93398 - ARCHITECTURES FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE M

Anno Accademico 2025/2026

  • Docente: Luca Benini
  • Crediti formativi: 6
  • SSD: ING-INF/01
  • Lingua di insegnamento: Inglese

Conoscenze e abilità da conseguire

The main goal of the class is to enable students to specify, configure, program and verify complex embedded electronic systems for the Internet of Things and for Artificial Intelligence. The importance of hardware-software interaction will be emphasized, as all practical IoT and AI systems are programmable. The class will provide working knowledge on state-of-the-art hardware platforms used in embedded AI and IoT applications - spanning a wide range of power and cost vs. performance tradeoffs. A detailed coverage will be given of software abstractions and methodologies for developing applications leveraging the capabilities of the above mentioned platforms. Design automation tools and flows will also be covered.

Contenuti



Module 1:

From ML to DNNs - a computational perspective

1. Introduction to key computational kernels (dot-product, matrix multiply...)

2. Inference vs training - workload analysis characterizatio

3. The NN computational zoo: DNNs, CNNs, RNNs, Attention-based Networks, State Based networks

Running ML workloads on programmable processor

1. recap of processor instruction set architecture (ISA) with focus on data processing

2. improving processor ISAs for ML: RISC-V and ARM use cases

3. fundamentals of parallel processor architecture and parallelization of ML workloads

Algorithmic optimizations for ML

1. Bottleneck analysis and algorithmic techniques

3. Model distillation: efficient NN models - depthwise convolutions, inverse bottleneck, optimized attention, introduction to Neural Architectural Search

3. Quantization and sparsity: scalar, block, vector.

Testi/Bibliografia

Selected parts from the following books

1. Dive into Deep Learning (online: d2l.ai)

2. Efficient Processing of Deep Neural Networks (online: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-01766-7 )

3. Machine Learning Systems (online: mlsysbook.ai)

Metodi didattici

Traditional lectures for theory.

Both Module 1 and Module 2 include hands-on sessions requiring a student laptop.

Modalità di verifica e valutazione dell'apprendimento

Written exam with oral discussion: the written exam is compulsory and consists of solving problems and answering questions. The oral exam is optional and consists of in-depth questions on topics covered in class.

Strumenti a supporto della didattica

Lectures using projector for slides provided by the instructors.

Hands-on sessions.

Online resources (virtuale)

Orario di ricevimento

Consulta il sito web di Luca Benini

Consulta il sito web di