# Runtime Task Scheduling using Imitation Learning for Heterogeneous Many-Core Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09361 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09361/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Scalable and Reproducible System-on-Chip Simulation for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13187/) (2021)
- [Launchpad: Learning to Schedule Using Offline and Online RL Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00639/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain-specific systems-on-chip, a class of heterogeneous many-core systems, are recognized as a key approach to narrow down the performance and energy-efficiency gap between custom hardware accelerators and programmable processors. Reaching the full potential of these architectures depends critically on optimally scheduling the applications to available resources at runtime. Existing optimization-based techniques cannot achieve this objective at runtime due to the combinatorial nature of the task scheduling problem. As the main theoretical contribution, this paper poses scheduling as a classification problem and proposes a hierarchical imitation learning (IL)-based scheduler that learns from an Oracle to maximize the performance of multiple domain-specific applications. Extensive evaluations with six streaming applications from wireless communications and radar domains show that the proposed IL-based scheduler approximates an offline Oracle policy with more than 99% accuracy for performance- and energy-based optimization objectives. Furthermore, it achieves almost identical performance to the Oracle with a low runtime overhead and successfully adapts to new applications, many-core system configurations, and runtime variations in application characteristics.