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 11612 publications
A 3D Scene Graphs Survey: Open Challenges and Future Directions
Dennis Rotondi
Francesco Argenziano
Sebastian Koch
Nathan Hughes
Martin Büchner
Johanna Wald
Lukas Schmid
Daniele Nardi
Abhinav Valada
Liam Paul
Luca Carlone
Kai Arras
Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems (ARCRAS), 10 (2027) (to appear)
Preview abstract
3D Scene Graphs (3DSGs) have emerged as a powerful representation for spatial AI by combining geometric grounding with semantic and relational abstractions of the environment. Their expressiveness has made them relevant to a broad range of problems in robotics and computer vision, including mapping, task and motion planning, scene understanding, and many others. However, the field remains fragmented: different communities adopt distinct formulations, construction pipelines, and evaluation protocols, making it difficult to compare methods, identify common assumptions, and assess remaining challenges for robust real- world deployment. This survey provides a unified and critical review of 3DSGs, with particular emphasis on open challenges and future directions. We first formalize 3DSGs under a common definition and analyze the principal modeling choices that characterize existing formulations, including node and edge attributes, hierarchical structure, dynamic scene representations, and affordance-aware extensions. We then review how 3DSGs are constructed from raw sensory observations, covering both learning-oriented and construction-oriented systems. Finally, we examine downstream applications and evaluation strategies, from intrinsic graph quality to task-level performance. To support the community, we also provide a dedicated website that organizes and extends the surveyed works.
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When Android Apps Request Location with a Reason: A Developer Study and User Behavior Experiment
May Smith
Aman Jain
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (2027)
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Recent reports have highlighted how mobile apps share user location data with third parties, risking user privacy and platform trust. Although location data is highly sensitive, when users grant apps location access, they may not know the full extent to which it is used. We study how requiring Android apps to show a reason for location access could impact developers, users, and the platform.
We surveyed 323 Android app developers and found most supported such a requirement. The majority said it would have a positive impact on user privacy, trust for apps, and trust for Android, where impact on user trust for Android correlated most strongly with support. Many developers also said the intervention would increase the number of users granting location access. Yet their open-ended comments also revealed consistent concerns, such as apps providing dishonest reasons and platform verification.
To study the impact on user behavior, we conducted a randomized controlled experiment with 2579 US Android users. We tested how users' decisions to grant location access were impacted by app type, whether reasons were included in the requests, and the content of the reasons, including monetization. We did not find the reasons impacted users' decisions; decisions were instead driven by app type and demographics. Yet we did find the reasons could have a positive impact on user perception for the platform when the reasons did not include using data for ads. Our findings provide insights into developers' willingness to implement privacy-enhancing changes, and expose limits to improving user privacy by simply adding information to user interfaces.
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We study a quantized prefix estimator for inner products that turns a randomly rotated TurboQuant-style representation into a cheap Johnson–Lindenstrauss-like search signal. The idea is simple: rotate the vectors once, keep only a short prefix of coordinates for fast scoring, and quantize the database-side prefix with an unbiased scalar quantizer. We prove that this estimator is unbiased and that its error separates cleanly into two interpretable sources: prefix truncation from using only r coordinates, and quantization error from using b bits per coordinate
This separation is useful in systems because the prefix can be exposed as a lightweight filter without building a separate projection index. In ParlayANN graph search, a 64-coordinate truncated view of existing TQ4 codes can replace a separately stored JL256 filter before full-precision reranking, adding only prefix-scale and query lookup-table bookkeeping. In k-means, the same estimator accelerates the dominant point–centroid assignment kernel while preserving exact centroid norms. Empirically, the truncated-TQ filter tracks the JL recall–throughput frontier across five graph-search datasets while reusing the quantized representation already present in the index.
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Semantic data models express high-level business concepts and metrics, capturing the business logic needed to query a database correctly. Most data modeling solutions are built as layers above SQL query engines, with bespoke query languages or APIs. The layered approach means that semantic models can’t be used directly in SQL queries. This paper focuses on an open problem in this space – can we define semantic models in SQL, and make them naturally queryable in SQL?
In parallel, graph query is becoming increasingly popular, including in SQL. SQL/PGQ extends SQL with an embedded subset of the GQL graph query language, adding property graph views and making graph traversal queries easy.
We explore a surprising connection: semantic data models are graphs, and defining graphs is a data modeling problem. In both domains, users start by defining a graph model, and need query language support to easily traverse edges in the graph, which means doing joins in the underlying data.
We propose some useful SQL extensions that make it easier to use higher-level data model abstractions in queries. Users can define a “semantic data graph” view of their data, encapsulating the complex business logic required to query the underlying tables correctly. Then they can query that semantic graph model easily with SQL.
Our SQL extensions are useful independently, simplifying many queries – particularly, queries with joins. We make declared foreign key relationships usable for joins at query time – a feature that seems obvious but is notably missing in standard SQL.
In combination, these extensions provide a practical approach to extend SQL incrementally, bringing semantic modeling and graph query together with the relational model and SQL.
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Config Driven User Interface (CDUI) frameworks, often referred to interchangeably as
Server Driven UI (SDUI) have fundamentally altered mobile and web application development. By shifting layout and orchestration logic from compiled client binaries to dynamic
server responses, organizations bypass slow app store review cycles and ensure cross-platform
consistency. Despite its widespread adoption by industry leaders, CDUI remains underexplored in formal software engineering literature. This paper investigates the evolution of
CDUI through a hybrid methodology, combining a Multivocal Literature Review (MLR) of
grey literature from organizations including Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Spotify, Faire, and Zalando,
with a structural artifact analysis of open-source production frameworks (Yandex DivKit,
Zup Beagle, and Spotify Hub). We introduce a taxonomy grounded in established foundational UI components and evaluate systems across three axes: Modularity, Centralization,
and Strictness. By tracing the architectural evolution from simple remote configurations to
strongly typed, Protobuf-driven contracts, our empirical artifact analysis (evaluating 570
schema commits across three repositories) demonstrates the critical magnitude of schema
governance and the complex challenge of managing “contract fragility.” We further analyze
cross-cutting concerns such as security sandboxing, “BFF Bloat,” and native accessibility
mapping, culminating in a future research agenda focused on the formal verification of UI
configurations.
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Verification-Driven Interface Convergence: Methodology for Validating Functional Interoperability And Accelerating Subsystem Design for Concurrently Developed Compute and Component IPs in Coherent Subsystem
Alisha Parvez
Preethi Ashok Kumar
Shreya Singh
Jyothi Kumari
Rohit Jindal
2026
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Modern compute subsystems have evolved into complex architectures where custom Compute-IPs interface directly or downstream with a mix of in-flight 1st-party IPs (1PIP), stable legacy components, and pre-verified 3rd-party IPs (3PIP). These connections—whether coherent, non-coherent / configuration, for custom use-cases utilizing in-house protocols, etc—often require concurrent development of both the compute tiles and their integration logic to meet aggressive time-to-market goals. However, this parallel approach introduces a critical bottleneck: the subsystem cannot be verified until both the Compute-IP and the 1PIPs reach maturity. Consequently, fundamental functional misalignments—such as protocol handshaking deadlocks, clock and reset sequencing issues, and architectural assumption mismatches—often remain hidden during IP development phases, resulting in a high-risk discovery tail where "integration-killer" bugs are uncovered only when RTL rework costs and schedule impacts are prohibitive. To break this deadlock, we present a verification-driven methodology that utilizes a silicon-proven Golden Proxy, Direct-Execution Traffic Profiles, and Programmable Sequencers to provide a functional proof of concept and pre-pull critical inter-IP interaction mismatch discoveries months prior to traditional integration milestones.
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Parametric Robustness Assessment of Ultra-Low Voltage Standard Cells via High-Sigma Verification (HSV)
Varshini Giri
Sravanth Mucharla
2026
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In modern digital System-on-Chip (SoC) designs, sequential standard cells—such as single-bit D-Flip-Flops (DFFs) and Multibit Flip-Flops (MBFFs)—serve as fundamental building blocks for memory arrays, registers, and pipelines. To meet ultra-low-power requirements in mobile, edge, and high-performance computing (HPC) applications, these circuits increasingly operate at near-threshold supply voltages (VDD0.45-0.50V). However, aggressive voltage scaling introduces critical failure mechanisms:
Write-Back Failures: At low supply voltages, transmission gate or pass-gate write paths fail to overpower cross-coupled feedback inverters, preventing state transitions and causing cells to retain stale values.
Hold-Time/Race Violations: Clock skew and fast transitions trigger internal races. When process variation weakens clock gating or feedback control, internal storage nodes degrade, leading to transient glitches, state corruption, or functional failure.
To verify standard cell reliability, brute-force Monte Carlo (MC) simulations are computationally prohibitive, requiring billions of SPICE iterations. This work outlines a High-Sigma Verification (HSV) methodology using advanced statistical sampling—such as Importance Sampling, Boundary Search, or machine-learning-driven MC—to evaluate rare, extreme variation tails with a fraction of the computational overhead.
By mapping the multidimensional local variation space, the framework calculates true statistical yield margins (the "sigma-metric") and identifies dominant transistor-level variation sources, including pull-up/pull-down network balance and pass-gate drive strength. Beyond single-point analyses, the workflow bridges layout-level parasitic extraction and silicon-level yield predictability by scaling high-sigma evaluation across comprehensive PVT corners and diverse input slew/output load profiles. This multi-corner, slew-aware verification captures tail-distribution failures and dynamic delay non-linearities under extreme operating conditions, delivering characterization-ready yield bounds for robust, near-threshold SoC sign-off.
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Can AI systems be aligned to human values? The popularization of large language models (LLMs) and multi-modal foundation models
has seen a commensurate rise in ways these models cause harm, spanning areas from toxic speech and hallucinations to AI agents
executing unauthorized actions. Given that these models are probabilistic and general-purpose by nature, it is impossible to enumerate
all possible uses and outputs of the model to reach a fully aligned end state. Within the field of AI safety, these harmful instances are
often framed as “the alignment problem,” of models being “misaligned” with human values. Researchers have responded by pursuing
applied and theoretical AI “value alignment” efforts, often without specifying what they mean by human values. How does the field of
AI value alignment conceive of human values? How are these conceptions of values technically operationalized and evaluated? What
does the emergent theory of value from this field signify for the future of AI?
The study of human values has long been part of many academic disciplines outside of computer science, yet these disciplines
are seldom consulted in AI alignment. Building on the theoretical insights of Zhi-Xuan’s (2024) "preferentist paradigm" critique, we
conduct a review of influential AI alignment literature. We also draw from conceptions of human values from philosophy, anthropology,
and sociology, to create an analytical schema. We annotated 94 AI value alignment research papers to discern their implicit theory of
values in AI. The majority do not define values, relying heavily on “preferences” as a stand-in that runs the risk of reducing complex,
culturally situated concepts down to binary choices. As researchers dispense with using human annotators for model training and
evaluation, turning instead to synthetic data and LLM-as-a-judge approaches to aligning and evaluating models, we identify the
potential to close off alternative methods for contesting and enacting values in foundation models. Overall, value alignment is often
reduced to an exercise in utility maximization, which we argue abstracts human values away from their lived context. In making AI
value alignment’s philosophical commitments explicit, we seek to bring greater specificity and under-explored perspectives into the
debate on whether and how AI can address human values
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Position: Explainability Research Must Prioritize Foundations over Ad-hoc Methods
Suraj Srinivas
Lesia Semenova
Nave Frost
Valentyn Boreiko
Shichang Zhang
Himabindu Lakkaraju
Cynthia Rudin
Jenn Wortman Vaughan
2026
Preview abstract
Despite the proliferation of Explainable AI (XAI) techniques—from feature attributions to sparse autoencoders—explanations rarely influence real-world workflows. In practice, they are often generated and discarded without guiding meaningful action. This gap reflects foundational shortcomings: research has not yet established methodologies for integrating explanations into end-to-end, human-in-the-loop systems. This position paper argues that the machine learning community must pivot from ad-hoc XAI methods toward addressing foundational & structural challenges, including unclear problem formulations, underspecified evaluation objectives, and the absence of pipelines for explanation-driven feedback. We support this claim through an analysis of recent ICML, NeurIPS, and ICLR papers and a survey of XAI practitioners, revealing recurring issues that limit cumulative progress. We conclude by outlining a practical checklist designed to shift XAI toward a more human-centered, action-oriented paradigm. By emphasizing foundational clarity over the development of ad-hoc methods, we hope to provide a roadmap for integrating explanations into actionable, feedback-driven AI systems.
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AI, Identity, and Ethical Governance: Building Trust in High-Stakes Systems
Ibrahim Waziri Jr.
Abhilasha Bhargav - Spantzel
RSAC (2026)
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As AI redefines identity verification in high stakes systems, it introduces novel risks like deepfake fraud and algorithmic bias, creating a critical trust deficit. This session will provide a practical framework for ethical governance, equipping leaders to build and manage secure, fair, and fundamentally trustworthy AI systems by design.
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We address the problem of training conversion prediction models in advertising domains under privacy constraints, where direct links between ad clicks and conversions are unavailable. Motivated by privacy-preserving browser APIs and the deprecation of third-party cookies, we study a setting where the learner observes a sequence of clicks and a sequence of conversions, but can only link a conversion to a set of candidate clicks (an attribution set) rather than a unique source. We formalize this as learning from attribution sets generated by an oblivious adversary equipped with a prior distribution over the candidates. Despite the lack of explicit labels, we construct an unbiased estimator of the population loss from these coarse signals via a novel approach. Leveraging this estimator, we show that Empirical Risk Minimization achieves generalization guarantees that scale with the informativeness of the prior and is also robust against estimation errors in the prior, despite complex dependencies among attribution sets.
Simple empirical evaluations on standard datasets suggest our unbiased approach significantly outperforms common industry heuristics, particularly in regimes where attribution sets are large or overlapping.
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Towards AI as a Collaborative Partner: A Taxonomy of AI Agent Behavior in Software Engineering
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on AI-Powered Software (AIware '26), ACM, Montreal, QC, Canada (2026) (to appear)
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The ongoing transition of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software engineering from one-shot code generators into agentic partners requires a shift in how we define and measure success. While models are becoming more capable, the industry lacks a clear understanding of the behavioral norms that make an interactive software engineering (SWE) agent effective in collaborative software development in the enterprise. This work addresses this gap by presenting a taxonomy of desirable SWE agent behaviors, synthesized from 91 sets of developer-defined rules for SWE agents and validated through interviewing 15 experienced professional developers. In this taxonomy, we identify four core expectations: Adhere to Standards and Processes, Ensure Code Quality and Reliability, Solve Problems Effectively, and Collaborate with the Developer. These findings offer a concrete vocabulary for aligning SWE agent behavior with developer preferences, enabling researchers and practitioners to move beyond correctness-only benchmarks and start designing evaluations that reflect the socio-technical nature of professional software development in enterprises.
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Looping, reusing a block of layers across depth, and depth growing, training shallow-to-deep models by duplicating middle layers, have both been linked to stronger reasoning, but their relationship remains unclear. We provide a mechanistic unification: looped and depth-grown models exhibit convergent depth-wise signatures, including increased reliance on late layers and recurring patterns aligned with the looped or grown block. These shared signatures support the view that their gains stem from a common form of iterative computation. In particular, applying inference-time looping to the middle blocks of a depth-grown model yields additional improvements in reasoning primitives accuracy, up to 2x, despite the model never being trained to loop. Building on this connection, we show that the two techniques are both adaptable and composable. Both approaches adapt better than the baseline when given more in-context examples or additional supervised fine-tuning data. Additionally, depth-grown models achieve the largest reasoning gains when using higher-quality, math-heavy cooldown mixtures, which can be further boosted by adapting a looped block in the middle of the network. Overall, our results position depth growth and looping as complementary, practical methods for inducing and scaling iterative computation to improve reasoning.
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While modern text-to-image (T2I) models excel at generating high-quality images, they are typically trained to optimize with respect to generalized, population-level preferences. This homogeneous approach ignores the diverse, individual tastes and aesthetic judgments of different users. In this work, we propose a novel framework that learns fine-grained user preferences without relying on computationally expensive visual language models (VLMs) or prompt-sensitive text profiles. Instead, we introduce a robust, continuous user representation that models a user’s reward function as a linear combination of K base user types. We learn user-specific weights $\lambda_u$ via logistic regression on pairwise preference data to construct a continuous user embedding. This embedding is integrated into the diffusion process via an IP-Adapter, and fine-tuned using Diffusion-DPO. Our approach consistently generates images aligned with individual reward functions, achieving a 66.2% win rate against a pre-trained SDXL baseline and a 63.2% win rate against the state-of-the-art PPD framework.
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We study the problem of allocating access point bandwidth to users of a wireless network in the presence of adversarial jamming. Specifically, we consider a setting in which the network designer acts first and allocates access point bandwidth to the users of the network, before an adversary applies a jamming strategy to reduce the bandwidth of a subset (or all) of the access points. We consider a strong adversary who has complete information and can optimize the jamming strategy, subject to power budget constraints. In turn, the network designer must allocate the resources in anticipation of the adversary's actions.
We explain that our model gives rise to a special network interdiction model, which differs from the standard setting in two ways: The first is that the interdictor is given the benefit of responding, rather than leading the game. The second is that the interdiction is fractional and performed at the node level of the network. The interdiction then propagates to all edges incident to the access point.
In terms of technical results, we provide an allocation algorithm that is based on linear programming duality and show that the algorithm can solve the problem optimally, assuming knowledge of the adversary's budget constraints. We conduct experiments on synthetic data to show the extent to which the algorithm improves the total utilized bandwidth over the algorithm that optimizes bandwidth allocation while being oblivious to the adversary's existence.
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