior. Blackboxes are intended to be run in the forward direction. This paper presents a new method of solving the inverse design problem namely, given requirements or constraints on output, find an input that also optimizes an objective function. This problem is challenging for several reasons. First, blackboxes are not designed to be run in reverse. Second, inputs and outputs can be discrete and continuous. Third, finding designs concurrently satisfying a set of requirements is hard because designs satisfying individual requirements may conflict with each other. Fourth, blackbox evaluations can be expensive. Finally, blackboxes can sometimes fail to produce an output. This paper presents CNMA, a new method of solving the inverse problem that overcomes these challenges. CNMA tries to sample only the part of the design space relevant to solving the problem, leveraging the power of neural networks, Mixed Integer Linear Programs, and a new learning-from-failure feedback loop. The paper also presents a parallel version of CNMA that improves the efficiency and quality of solutions over the sequential version, and tries to steer it away from local optima. CNMA's performance is evaluated against conventional optimization methods for seven nonlinear design problems of 8 (two problems), 10, 15, 36 and 60 real-valued dimensions and one with 186 binary dimensions. Conventional methods evaluated are off-the-shelf implementations of Bayesian Optimization with Gaussian Processes, Nelder Mead and Random Search. The first two do not solve problems that are high-dimensional, have discrete and continuous variables or whose blackboxes can fail to return values. CNMA solves all problems, and surpasses the performance of conventional methods by up to 87%.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

FlexiBERT: Are Current Transformer Architectures too Homogeneous and Rigid?

The existence of a plethora of language models makes the problem of selecting the best one for a custom task challenging. Most state-of-the-art methods leverage transformer-based models (e.g., BERT) or their variants. Training such models and exploring their hyperparameter space, however, is computationally expensive. Prior work proposes several neural architecture search (NAS) methods that employ performance predictors (e.g., surrogate models) to address this issue; however, analysis has been limited to homogeneous models that use fixed dimensionality throughout the network. This leads to sub-optimal architectures. To address this limitation, we propose a suite of heterogeneous and flexible models, namely FlexiBERT, that have varied encoder layers with a diverse set of possible operations and different hidden dimensions. For better-posed surrogate modeling in this expanded design space, we propose a new graph-similarity-based embedding scheme. We also propose a novel NAS policy, called BOSHNAS, that leverages this new scheme, Bayesian modeling, and second-order optimization, to quickly train and use a neural surrogate model to converge to the optimal architecture. A comprehensive set of experiments shows that the proposed policy, when applied to the FlexiBERT design space, pushes the performance frontier upwards compared to traditional models. FlexiBERT-Mini, one of our proposed models, has 3% fewer parameters than BERT-Mini and achieves 8.9% higher GLUE score. A FlexiBERT model with equivalent performance as the best homogeneous model achieves 2.6x smaller size. FlexiBERT-Large, another proposed model, achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming the baseline models by at least 5.7% on the GLUE benchmark.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

TUTOR: Training Neural Networks Using Decision Rules as Model Priors

The human brain has the ability to carry out new tasks with limited experience. It utilizes prior learning experiences to adapt the solution strategy to new domains. On the other hand, deep neural networks (DNNs) generally need large amounts of data and computational resources for training. However, this requirement is not met in many settings. To address these challenges, we propose the TUTOR DNN synthesis framework. TUTOR targets tabular datasets. It synthesizes accurate DNN models with limited available data and reduced memory/computational requirements. It consists of three sequential steps. The first step involves generation, verification, and labeling of synthetic data. The synthetic data generation module targets both the categorical and continuous features. TUTOR generates the synthetic data from the same probability distribution as the real data. It then verifies the integrity of the generated synthetic data using a semantic integrity classifier module. It labels the synthetic data based on a set of rules extracted from the real dataset. Next, TUTOR uses two training schemes that combine synthetic and training data to learn the parameters of the DNN model. These two schemes focus on two different ways in which synthetic data can be used to derive a prior on the model parameters and, hence, provide a better DNN initialization for training with real data. In the third step, TUTOR employs a grow-and-prune synthesis paradigm to learn both the weights and the architecture of the DNN to reduce model size while ensuring its accuracy. We evaluate the performance of TUTOR on nine datasets of various sizes. We show that in comparison to fully connected DNNs, TUTOR, on an average, reduces the need for data by 5.9x, improves accuracy by 3.4%, and reduces the number of parameters (fFLOPs) by 4.7x (4.3x). Thus, TUTOR enables a less data-hungry, more accurate, and more compact DNN synthesis.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

MHDeep: Mental Health Disorder Detection System based on Body-Area and Deep Neural Networks

Mental health problems impact quality of life of millions of people around the world. However, diagnosis of mental health disorders is a challenging problem that often relies on self-reporting by patients about their behavioral patterns. Therefore, there is a need for new strategies for diagnosis of mental health problems. The recent introduction of body-area networks consisting of a plethora of accurate sensors embedded in smartwatches and smartphones and deep neural networks (DNNs) points towards a possible solution. However, disease diagnosis based on WMSs and DNNs, and their deployment on edge devices, remains a challenging problem. To this end, we propose a framework called MHDeep that utilizes commercially available WMSs and efficient DNN models to diagnose three important mental health disorders: schizoaffective, major depressive, and bipolar. MHDeep uses eight different categories of data obtained from sensors integrated in a smartwatch and smartphone. Due to limited available data, MHDeep uses a synthetic data generation module to augment real data with synthetic data drawn from the same probability distribution. We use the synthetic dataset to pre-train the DNN models, thus imposing a prior on the weights. We use a grow-and-prune DNN synthesis approach to learn both the architecture and weights during the training process. We use three different data partitions to evaluate the MHDeep models trained with data collected from 74 individuals. We conduct data instance level and patient level evaluations. MHDeep achieves an average test accuracy of 90.4%, 87.3%, and 82.4%, respectively, for classifications between healthy instances and schizoaffective disorder instances, major depressive disorder instances, and bipolar disorder instances. At the patient level, MHDeep DNNs achieve an accuracy of 100%, 100%, and 90.0% for the three mental health disorders, respectively.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Robot Design With Neural Networks, MILP Solvers and Active Learning

Central to the design of many robot systems and their controllers is solving a constrained blackbox optimization problem. This paper presents CNMA, a new method of solving this problem that is conservative in the number of potentially expensive blackbox function evaluations; allows specifying complex, even recursive constraints directly rather than as hard-to-design penalty or barrier functions; and is resilient to the non-termination of function evaluations. CNMA leverages the ability of neural networks to approximate any continuous function, their transformation into equivalent mixed integer linear programs (MILPs) and their optimization subject to constraints with industrial strength MILP solvers. A new learning-from-failure step guides the learning to be relevant to solving the constrained optimization problem. Thus, the amount of learning is orders of magnitude smaller than that needed to learn functions over their entire domains. CNMA is illustrated with the design of several robotic systems: wave-energy propelled boat, lunar lander, hexapod, cartpole, acrobot and parallel parking. These range from 6 real-valued dimensions to 36. We show that CNMA surpasses the Nelder-Mead, Gaussian and Random Search optimization methods against the metric of number of function evaluations.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Dreaming to Distill: Data-free Knowledge Transfer via DeepInversion

We introduce DeepInversion, a new method for synthesizing images from the image distribution used to train a deep neural network. We 'invert' a trained network (teacher) to synthesize class-conditional input images starting from random noise, without using any additional information about the training dataset. Keeping the teacher fixed, our method optimizes the input while regularizing the distribution of intermediate feature maps using information stored in the batch normalization layers of the teacher. Further, we improve the diversity of synthesized images using Adaptive DeepInversion, which maximizes the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the teacher and student network logits. The resulting synthesized images from networks trained on the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets demonstrate high fidelity and degree of realism, and help enable a new breed of data-free applications - ones that do not require any real images or labeled data. We demonstrate the applicability of our proposed method to three tasks of immense practical importance -- (i) data-free network pruning, (ii) data-free knowledge transfer, and (iii) data-free continual learning. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/DeepInversion

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Efficient Synthesis of Compact Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been deployed in myriad machine learning applications. However, advances in their accuracy are often achieved with increasingly complex and deep network architectures. These large, deep models are often unsuitable for real-world applications, due to their massive computational cost, high memory bandwidth, and long latency. For example, autonomous driving requires fast inference based on Internet-of-Things (IoT) edge devices operating under run-time energy and memory storage constraints. In such cases, compact DNNs can facilitate deployment due to their reduced energy consumption, memory requirement, and inference latency. Long short-term memories (LSTMs) are a type of recurrent neural network that have also found widespread use in the context of sequential data modeling. They also face a model size vs. accuracy trade-off. In this paper, we review major approaches for automatically synthesizing compact, yet accurate, DNN/LSTM models suitable for real-world applications. We also outline some challenges and future areas of exploration.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Fully Dynamic Inference with Deep Neural Networks

Modern deep neural networks are powerful and widely applicable models that extract task-relevant information through multi-level abstraction. Their cross-domain success, however, is often achieved at the expense of computational cost, high memory bandwidth, and long inference latency, which prevents their deployment in resource-constrained and time-sensitive scenarios, such as edge-side inference and self-driving cars. While recently developed methods for creating efficient deep neural networks are making their real-world deployment more feasible by reducing model size, they do not fully exploit input properties on a per-instance basis to maximize computational efficiency and task accuracy. In particular, most existing methods typically use a one-size-fits-all approach that identically processes all inputs. Motivated by the fact that different images require different feature embeddings to be accurately classified, we propose a fully dynamic paradigm that imparts deep convolutional neural networks with hierarchical inference dynamics at the level of layers and individual convolutional filters/channels. Two compact networks, called Layer-Net (L-Net) and Channel-Net (C-Net), predict on a per-instance basis which layers or filters/channels are redundant and therefore should be skipped. L-Net and C-Net also learn how to scale retained computation outputs to maximize task accuracy. By integrating L-Net and C-Net into a joint design framework, called LC-Net, we consistently outperform state-of-the-art dynamic frameworks with respect to both efficiency and classification accuracy. On the CIFAR-10 dataset, LC-Net results in up to 11.9$\times$ fewer floating-point operations (FLOPs) and up to 3.3% higher accuracy compared to other dynamic inference methods. On the ImageNet dataset, LC-Net achieves up to 1.4$\times$ fewer FLOPs and up to 4.6% higher Top-1 accuracy than the other methods.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

SECRET: Semantically Enhanced Classification of Real-world Tasks

Supervised machine learning (ML) algorithms are aimed at maximizing classification performance under available energy and storage constraints. They try to map the training data to the corresponding labels while ensuring generalizability to unseen data. However, they do not integrate meaning-based relationships among labels in the decision process. On the other hand, natural language processing (NLP) algorithms emphasize the importance of semantic information. In this paper, we synthesize the complementary advantages of supervised ML and NLP algorithms into one method that we refer to as SECRET (Semantically Enhanced Classification of REal-world Tasks). SECRET performs classifications by fusing the semantic information of the labels with the available data: it combines the feature space of the supervised algorithms with the semantic space of the NLP algorithms and predicts labels based on this joint space. Experimental results indicate that, compared to traditional supervised learning, SECRET achieves up to 14.0% accuracy and 13.1% F1 score improvements. Moreover, compared to ensemble methods, SECRET achieves up to 12.7% accuracy and 13.3% F1 score improvements. This points to a new research direction for supervised classification based on incorporation of semantic information.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Software-defined Design Space Exploration for an Efficient DNN Accelerator Architecture

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to outperform conventional machine learning algorithms across a wide range of applications, e.g., image recognition, object detection, robotics, and natural language processing. However, the high computational complexity of DNNs often necessitates extremely fast and efficient hardware. The problem gets worse as the size of neural networks grows exponentially. As a result, customized hardware accelerators have been developed to accelerate DNN processing without sacrificing model accuracy. However, previous accelerator design studies have not fully considered the characteristics of the target applications, which may lead to sub-optimal architecture designs. On the other hand, new DNN models have been developed for better accuracy, but their compatibility with the underlying hardware accelerator is often overlooked. In this article, we propose an application-driven framework for architectural design space exploration of DNN accelerators. This framework is based on a hardware analytical model of individual DNN operations. It models the accelerator design task as a multi-dimensional optimization problem. We demonstrate that it can be efficaciously used in application-driven accelerator architecture design. Given a target DNN, the framework can generate efficient accelerator design solutions with optimized performance and area. Furthermore, we explore the opportunity to use the framework for accelerator configuration optimization under simultaneous diverse DNN applications. The framework is also capable of improving neural network models to best fit the underlying hardware resources.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

SPRING: A Sparsity-Aware Reduced-Precision Monolithic 3D CNN Accelerator Architecture for Training and Inference

CNNs outperform traditional machine learning algorithms across a wide range of applications. However, their computational complexity makes it necessary to design efficient hardware accelerators. Most CNN accelerators focus on exploring dataflow styles that exploit computational parallelism. However, potential performance speedup from sparsity has not been adequately addressed. The computation and memory footprint of CNNs can be significantly reduced if sparsity is exploited in network evaluations. To take advantage of sparsity, some accelerator designs explore sparsity encoding and evaluation on CNN accelerators. However, sparsity encoding is just performed on activation or weight and only in inference. It has been shown that activation and weight also have high sparsity levels during training. Hence, sparsity-aware computation should also be considered in training. To further improve performance and energy efficiency, some accelerators evaluate CNNs with limited precision. However, this is limited to the inference since reduced precision sacrifices network accuracy if used in training. In addition, CNN evaluation is usually memory-intensive, especially in training. In this paper, we propose SPRING, a SParsity-aware Reduced-precision Monolithic 3D CNN accelerator for trainING and inference. SPRING supports both CNN training and inference. It uses a binary mask scheme to encode sparsities in activation and weight. It uses the stochastic rounding algorithm to train CNNs with reduced precision without accuracy loss. To alleviate the memory bottleneck in CNN evaluation, especially in training, SPRING uses an efficient monolithic 3D NVM interface to increase memory bandwidth. Compared to GTX 1080 Ti, SPRING achieves 15.6X, 4.2X and 66.0X improvements in performance, power reduction, and energy efficiency, respectively, for CNN training, and 15.5X, 4.5X and 69.1X improvements for inference.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access