UML state machine diagrams illustrate the states and transitions of an object in response to events. A state represents the condition of an object at a moment in time between events. A transition between two states occurs when an event happens, which may cause actions to fire or require conditional guards. States can be nested, with substates inheriting transitions from the superstate. Pipelining is a technique that decomposes a process into sub-operations that execute concurrently on different data in specialized pipeline segments, overlapping computations to improve efficiency.