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Rajat Bhattacharjya

Publications and source records attributed to Rajat Bhattacharjya.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

FloodReasonBench: Benchmarking VLM Reasoning Segmentation for Embodied Flood Response at the Edge

Reasoning segmentation enables vision-language models (VLMs) to translate mission-relevant language requests into pixel-level visual grounding, offering a natural perception interface for embodied agents. However, existing benchmarks largely focus on generic visual scenes and overlook the domain and resource constraints encountered in flood-response platforms. We present FloodReasonBench, a benchmark for VLM reasoning segmentation for embodied flood response at the edge. At its core, FloodReasonBench introduces FloodResponseSeg, a flood-specific reasoning-segmentation dataset constructed from real-world scenes and response-relevant targets. Beyond task accuracy, the benchmark characterizes reasoning-segmentation pipelines under lightweight visual encoding, hierarchical split inference, and compressed intermediate representations. We observe strong partition-dependent accuracy variation in the generic pre-adaptation setting, while the flood-adapted target-workload design space exhibits a substantially more compact accuracy range across partitions. Evaluation on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier further exposes the tradeoffs among reasoning-segmentation accuracy, edge-side latency, energy, and communication footprint, enabling quality-constrained selection of edge operating points. Together, these results provide a task- and system-level characterization of reasoning segmentation for resource-constrained embodied flood response at the edge.

cs.DC

MemoGuard: An Adaptive Runtime for Guarding Against Memory Traps in Communication-Limited Robot Navigation

Communication-limited robots in mission-critical scenarios such as disaster inspection and search-and-rescue must make reliable onboard decisions without access to remote operators or high-capacity reasoning services. Episodic memory reuse is an attractive low-cost fallback, but retrieval similarity does not guarantee execution validity, i.e., a retrieved action may match the current context yet be unsafe due to changed topology, insufficient battery margin, or unreliable prior outcomes. We call such high-similarity but execution-invalid episodes memory traps. This creates a safety-efficiency design space where similarity only reuse minimizes fallback cost but can be unsafe, while always invoking local reasoning improves safety at high computational and energy cost. This paper presents MemoGuard, a lightweight adaptive runtime that validates episodic memories against topology, resource, and outcome contracts before reuse, invoking fallback only when validation fails. In a graph-based corridor-inspection simulator, MemoGuard reduces battery safety violations by 76.6% over similarity-only top-1 reuse while reducing fallback calls by 21.4% over always reasoning. On an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier with local llama3.2:3b fallback reasoning, this corresponds to 3.67 s and 36.97 J of avoided fallback-reasoning overhead per trial. We open-source MemoGuard at https://github.com/hetheiin/memoguard.

cs.RO

AVERY: Intent-Driven Adaptive VLM Split Computing via Embodied Self-Awareness for Efficient Disaster Response Systems

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in disaster response require complex, queryable intelligence that onboard CNNs cannot provide. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer this semantic reasoning, their high resource demands make on-device deployment infeasible, and naive cloud offloading fails under the low-bandwidth, unstable networks endemic to disaster zones. We present AVERY, an intent-driven adaptive split computing framework for efficient VLM deployment on resource-constrained platforms. AVERY is motivated by the observation that operator intent must be treated as a first-class system objective, since missions such as broad situational monitoring and precise, spatially grounded investigation require different semantic products, latency targets, and resource allocations. To reflect this, AVERY advances split computing beyond traditional depth-wise partitioning through a functional, cognitive-inspired dual-stream split: a high-frequency, low-resolution Context stream for real-time awareness, and a low-frequency, high-fidelity Insight stream for deep analysis. This design enables a hierarchical split strategy: computation is first separated by function, then partitioned depth-wise across edge and cloud when the Insight stream is required. A lightweight, self-aware onboard controller monitors network conditions and operator intent to select from pre-trained compression models, navigating the accuracy-throughput trade-off at runtime. Evaluated using LISA-7B in an edge-cloud setting under fluctuating network conditions, AVERY achieves 11.2% higher accuracy than raw image compression, 93.98% lower energy consumption than full-edge execution, and average accuracy within 0.75% of the static High-Accuracy baseline during dynamic adaptation. Overall, AVERY enhances mission efficiency and enables real-time, queryable intelligence in dynamic disaster environments.

cs.DC

HYPERDOA: Robust and Efficient DoA Estimation using Hyperdimensional Computing

Direction of Arrival (DoA) estimation techniques face a critical trade-off, as classical methods often lack accuracy in challenging, low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions, while modern deep learning approaches are too energy-intensive and opaque for resource-constrained, safety-critical systems. We introduce HYPERDOA, a novel estimator leveraging Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC). The framework introduces two distinct feature extraction strategies -- Mean Spatial-Lag Autocorrelation and Spatial Smoothing -- for its HDC pipeline, and then reframes DoA estimation as a pattern recognition problem. This approach leverages HDC's inherent robustness to noise and its transparent algebraic operations to bypass the expensive matrix decompositions and "black-box" nature of classical and deep learning methods, respectively. Our evaluation demonstrates that HYPERDOA achieves ~35.39% higher accuracy than state-of-the-art methods in low-SNR, coherent-source scenarios. Crucially, it also consumes ~93% less energy than competing neural baselines on an embedded NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX platform. This dual advantage in accuracy and efficiency establishes HYPERDOA as a robust and viable solution for mission-critical applications on edge devices.

eess.SP

T-SAR: A Full-Stack Co-design for CPU-Only Ternary LLM Inference via In-Place SIMD ALU Reorganization

Recent advances in LLMs have outpaced the computational and memory capacities of edge platforms that primarily employ CPUs, thereby challenging efficient and scalable deployment. While ternary quantization enables significant resource savings, existing CPU solutions rely heavily on memory-based lookup tables (LUTs) which limit scalability, and FPGA or GPU accelerators remain impractical for edge use. This paper presents T-SAR, the first framework to achieve scalable ternary LLM inference on CPUs by repurposing the SIMD register file for dynamic, in-register LUT generation with minimal hardware modifications. T-SAR eliminates memory bottlenecks and maximizes data-level parallelism, delivering 5.6-24.5x and 1.1-86.2x improvements in GEMM latency and GEMV throughput, respectively, with only 3.2% power and 1.4% area overheads in SIMD units. T-SAR achieves up to 2.5-4.9x the energy efficiency of an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, establishing a practical approach for efficient LLM inference on edge platforms.

cs.AR

ACCESS-AV: Adaptive Communication-Computation Codesign for Sustainable Autonomous Vehicle Localization in Smart Factories

Autonomous Delivery Vehicles (ADVs) are increasingly used for transporting goods in 5G network-enabled smart factories, with the compute-intensive localization module presenting a significant opportunity for optimization. We propose ACCESS-AV, an energy-efficient Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) localization framework that leverages existing 5G infrastructure in smart factory environments. By opportunistically accessing the periodically broadcast 5G Synchronization Signal Blocks (SSBs) for localization, ACCESS-AV obviates the need for dedicated Roadside Units (RSUs) or additional onboard sensors to achieve energy efficiency as well as cost reduction. We implement an Angle-of-Arrival (AoA)-based estimation method using the Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) algorithm, optimized for resource-constrained ADV platforms through an adaptive communication-computation strategy that dynamically balances energy consumption with localization accuracy based on environmental conditions such as Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and vehicle velocity. Experimental results demonstrate that ACCESS-AV achieves an average energy reduction of 43.09% compared to non-adaptive systems employing AoA algorithms such as vanilla MUSIC, ESPRIT, and Root-MUSIC. It maintains sub-30 cm localization accuracy while also delivering substantial reductions in infrastructure and operational costs, establishing its viability for sustainable smart factory environments.

eess.SY

MUSIC-lite: Efficient MUSIC using Approximate Computing: An OFDM Radar Case Study

Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) is a widely used Direction of Arrival (DoA)/Angle of Arrival (AoA) estimation algorithm applied to various application domains such as autonomous driving, medical imaging, and astronomy. However, MUSIC is computationally expensive and challenging to implement in low-power hardware, requiring exploration of trade-offs between accuracy, cost, and power. We present MUSIC-lite, which exploits approximate computing to generate a design space exploring accuracy-area-power trade-offs. This is specifically applied to the computationally intensive singular value decomposition (SVD) component of the MUSIC algorithm in an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) radar use case. MUSIC-lite incorporates approximate adders into the iterative CORDIC algorithm that is used for hardware implementation of MUSIC, generating interesting accuracy-area-power trade-offs. Our experiments demonstrate MUSIC-lite's ability to save an average of 17.25% on-chip area and 19.4% power with a minimal 0.14% error for efficient MUSIC implementations.

cs.AR

Ellora: Exploring Low-Power OFDM-based Radar Processors using Approximate Computing

In recent times, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based radar has gained wide acceptance given its applicability in joint radar-communication systems. However, realizing such a system on hardware poses a huge area and power bottleneck given its complexity. Therefore it has become ever-important to explore low-power OFDM-based radar processors in order to realize energy-efficient joint radar-communication systems targeting edge devices. This paper aims to address the aforementioned challenges by exploiting approximations on hardware for early design space exploration (DSE) of trade-offs between accuracy, area and power. We present Ellora, a DSE framework for incorporating approximations in an OFDM radar processing pipeline. Ellora uses pairs of approximate adders and multipliers to explore design points realizing energy-efficient radar processors. Particularly, we incorporate approximations into the block involving periodogram based estimation and report area, power and accuracy levels. Experimental results show that at an average accuracy loss of 0.063% in the positive SNR region, we save 22.9% of on-chip area and 26.2% of power. Towards achieving the area and power statistics, we design a fully parallel Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) core which acts as a part of periodogram based estimation and approximate the addition and multiplication operations in it. The aforementioned results show that Ellora can be used in an integrated way with various other optimization methods for generating low-power and energy-efficient radar processors.

cs.AR

Locate: Low-Power Viterbi Decoder Exploration using Approximate Adders

Viterbi decoders are widely used in communication systems, natural language processing (NLP), and other domains. While Viterbi decoders are compute-intensive and power-hungry, we can exploit approximations for early design space exploration (DSE) of trade-offs between accuracy, power, and area. We present Locate, a DSE framework that uses approximate adders in the critically compute and power-intensive Add-Compare-Select Unit (ACSU) of the Viterbi decoder. We demonstrate the utility of Locate for early DSE of accuracy-power-area trade-offs for two applications: communication systems and NLP, showing a range of pareto-optimal design configurations. For instance, in the communication system, using an approximate adder, we observe savings of 21.5% area and 31.02% power with only 0.142% loss in accuracy averaged across three modulation schemes. Similarly, for a Parts-of-Speech Tagger in an NLP setting, out of 15 approximate adders, 7 report 100% accuracy while saving 22.75% area and 28.79% power on average when compared to using a Carry-Lookahead Adder in the ACSU. These results show that Locate can be used synergistically with other optimization techniques to improve the end-to-end efficiency of Viterbi decoders for various application domains.

cs.AR

An Approximate Carry Estimating Simultaneous Adder with Rectification

Approximate computing has in recent times found significant applications towards lowering power, area, and time requirements for arithmetic operations. Several works done in recent years have furthered approximate computing along these directions. In this work, we propose a new approximate adder that employs a carry prediction method. This allows parallel propagation of the carry allowing faster calculations. In addition to the basic adder design, we also propose a rectification logic which would enable higher accuracy for larger computations. Experimental results show that our adder produces results 91.2% faster than the conventional ripple-carry adder. In terms of accuracy, the addition of rectification logic to the basic design produces results that are more accurate than state-of-the-art adders like SARA and BCSA by 74%.

cs.AR