United States

Advancements in chip design and manufacturing have enabled the processing of complex tasks such as deep learning and natural language processing, paving the way for the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). AI, on the other hand, can be leveraged to innovate and streamline semiconductor technology from planning and implementation to manufacturing. In this paper, we present \textit{Intelligent OPC Engineer Assistant}, an AI/LLM-powered methodology designed to solve the core manufacturing-aware optimization problem known as Optical Proximity Correction (OPC). The methodology involves a reinforcement learning-based OPC recipe search and a customized multi-modal agent system for recipe summarization. Experiments demonstrate that our methodology can efficiently build OPC recipes on various chip designs with specially handled design topologies, a task that typically requires the full-time effort of OPC engineers with years of experience.

AAAI 2025

Intelligent OPC Engineer Assistant for Semiconductor Manufacturing

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We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.



Training semantic segmenter with synthetic data has been attracting great attention due to its easy accessibility and huge quantities. Most previous methods focused on producing large-scale synthetic image-annotation samples and then training the segmenter with all of them. However, such a solution remains a main challenge in that the poor-quality samples are unavoidable, and using them to train the model will damage the training process. In this paper, we propose a training-free Synthetic Data Selection (SDS) strategy with CLIP to select high-quality samples for building a reliable synthetic dataset. Specifically, given massive synthetic image-annotation pairs, we first design a Perturbation-based CLIP Similarity (PCS) to measure the reliability of synthetic image, thus removing samples with low-quality images. Then we propose a class-balance Annotation Similarity Filter (ASF) by comparing the synthetic annotation with the response of CLIP to remove the samples related to low-quality annotations. The experimental results show that using our method significantly reduces the data size by half, while the trained segmenter achieves higher performance. The code will be released.

A Training-free Synthetic Data Selection Method for Semantic Segmentation

We propose sym-power transformation to freely enhance Implicit Neural Representation (INR) from the perspective of data transformation. 
Unlike prior work utilizing random permutation or index rearrangement, our method is a reversible operation that does not require additional storage consumption to recover data.
We first investigate the characteristics of data that can benefit the training of INR, proposing the Range-Defined Symmetric Hypothesis, which posits that specific range and symmetry can improve the expressive ability of INR. This hypothesis is verified using both simulated and real data.
Based on this hypothesis, we propose a nonlinear sym-power transformation to achieve both range-defined and symmetric properties simultaneously. We use the power coefficient to redistribute data to approximate symmetry within the target range. To improve the robustness of the transformation, we further design deviation-aware calibration and adaptive soft boundary to address issues of extreme deviation boosting and continuity-breaking.
Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed method, demonstrating that our transformation can reliably improve INR compared with other data transformations. We also conduct 1D audio fitting, 2D image fitting, and 3D video fitting tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of sym-power transformation.

Enhancing Implicit Neural Representations via Symmetric Power Transformation

Vision transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in a variety of vision tasks. Despite their promising capabilities, training a ViT requires a large amount of diverse data. Several studies empirically found that using rich data augmentations, such as Mixup, Cutmix, and random erasing, is critical to the successful training of ViTs. Now, the use of rich data augmentations has become a standard practice in the current state. However, we report a vulnerability to this practice: Certain data augmentations such as Mixup cause a variance shift in the positional embedding of ViT, which has been a hidden factor that degrades the performance of ViT during the test phase. We claim that achieving a stable effect from positional embedding requires a specific condition on the image, which is often broken for the current data augmentation methods. We provide a detailed analysis of this problem as well as the correct configuration for these data augmentations to remove the side effects of variance shift. Experiments showed that adopting our guidelines improves the performance of ViTs compared with the current configuration of data augmentations.

Configuring Data Augmentations to Reduce Variance Shift in Positional Embedding of Vision Transformers

Diffusion models excel at producing high-quality images; however, scaling to higher resolutions, such as 4K, often results in structural distortions, and repetitive patterns. To this end, we introduce ResMaster, a novel, training-free method that empowers resolution-limited diffusion models to generate high-quality images beyond resolution restrictions.  Specifically, ResMaster leverages a low-resolution reference image created by a pre-trained diffusion model to provide structural and fine-grained guidance for crafting high-resolution images on a patch-by-patch basis. To ensure a coherent structure, ResMaster meticulously aligns the low-frequency components of high-resolution patches with the low-resolution reference at each denoising step. For fine-grained guidance, tailored image prompts based on the low-resolution reference and enriched textual prompts produced by a vision-language model are incorporated. This approach could significantly mitigate local pattern distortions and improve detail refinement. Extensive experiments validate that ResMaster sets a new benchmark for high-resolution image generation.

ResMaster: Mastering High-Resolution Image Generation via Structural and Fine-Grained Guidance

Recently, Large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning have demonstrated remarkable potential in handling neural machine translation. However, existing evidence shows that LLMs are prompt-sensitive and it is sub-optimal to apply the fixed prompt to any input for downstream machine translation tasks. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive few-shot prompting (AFSP) framework to automatically select suitable translation demonstrations for various source input sentences to further elicit the translation capability of an LLM for better machine translation. First, we build a translation demonstration retrieval module based on LLM's embedding to retrieve top-k semantic-similar translation demonstrations from aligned parallel translation corpus. Rather than using other embedding models for semantic demonstration retrieval, we build a hybrid demonstration retrieval module based on the embedding layer of the deployed LLM to build better input representation for retrieving more semantic-related translation demonstrations. Then, to ensure better semantic consistency between source inputs and target outputs, we force the deployed LLM itself to generate multiple output candidates in the target language with the help of translation demonstrations and rerank these candidates. Besides, to better evaluate the effectiveness of our AFSP framework on the latest language and extend the research boundary of neural machine translation, we construct a high-quality diplomatic Chinese-English parallel dataset that consists of 5,528 parallel Chinese-English sentences. Finally, extensive experiments on the proposed diplomatic Chinese-English parallel dataset and the United Nations Parallel Corpus (Chinese-English part) show the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed AFSP.

Adaptive Few-shot Prompting for Machine Translation with Pre-trained Language Models

Existing efforts to boost multimodal fusion of 3D anomaly detection (3D-AD) primarily concentrate on devising more effective multimodal fusion strategies. However, little attention was devoted to analyzing the role of multimodal fusion architecture (topology) design in contributing to 3D-AD. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap and present a systematic study on the impact of multimodal fusion architecture design on 3D-AD. This work considers the multimodal fusion architecture design at the intra-module fusion level, i.e., independent modality-specific modules, involving early, middle or late multimodal features with specific fusion operations, and also at the inter-module fusion level, i.e., the strategies to fuse those modules. In both cases, we first derive insights through theoretically and experimentally exploring how architectural designs influence 3D-AD. Then, we extend SOTA neural architecture search (NAS) paradigm and propose 3D-ADNAS to simultaneously search across multimodal fusion strategies and modality-specific modules for the first time. Extensive experiments show that 3D-ADNAS obtains consistent improvements in 3D-AD across various model capacities in terms of accuracy, frame rate, and memory usage,  and it exhibits great potential in dealing with few-shot 3D-AD tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Anonymous/3D-ADNAS.

Revisiting Multimodal Fusion for 3D Anomaly Detection from an Architectural Perspective

Intent-based grasp generation inherently involves challenges such as manipulation ambiguity and modality gaps. To address these, we propose a novel Retrieval-Augmented Grasp Generation model (RAGG). Our key insight is that when humans manipulate new objects, they initially mimic the interaction patterns observed in similar objects, then progressively adjust hand-object contact. Consequently, we develop RAGG as a two-stage approach, encompassing retrieval-guided generation and structurally stable grasp refinement. In the first stage, we propose a Retrieval-Augmented Diffusion Model (ReDim), which identifies the most relevant interaction instance from a knowledge base to explicitly guide grasp generation, thereby mitigating ambiguity and bridging modality gaps to ensure semantically correct manipulation. In the second stage, we introduce a Progressive Refinement Network (PRN) with Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) layers to refine the generated coarse grasp, employing a Structural Similarity Index loss to constrain the spatial relationship between the hand and the object, thus ensuring the stability of the grasp. Extensive experiments on the OakInk and GRAB benchmarks demonstrate that RAGG achieves superior results compared to state-of-the-art approach, indicating not only better physical feasibility and controllability but also strong generalization and interpretability for unseen objects.

RAGG: Retrieval-Augmented Grasp Generation Model

Adversarial training incurs significant computational overhead, leading to growing interest in designing inherently robust architectures. We demonstrate that a carefully designed first layer of the neural network can serve as an implicit adversarial noise filter (ANF). This filter is created using a combination of large kernel size, increased convolution filters, and a maxpool operation. We show that integrating this filter as the first layer in architectures such as ResNet, VGG, and EfficientNet results in adversarially robust networks. Our approach achieves higher adversarial accuracies than existing natively robust architectures without adversarial training and is competitive with adversarial-trained architectures across a wide range of datasets. Supporting our findings, we show that (a) the decision regions for our method have better margins, (b) the visualized loss surfaces are smoother, (c) the modified peak signal-to-noise ratio (mPSNR) values at the output of the ANF are higher, (d) high-frequency components are more attenuated, and (e) architectures incorporating ANF exhibit better denoising in Gaussian noise compared to baseline architectures.

First Line of Defense: A Robust First Layer Mitigates Adversarial Attacks

Point cloud segmentation has a wide range of applications in autonomous driving, augmented reality and virtual reality. Multi-modal fusion strategies have received increasing attention in point cloud segmentation recently. Despite the success, existing methods usually generate unnecessary information loss or redundancy. In this paper, we propose $\textbf{FEAST-Mamba}$, a novel $\textbf{FEA}$ture and $\textbf{S}$pa$\textbf{T}$ial aware $\textbf{Mamba}$ network to tackle multi-modal point cloud segmentation. To exploit the complementarity between different modals, we propose a bidirectional orthogonal attention module, where features are first bidirectionally interacted with each other through cross-modal attention, and then orthogonal fusion is used to reduce feature redundancy. Furthermore, a reordering strategy is proposed for the Mamba architecture that takes into account both spatial and semantic information during cross-modal feature ordering. Experiments on two indoor datasets, S3DIS and ScanNet, and three outdoor datasets, Waymo, nuScenes and SemanticKITTI, show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performances.

FEAST-Mamba: FEAture and SpaTial Aware Mamba Network with Bidirectional Orthogonal Fusion for Cross-Modal Point Cloud Segmentation

LIDAR-based 3D object detection and semantic segmentation are critical tasks in 3D scene understanding. Traditional detection and segmentation methods supervise their models through bounding box labels and semantic mask labels. However, these two independent labels inherently contain significant redundancy. This paper aims to eliminate the redundancy by supervising 3D object detection using only semantic labels. However, the challenge arises due to the incomplete geometry structure and boundary ambiguity of point cloud instances, leading to inaccurate pseudo-labels and poor detection results. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method, named Seg2Box. We first introduce a Multi-Frame Multi-Scale Clustering (MFMS-C) module, which leverages the spatio-temporal consistency of point clouds to generate accurate box-level pseudo-labels. Additionally, the Semantic-Guiding Iterative-Mining Self-Training (SGIM-ST) module is proposed to enhance the performance by progressively refining the pseudo-labels and mining the instances without generating pseudo-labels. Experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes Dataset show that our method significantly outperforms other competitive methods by 23.7% and 10.3% in mAP, respectively. The results demonstrate the great label-efficient potential and advancement of our method.

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A Training-free Synthetic Data Selection Method for Semantic Segmentation

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