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 10456 publications
Wave: Offloading Resource Management to SmartNIC Cores
Jack Humphries
Neel Natu
Kostis Kaffes
Hank Levy
Christos Kozyrakis
2025
Preview abstract
SmartNICs are increasingly deployed in datacenters to offload tasks from server CPUs, improving the efficiency and flexibility of datacenter security, networking and storage. Optimizing cloud server efficiency in this way is critically important to ensure that virtually all server resources are available to paying customers. Userspace system software, specifically, decision-making tasks performed by various operating system subsystems, is particularly well suited for execution on mid-tier SmartNIC ARM cores. To this end, we introduce Wave, a framework for offloading userspace system software to processes/agents running on the SmartNIC. Wave uses Linux userspace systems to better align system functionality with SmartNIC capabilities. It also introduces a new host-SmartNIC communication API that enables offloading of even μs-scale system software. To evaluate Wave, we offloaded preexisting userspace system software including kernel thread scheduling, memory management, and an RPC stack to SmartNIC ARM cores, which showed a performance degradation of 1.1%-7.4% in an apples-to-apples comparison with on-host implementations. Wave recovered host resources consumed by on-host system software for memory management (saving 16 host cores), RPCs (saving 8 host cores), and virtual machines (an 11.2% performance improvement). Wave highlights the potential for rethinking system software placement in modern datacenters, unlocking new opportunities for efficiency and scalability.
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The global adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) in healthcare shows promise for enhancing clinical workflows and improving patient outcomes. However, Automatic Speech
Recognition (ASR) errors in critical medical entities remain a significant challenge. These
errors can lead to severe consequences if undetected. This study investigates the prevalence and impact of ASR errors in medical transcription across Africa, Europe, and North America. By examining variations in accented English across three continents, we analyze the impact of regional speech patterns on ASR performance. Our research quantifies both the potential and limitations of LLMs in mitigating ASR inaccuracies within various medical settings, with particular attention to performance variations across regional accents and medical terminology. Our findings highlight significant disparities in ASR accuracy across regions and identify specific conditions under which LLM corrections prove most effective.
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Julia's strength in mathematical computation and high performance makes it a popular choice across scientific fields, mostly due to its focus on mathematics in a broad sense and execution performance. It is a language of choice to implement new numerical algorithms, but it really shines in modelling for optimisation thanks to JuMP.jl and MathOptInterface.jl.
These libraries are, first and foremost, made for mathematical optimisation (linear, mixed-integer, conic, etc.), yet they are now generic enough to support more paradigms, such as constraint programming. This talk will introduce the basic principles behind the current implementation of JuMP.jl and explain why and how they are very good matches for modelling using constraint programming… and solving using any kind of mixed-integer-programming solver.
Constraint-programming solvers can also be implemented using linear programming, in a great collaboration between discrete and continuous optimisation. This talk will briefly explain the connection and its implementation in Google’s CP-SAT, a leading, award-winning constraint solver that uses linear programs in its solving process — a solver that will soon be available in Julia too.
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Many AI applications of interest require specialized multi-modal models. Yet, relevant data for training these models is inherently scarce. Human annotation is prohibitively expensive, error-prone, and time-consuming. Meanwhile, existing synthetic data generation methods often rely on manual prompts, evolutionary algorithms, or extensive seed data from the target distribution - limiting scalability and control. In this paper, we introduce Simula, a novel, seedless framework that balances global and local reasoning to generate synthetic datasets. We utilize taxonomies to capture a global coverage space and use a series of agentic refinements to promote local diversity and complexity. Our approach allows users to define desired dataset characteristics through an explainable and controllable process, without relying on seed data. This unlocks new opportunities for developing and deploying AI in domains where data scarcity or privacy concerns are paramount.
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Mufu: Multilingual Fused Learning for Low- Resource Translation with LLM
Zheng Lim
Honglin Yu
Trevor Cohn
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025
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Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are great translators, but this is largely limited to high-resource languages. For many LLMs, translating in and out of low-resource languages remains a challenging task. To maximize data efficiency in this low-resource setting, we introduce Mufu, which includes a selection of automatically generated multilingual candidates and an instruction to correct inaccurate translations in the prompt. Mufu prompts turn a translation task into a postediting one, and seek to harness the LLM's reasoning capability with auxiliary translation candidates, from which the model is required to assess the input quality, align the semantics cross-lingually, copy from relevant inputs and override instances that are incorrect. Our experiments on En-XX translations over the Flores-200 dataset show LLMs finetuned against Mufu-style prompts are robust to poor quality auxiliary translation candidates, achieving performance superior to NLLB 1.3B distilled model in 64% of low- and very-low-resource language pairs. We then distill these models to reduce inference cost, while maintaining on average 3.1 chrF improvement over finetune-only baseline in low-resource translations.
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Matryoshka Model Learning for Improved Elastic Student Models
Chetan Verma
Aditya Srinivas Timmaraju
Cho-Jui Hsieh
Ngot Bui
Yang Zhang
Wen Chen
Xin Liu
Inderjit Dhillon
2025
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Industry-grade ML models are carefully designed to meet rapidly evolving serving constraints, which requires significant resources for model development. In this paper, we propose MatTA, a framework for training multiple accurate Student models using a novel Teacher-TA-Student recipe. TA models are larger versions of the Student models with higher capacity, and thus allow Student models to better relate to the Teacher model and also bring in more domain-specific expertise. Furthermore, multiple accurate Student models can be extracted from the TA model. Therefore, despite only one training run, our methodology provides multiple servable options to trade off accuracy for lower serving cost. We demonstrate the proposed method, MatTA, on proprietary datasets and models. Its practical efficacy is underscored by live A/B tests within a production ML system, demonstrating 20% improvement on a key metric. We also demonstrate our method on GPT-2 Medium, a public model, and achieve relative improvements of over 24% on SAT Math and over 10% on the LAMBADA benchmark.
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Adversarial Attacks in Multimodal Systems: A Practitioner's Survey
Shashank Kapoor
Aman Raj
IEEE Compsac 2025 (2025)
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Multimodal models represent a significant advancement in Artificial Intelligence. A single model is trained to understand unstructured modalities: text, image, video, and audio. Open-source variants of multimodal models have made these breakthroughs further accessible. ML practitioners adopt, finetune, and deploy open-source models in real-world applications. However, considering the vast landscape of adversarial attacks across these modalities, these models also inherit vulnerabilities of all the modalities, and eventually, the adversarial threat amplifies. While broad research is available on possible attacks within or across these modalities, a practitioner-focused view of outlining attack types remains absent in the multimodal world. This paper addresses the gap by surveying adversarial attacks targeting all four modalities: text, image, video, and audio. This survey provides a view of the adversarial attack landscape and presents how multimodal adversarial threats have evolved. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the first comprehensive summarization of the threat landscape in the multimodal world.
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Linear Elastic Caching via Ski Rental
Todd Lipcon
The biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (2025)
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In this work we study the Linear Elastic Caching problem, where the goal is to minimize the total cost of a cache inclusive of not just its misses, but also its memory footprint integrated over time. We demonstrate a theoretical connection to the classic ski rental problem and propose a practical algorithm that combines online caching algorithms with ski rental policies. We also introduce a lightweight machine learning-based algorithm for ski rental that is optimized for production workloads and is easy to integrate within existing database systems. Evaluations on both production workloads in Google Spanner and publicly available traces show that the proposed elastic caching approach can significantly reduce the total cache cost compared to traditional fixed-size cache policies.
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Generative AI for medical education: Insights from a case study with medical students and an AI tutor for clinical reasoning
Amy Wang
Roma Ruparel
Paul Jhun
Julie Anne Seguin
Patricia Strachan
Renee Wong
2025
Preview abstract
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), have demonstrated significant potential in clinical reasoning skills such as history-taking and differential diagnosis generation—critical aspects of medical education. This work explores how LLMs can augment medical curricula through interactive learning. We conducted a participatory design process with medical students, residents and medical education experts to co-create an AI-powered tutor prototype for clinical reasoning. As part of the co-design process, we conducted a qualitative user study, investigating learning needs and practices via interviews, and conducting concept evaluations through interactions with the prototype. Findings highlight the challenges learners face in transitioning from theoretical knowledge to practical application, and how an AI tutor can provide personalized practice and feedback. We conclude with design considerations, emphasizing the importance of context-specific knowledge and emulating positive preceptor traits, to guide the development of AI tools for medical education.
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Optimizing LLMs for Resource-Constrained Environments: A Survey of Model Compression Techniques
Shashank Kapoor
Aman Raj
IEEE Compsac 2025 (2025)
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Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing many areas of AI, but their substantial resource requirements limit their deployment on mobile and edge devices. This survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of techniques for compressing LLMs to enable efficient inference in resource-constrained environments. We examine three primary approaches: knowledge distillation, model quantization and model pruning. For each technique, we discuss the underlying principles, present different forms, and provide examples of successful applications. We also briefly discuss complementary techniques like mixture-of-experts and early exit strategies and highlight the promising future directions. We aim to provide a valuable resource for both researchers and practitioners seeking to optimize LLMs for edge deployment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that provides a focused survey of LLM compression techniques from the lens of resource-constrained environments.
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ESAM++: Efficient Online 3D Perception on the Edge
Qin Liu
Lavisha Aggarwal
Vikas Bahirwani
Lin Li
Aleksander Holynski
Saptarashmi Bandyopadhyay
Zhengyang Shen
Marc Niethammer
Ehsan Adeli
Andrea Colaco
2025
Preview abstract
Online 3D scene perception in real time is critical for robotics, AR/VR, and autonomous systems, particularly in edge computing scenarios where computational resources are limited. Recent state-of-the-art methods like EmbodiedSAM (ESAM) demonstrate the promise of online 3D perception by leveraging the 2D visual foundation model (VFM) with efficient 3D query lifting and merging. However, ESAM depends on a computationally expensive sparse 3D U-Net for point cloud feature extraction, which we identify as the primary efficiency bottleneck. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and scalable alternative for online 3D scene perception tailored to edge devices. Our method introduces a 3D Sparse FeaturePyramid Network (SFPN) that efficiently captures multi-scale geometric features from streaming 3D point clouds while significantly reducing computational over-head and model size. We evaluate our approach on four challenging segmentation benchmarks—ScanNet, ScanNet200, SceneNN, and 3RScan—demonstrating that our model achieves competitive accuracy with up to 3×faster inference and 3×small model size compared to ESAM, enabling practical deployment in real-world edge scenarios. Code and models will be released.
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DORA Impact of Generative AI in Software Development
Derek DeBellis
Daniella Villalba
Nathen Harvey
DORA, Google (2025)
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Generative AI is transforming how software is built, offering unprecedented opportunities and raising new challenges. Based on extensive research and developer interviews, this DORA report provides a nuanced understanding of AI's impact on individuals, teams, and organizations.
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Supporting the Digital Safety of At-Risk Users: Lessons Learned from 9+ Years of Research and Training
Tara Matthews
Patrick Gage Kelley
Lea Kissner
Andreas Kramm
Andrew Oplinger
Andy Schou
Stephan Somogyi
Dalila Szostak
Jill Woelfer
Lawrence You
Izzie Zahorian
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 32(3) (2025), pp. 1-39
Preview abstract
Creating information technologies intended for broad use that allow everyone to participate safely online—which we refer to as inclusive digital safety—requires understanding and addressing the digital-safety needs of a diverse range of users who face elevated risk of technology-facilitated attacks or disproportionate harm from such attacks—i.e., at-risk users. This article draws from more than 9 years of our work at Google to understand and support the digital safety of at-risk users—including survivors of intimate partner abuse, people involved with political campaigns, content creators, youth, and more—in technology intended for broad use. Among our learnings is that designing for inclusive digital safety across widely varied user needs and dynamic contexts is a wicked problem with no “correct” solution. Given this, we describe frameworks and design principles we have developed to help make at-risk research findings practically applicable to technologies intended for broad use and lessons we have learned about communicating them to practitioners.
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PAIGE: Examining Student Learning Outcomes and Experiences with Personalized AI-Generated Podcasts
Tiffany Do
Usama Bin Shafqat
Elsie Ling
Νikhil Sarda
2025
Preview abstract
Generative AI is revolutionizing content creation and holds promise for real-time, personalized educational experiences. We investigated the effectiveness of converting textbook chapters into AI-generated podcasts and explored the impact of personalizing these podcasts
for individual learner profiles. We conducted a 3x3 user study with 180 college students in the United States, comparing traditional textbook reading with both generalized and personalized AI-generated podcasts across three textbook subjects. The personalized podcasts were tailored to students’ majors, interests, and learning styles. Our findings show that students found the AI-generated podcast format to be more enjoyable than textbooks and that personalized podcasts led to significantly improved learning outcomes, although this was subject-specific. These results highlight that AI-generated podcasts can offer an engaging and effective modality
transformation of textbook material, with personalization enhancing content relevance. We conclude with design recommendations for leveraging AI in education, informed by student feedback.
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In this article, we describe our human-centered research focused on understanding the role of collaboration and teamwork in productive software development. We describe creation of a logs-based metric to identify collaboration through observable events and a survey-based multi-item scale to assess team functioning.
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