Publications
Our teams aspire to make discoveries that impact everyone, and core to our approach is sharing our research and tools to fuel progress in the field.
Our teams aspire to make discoveries that impact everyone, and core to our approach is sharing our research and tools to fuel progress in the field.
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1 - 15 of 11257 publications
An experimental evaluation of an AI-powered interactive learning platform
Nicole Miller
Yael Haramaty
Lidan Hackmon
Lior Belinsky
Abraham Oritz Tapia
Lucy Tootill
Scott Siebert
Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (2026) (to appear)
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Generative AI, which is capable of transforming static content into dynamic learning experiences, holds the potential to revolutionize student engagement in educational contexts. However, questions still remain around whether or not these tools are effective at facilitating student learning. In this research, we test the effectiveness of an AI-powered platform incorporating multiple representations and assessment through Learn Your Way, an experimental research platform that transforms textbook chapters into dynamic visual and audio representations. Through a between-subjects, mixed methods experiment with 60 US-based students, we demonstrate that students who used Learn Your Way had a more positive learning experience and had better learning outcomes compared to students learning the same content through a digital textbook. These findings indicate that AI-driven tools, capable of providing choice among interactive representations of content, constitute an effective and promising method for enhancing student learning.
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The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart home ecosystems has led to a fragmented landscape of user data management across consumer electronics (CE) such as Smart TVs, gaming consoles, and set-top boxes. Current onboarding processes on these devices are characterized by high friction due to manual data entry and opaque data-sharing practices. This paper introduces the User Data Sharing System (UDSS), a platform-agnostic framework designed to facilitate secure, privacy-first PII (Personally Identifiable Information) exchange between device platforms and third-party applications. Our system implements a Contextual Scope Enforcement (CSE) mechanism that programmatically restricts data exposure based on user intent—specifically distinguishing between Sign-In and Sign-Up workflows. Unlike cloud-anchored identity standards such as FIDO2/WebAuthn, UDSS is designed for shared, device-centric CE environments where persistent user-to-device bind-ing cannot be assumed. We further propose a tiered access model that balances developer needs with regulatory compliance (GDPR/CCPA). A proof-of-concept implementation on a reference ARMv8 Linux-based middleware demonstrates that UDSS reduces user onboarding latency by 65% and measurably reduces PII over-exposure risk through protocol-enforced data minimization. This framework provides a standardized approach to identity management in the heterogeneous CE market.
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As artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly integrated into healthcare, ensuring that this innovation helps to combat health inequities requires engaging marginalized communities in health AI futuring. However, little research has examined Black populations’ perspectives on the use of AI in health contexts, despite the widespread health inequities they experience–inequities that are already perpetuated by AI. Addressing this research gap, through qualitative workshops with 18 Black adults, we characterize participants’ cautious optimism for health AI addressing structural well-being barriers (e.g., by providing second opinions that introduce fairness into an unjust healthcare system), and their concerns that AI will worsen health inequities (e.g., through health AI biases they deemed inevitable and the problematic reality of having to trust healthcare providers to use AI equitably). We advance health AI research by articulating previously-unreported health AI perspectives from a population experiencing significant health inequities, and presenting key considerations for future work.
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XProf: An Open, Scalable and Extensible Profiling System for the Modern ML Stack
Naveen Kumar
Jose Baiocchi Paredes
Scott Goodson
Kelvin Le
Yin Zhang
Kan Cai
Jiten Thakkar
Sai Ganesh Bandiatmakuri
Yogesh SY
Ani Udipi
Vikas Aggarwal
2026
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Optimizing Large Language Models across thousands of hardware accelerators requires deep system expertise. To address modern machine learning optimization needs, we present XProf, the de-facto machine learning profiler for the OpenXLA ecosystem. XProf delivers actionable optimization suggestions and in-depth performance analysis, empowering machine learning researchers and framework users to improve efficiency without specialized systems knowledge. XProf provides a unified, full-stack view of both host (CPU) and device (accelerator - TPUs/GPUs) performance, leveraging tools like the Roofline Model for comprehensive analysis. Engineered with a distributed architecture, XProf is battle-tested at Google to profile across thousands of chips with minimal overhead (<1%) for the workload. Using the Open Source C API extension to PJRT, this pluggable architecture is already adopted by other third-party accelerator vendors. Originally developed at Google and now open-sourced within the OpenXLA Project, XProf has proven indispensable in production, driving significant efficiency gains and enabling critical results, including winning MLPerf submissions. This paper presents the design and architecture of XProf, showcases its differentiating tools & capabilities, and highlights its impact within Google and across the industry as a state of the art ML profiler. The codebase is at https://github.com/openxla/xprof.
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Multimodal large language models (LLMs) integrate and process information from multiple modalities such as text, images, audio, and video, enabling complex tasks such as audio translation and visual question answering. While powerful, this complexity introduces novel vulnerabilities to sophisticated adversarial attacks. This survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of this rapidly expanding field, systematically categorizing attacks that range from manipulations of single modalities (e.g., perturbed images or audio) to those exploiting cross-modal interactions. We overview how these attacks exploit weaknesses in model fusion, attention mechanisms, and representation learning and provided analyses on their potential for real-world consequences.
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Neural general circulation models for modeling precipitation
Stephan Hoyer
Dmitrii Kochkov
Janni Yuval
Ian Langmore
Science Advances (2026)
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Climate models struggle to accurately simulate precipitation, particularly extremes and the diurnal cycle. While hybrid models combining machine learning and physics have emerged with the premise of improving precipitation simulations, none have proven sufficiently skillful or stable enough to outperform existing models in simulating precipitation.
Here, we present the first hybrid model that is trained directly on precipitation observations. The model runs at 2.8 degrees resolution and is built on the differentiable NeuralGCM framework. This model is stable for decadal simulations and demonstrates significant improvements over existing GCMs, ERA5 reanalysis, and a Global Cloud-Resolving Model in simulating precipitation. Our approach yields reduced biases, a more realistic precipitation distribution, improved representation of extremes, and a more accurate diurnal cycle. Furthermore, it outperforms the ECMWF ensemble for mid-range weather forecasting.
This advance paves the way for more reliable simulations of current climate and for the ability to fully utilize the abundance of existing observations to further improve GCMs.
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Automating AI research differs from general software engineering due to computationally expensive evaluation (e.g., model training) and opaque performance attribution. Current LLM-based agents struggle here, often generating monolithic scripts that ignore execution costs and causal factors. We introduce MARS (Modular Agent with Reflective Search), a framework optimized for autonomous AI research. MARS relies on three pillars: (1) Budget-Aware Planning via cost-constrained Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to explicitly balance performance with execution expense; (2) Modular Construction, employing a "Design-Decompose-Implement" pipeline to manage complex research repositories; and (3) Comparative Reflective Memory, which addresses credit assignment by analyzing solution differences to distill high-signal insights. MARS achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source frameworks on MLE-Bench under comparable settings, maintaining competitiveness with the global leaderboard's top methods. Furthermore, the system exhibits qualitative "Aha!" moments, where 63% of all utilized lessons originate from cross-branch transfer, demonstrating that the agent effectively generalizes insights across search paths.
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ConvApparel: A Benchmark Dataset and Validation Framework for User Simulators in Conversational Recommenders
Guy Tennenholtz
Jihwan Jeong
The 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL-26), Rabat, Morocco (2026)
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LLM-based user simulators are a scalable solution for improving conversational AI, but a critical realism gap undermines their effectiveness. To close this gap, we introduce a framework for building and validating high-fidelity simulators. We present a novel dataset of human-AI shopping conversations designed to capture a wide spectrum of user experiences. To measure fidelity, we propose a hybrid evaluation protocol that combines statistical alignment with a learned, discriminator-based Human-Likeness Score. Our most sophisticated simulator, trained via reinforcement learning with iterative critique, achieves a significant leap in realism. Critically, we demonstrate through counterfactual validation that our simulator—trained exclusively on optimal interactions—realistically adapts its behavior to suboptimal system responses, mirroring real user reactions and marking a key advance in creating reliable simulators for robust AI development.
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Type-Aware Ranking of Urban Similarity from Aerial Imagery
Idan Kligvasser
Yotam Intrator
Yuval Desheh
Aviad Barzilai
Niv Efron
Ehud Rivlin
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) Workshops (2026), pp. 821-829
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Estimating and ranking cross-city similarity from aerial imagery is a fundamental challenge in remote sensing and geospatial representation learning. Urban environments differ widely in road layout, marking conventions, and infrastructure design, yet standard visual representations often struggle to disentangle these meaningful structural variations from superficial appearances. In this work, we propose a type-aware contrastive learning framework that measures urban similarity by explicitly modeling distinct infrastructure elements. Leveraging open-vocabulary retrieval, we construct a globally diverse dataset of road-related features, such as intersections, crosswalks, and bus lanes, and train a type-conditioned Vision Transformer that fuses visual features with CLIP-derived semantic embeddings. Crucially, we introduce an adaptive per-type contrastive loss that dynamically emphasizes infrastructure categories with high discriminative power while down-weighting less informative types. To quantify city-level similarity, we aggregate per-type cosine similarities via a lightweight classifier to generate a global city-to-city similarity matrix. Experiments demonstrate that this type-aware approach significantly improves clustering quality and successfully generalizes to unseen cities, establishing a scalable, interpretable foundation for comparative urban analysis.
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A Computer Vision Problem in Flatland
Erin Connelly
Annalisa Crannell
Timothy Duff
Rekha R. Thomas
SIAM Journal on Applied Algebra and Geometry, 10 (2026), pp. 14-45
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When is it possible to project two sets of labeled points of equal cardinality lying in a pair of projective planes to the same image on a projective line? We give a complete answer to this question, obtaining the following results. We first show that such a pair of projections exist if and only if the two point sets are themselves images of a common point set in projective space. Moreover, we find that for generic pairs of point sets, a common projection exists if and only if their cardinality is at most seven. In these cases, we give an explicit description of the loci of projection centers that enable a common image.
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Source-to-source compilers may perform inefficiently by executing transpilation passes on scripts that do not contain the specific language features a pass is designed to transform, potentially leading to redundant processing. A compiler can analyze a script to generate a per-script feature map, for example, by identifying language features in its abstract syntax tree (AST). Before executing a transpilation pass, the compiler can check this map and may bypass the pass for that script if the specific feature targeted by the pass is not present. This feature map can also be dynamically updated throughout the compilation process as other passes transform the code. This method of conditional pass execution based on content-aware analysis may reduce redundant AST traversals, which could decrease overall compilation time and computational resource consumption.
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Uncovering Relationships between Android Developers, User Privacy, and Developer Willingness to Reduce Fingerprinting Risks
Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26) (2026)
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The major mobile platforms, Android and iOS, have introduced changes that restrict user tracking to improve user privacy, yet apps continue to covertly track users via device fingerprinting. We study the opportunity to improve this dynamic with a case study on mobile fingerprinting that evaluates developers’ perceptions of how well platforms protect user privacy and how developers perceive platform privacy interventions. Specifically, we study developers’ willingness to make changes to protect users from fingerprinting and how developers consider trade-offs between user privacy and developer effort. We do this via a survey of 246 Android developers, presented with a hypothetical Android change that protects users from fingerprinting at the cost of additional developer effort.
We find developers overwhelmingly (89%) support this change, even when they anticipate significant effort, yet prefer the change be optional versus required. Surprisingly, developers who use fingerprinting are six times more likely to support the change, despite being most impacted by it. We also find developers are most concerned about compliance and enforcement. In addition, our results show that while most rank iOS above Android for protecting user privacy, this distinction significantly reduces among developers very familiar with fingerprinting. Thus there is an important opportunity for platforms and developers to collaboratively build privacy protections, and we present actionable ways platforms can facilitate this.
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AgentHands: Generating Interactive Hands Gestures for Spatially Grounded Agent Conversations in XR
Ziyi Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM
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Communicating spatial tasks via text or speech creates ``a mental mapping gap'' that limits an agent’s expressiveness. Inspired by co-speech gestures in face-to-face conversation, we propose \textsc{AgentHands}, an LLM-powered XR system that equips agents with hands to render responses clearer and more engaging. Guided by a design taxonomy distilled from a formative study (N=10), we implement a novel pipeline to generate and render a hand agent that augments conversational responses with synchronized, space-aware, and interactive hand gestures: using a meta-instruction, \textsc{AgentHands} generates verbal responses embedded with \textit{GestureEvents} aligned to specific words; each event specifies gesture type and parameters. At runtime, a parser converts events into time-stamped poses and motions, driving an animation system that renders expressive hands synchronized with speech. In a within-subjects study (N=12), \textsc{AgentHands} increased engagement and made spatially grounded conversations easier to follow compared to a speech-only baseline.
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CoDaS: AI Co-Data-Scientist for Biomarker Discovery via Wearable Sensors
Juro Gottweis
CJ Park
Salman Rahman
Ahmed Metwally
Hong Yu
Ivor Rendulic
Yuzhe Yang
Petar Sirkovic
Daniel McDuff
Shwetak Patel
Nicolas Stroppa
Yubin Kim
Mark Malhotra
Orson Xu
Sam Schmidgall
Tim Althoff
Elahe Vedadi
Cynthia Breazeal
Hae Won Park
(2026)
`It’s still abuse’: Community attitudes and perceptions on AI-generated image-based sexual abuse
Nicola Henry
Gemma Beard
Lisa Given
Information, Communication, & Society (2026)
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There are growing concerns about AI-generated image-based sexual abuse (AI-IBSA), also known as nonconsensual sexualized ′deepfakes.′ Empirical research on AI-IBSA, however, remains very limited. This study surveyed 7231 respondents across Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States to investigate community attitudes and perceptions on AI-IBSA. Through a vignette study, we explored the relationship between public familiarity with AI-IBSA, normative concerns about consent, and context-dependent judgments that vary based on the target's identity relational status, and how the content was used. Our findings reveal strong condemnation of AI-IBSA, yet respondents demonstrated low familiarity with the technology and their views varied depending on particular contexts. AI-IBSA targeting intimate partners was viewed as more unacceptable than targeting celebrities, and content created solely for personal use was seen as less unacceptable than content intended for distribution. The study highlights the need for approaches that go beyond technical fixes and punitive measures, advocating for a multifaceted response that integrates ethical data governance, digital sexual literacy, and restorative justice approaches.
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