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 11082 publications
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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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AI coding assistants are rapidly becoming integral to modern software development. A key challenge in this space is the continual need to migrate and modernize codebases in response to evolving software ecosystems. Traditionally, such migrations have relied on rule-based systems and human intervention. With the advent of powerful large language models (LLMs), AI-driven agentic frameworks offer a promising alternative—but their effectiveness remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce FreshBrew, a novel benchmark for evaluating AI-based agentic frameworks on project-level Java migrations. We benchmark several such frameworks, powered by state-of-the-art LLMs, and compare their performance against established rule-based tools. Our evaluation of AI agents on this benchmark of 228 repositories shows that the top-performing model, Gemini 2.5 Flash, can successfully migrate 56.5% of projects to JDK 17. Our empirical analysis reveals novel insights into the critical strengths and limitations of current agentic approaches, offering actionable insights into their real-world applicability. By releasing FreshBrew publicly upon acceptance, we aim to facilitate rigorous, reproducible evaluation and catalyze progress in AI-driven codebase modernization.
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Who Controls the Curriculum for AI? The Limits of Participatory Design for Educational AI
Michael Madaio
Learning Under Algorithmic Conditions, University of Minnesota Press (2026)
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Participatory design is a long-standing effort to shift control over technology design from technologists to users and communities impacted by technologies. For educational AI, this means involving students, families, teachers, and other stakeholders in shaping the design of AI systems. While promising, in this article, I situate the recent calls for participatory design of educational AI systems within a different historical tradition—that of contests over local control of educational curricula. I argue that approaches that attempt to steer the design and development of educational AI through participatory methods may inadvertently reproduce the history of political contestation of educational curricula, in ways that may privilege the most powerful communities, rather than those inequitably impacted. What might it look like to treat participatory AI design as a site for political contestation? How might these approaches avoid reproducing the same majoritarian tendencies that led to educational inequities in the first place?
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For many practical applications of quantum computing, the slowest and most costly steps involve coherently accessing classical data. We help address this challenge by applying mass production techniques, which can sometimes allow us to perform operations many times in parallel for a cost that is comparable to a single execution[1-3]. We combine existing mass-production results with modern approaches for loading classical data using ``quantum read-only memory.'' We show that quantum mass production techniques offer no benefit when we consider a cost model that focuses purely on the number of non-Clifford gates. However, analyzing the constant factors in a more nuanced cost model, we find that it may be possible to obtain a reduction in cost of an order or magnitude or more for a variety reasonably-sized fault-tolerant quantum algorithms. We present several applications of quantum mass-production techniques beyond naive parallelization, including a strategy for reducing the cost of serial calls to the same data loading step.
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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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CrossCheck: Input Validation for WAN Control Systems
Rishabh Iyer
Isaac Keslassy
Sylvia Ratnasamy
Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) (2026) (to appear)
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We present CrossCheck, a system that validates inputs to the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) controller in a Wide Area Network (WAN). By detecting incorrect inputs—often stemming from bugs in the SDN control infrastructure—CrossCheck alerts operators before they trigger network outages.
Our analysis at a large-scale WAN operator identifies invalid inputs as a leading cause of major outages, and we show how CrossCheck would have prevented those incidents. We deployed CrossCheck as a shadow validation system for four weeks in a production WAN, during which it accurately detected the single incident of invalid inputs that occurred while sustaining a 0% false positive rate under normal operation, hence imposing little additional burden on operators. In addition, we show through simulation that CrossCheck reliably detects a wide range of invalid inputs (e.g., detecting demand perturbations as small as 5% with 100% accuracy) and maintains a near-zero false positive rate for realistic levels of noisy, missing, or buggy telemetry data (e.g., sustaining zero false positives with up to 30% of corrupted telemetry data).
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How many T gates are needed to approximate an arbitrary n-qubit quantum state to within
a given precision ϵ? Improving prior work of Low, Kliuchnikov and Schaeffer, we show that the
optimal asymptotic scaling is Θ(sqrt{2^n log(1/ε)} + log(1/ε)) if we allow an unlimited number of ancilla qubits. We also show that this is the optimal T-count for implementing an arbitrary
diagonal n-qubit unitary to within error ϵ. We describe an application to batched synthesis of
single-qubit unitaries: we can approximate a tensor product of m = O(log log(1/ϵ)) arbitrary
single-qubit unitaries to within error ϵ with the same asymptotic T-count as is required to
approximate just one single-qubit unitary.
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ALF: Advertiser Large Foundation Model for Multi-Modal Advertiser Understanding
Sunny Rajagopalan
Alireza Golestaneh
Shubhra Chandra
Min Zhou
Jonathan Vronsky
Songbai Yan
2026
Preview abstract
We present ALF (Advertiser Large Foundation model), a multi-modal transformer architecture for understanding advertiser behavior and intent across text, image, video and structured data modalities. Through contrastive learning and multi-task optimization, ALF creates unified advertiser representations that capture both content and behavioral patterns. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on critical tasks including fraud detection, policy violation identification, and advertiser similarity matching. In production deployment, ALF reduces false positives by 90\% while maintaining 99.8\% precision on abuse detection tasks. The architecture's effectiveness stems from its novel combination of multi-modal transformations, intersample attention mechanism, spectrally normalized projections, and calibrated probabilistic outputs.
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Verifiable Quantum Advantage via Optimized DQI Circuits
Dmitri Maslov
Stephen Jordan
arXiv:2510.10967 (2025)
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Decoded Quantum Interferometry (DQI) provides a framework for superpolynomial quantum speedups by reducing certain optimization problems to reversible decoding tasks. We apply DQI to the Optimal Polynomial Intersection (OPI) problem, whose dual code is Reed-Solomon (RS). We establish that DQI for OPI is the first known candidate for verifiable quantum advantage with optimal asymptotic speedup: solving instances with classical hardness $O(2^N)$ requires only $\widetilde{O}(N)$ quantum gates, matching the theoretical lower bound. Realizing this speedup requires highly efficient reversible RS decoders. We introduce novel quantum circuits for the Extended Euclidean Algorithm, the decoder's bottleneck. Our techniques, including a new representation for implicit Bézout coefficient access, and optimized in-place architectures, reduce the leading-order space complexity to the theoretical minimum of $2nb$ qubits while significantly lowering gate counts. These improvements are broadly applicable, including to Shor's algorithm for the discrete logarithm. We analyze OPI over binary extension fields $GF(2^b)$, assess hardness against new classical attacks, and identify resilient instances. Our resource estimates show that classically intractable OPI instances (requiring $>10^{23}$ classical trials) can be solved with approximately 5.72 million Toffoli gates. This is substantially less than the count required for breaking RSA-2048, positioning DQI as a compelling candidate for practical, verifiable quantum advantage.
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Correspondance: Wearing a Fur Coat in the Summertime: Should Digital Pathology Redefine Medical Imaging?
Kenneth Philbrick
Brian Napora
John Groth
Mustafa Yousuf
Journal of Pathology Informatics (2025)
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In response to recent critiques, members of DICOM Working Group 26 assert that DICOM is the robust and essential standard for digital pathology, actively facilitating interoperability and communication of medical images far beyond simple pixel data. They highlight successful global deployments and collaborations (like the recent Connectathon) demonstrating DICOM's proven ability to integrate WSI scanners, archives, viewers, and AI tools. Despite concerns, DICOM offers flexible metadata encoding, robust security features, and strong industry and regulatory support, making it indispensable for patient care. The authors advocate for continued investment in and adoption of DICOM to advance efficiency, accuracy, and patient safety in integrated healthcare systems.
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Due to the size and complexity of modern large language models (LLMs), it has proven challenging to uncover the underlying mechanisms that models use to solve reasoning problems. For instance, is their reasoning for a specific problem localized to certain parts of the network? Do they break down the reasoning problem into modular components that are then executed as sequential steps as we go deeper in the model? To better understand the reasoning capability of LLMs, we study a minimal propositional logic problem that requires combining multiple facts to arrive at a solution. By studying this problem on Mistral and Gemma models, up to 27B parameters, we illuminate the core components the models use to solve such logic problems. From a mechanistic interpretability point of view, we use causal mediation analysis to uncover the pathways and components of the LLMs' reasoning processes. Then, we offer fine-grained insights into the functions of attention heads in different layers. We not only find a sparse circuit that computes the answer, but we decompose it into sub-circuits that have four distinct and modular uses. Finally, we reveal that three distinct models -- Mistral-7B, Gemma-2-9B and Gemma-2-27B -- contain analogous but not identical mechanisms.
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Modern deep learning algorithms use variations of gradient descent as their main learning methods. Gradient descent can be understood as the simplest Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solver; namely, the Euler method applied to the gradient flow differential equation. Since Euler, many ODE solvers have been devised that follow the gradient flow equation more precisely and more stably. Runge-Kutta (RK) methods provide a family of very powerful explicit and implicit high-order ODE solvers. However, these higher-order solvers have not found wide application in deep learning so far. In this work, we evaluate the performance of higher-order RK solvers when applied in deep learning, study their limitations, and propose ways to overcome these drawbacks. In particular, we explore how to improve their performance by naturally incorporating key ingredients of modern neural network optimizers such as preconditioning, adaptive learning rates, and momentum.
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Score-based Causal Representation Learning: Linear and General Transformations
Burak Varici
Emre Acarturk
Abhishek Kumar
Ali Tajer
Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) 2025 (2025)
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This paper addresses intervention-based causal representation learning (CRL) under a
general nonparametric latent causal model and an unknown transformation that maps the
latent variables to the observed variables. Linear and general transformations are investigated. The paper addresses both the identifiability and achievability aspects. Identifiability
refers to determining algorithm-agnostic conditions that ensure the recovery of the true
latent causal variables and the underlying latent causal graph. Achievability refers to the algorithmic aspects and addresses designing algorithms that achieve identifiability guarantees.
By drawing novel connections between score functions (i.e., the gradients of the logarithm of
density functions) and CRL, this paper designs a score-based class of algorithms that ensures
both identifiability and achievability. First, the paper focuses on linear transformations and
shows that one stochastic hard intervention per node suffices to guarantee identifiability. It
also provides partial identifiability guarantees for soft interventions, including identifiability
up to mixing with parents for general causal models and perfect recovery of the latent graph
for sufficiently nonlinear causal models. Secondly, it focuses on general transformations
and demonstrates that two stochastic hard interventions per node are sufficient for identifiability. This is achieved by defining a differentiable loss function whose global optima
ensure identifiability for general CRL. Notably, one does not need to know which pair of
interventional environments has the same node intervened. Finally, the theoretical results
are empirically validated via experiments on structured synthetic data and image data.
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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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We document the work required to roll out Hardened Libc++ across Google, including collaboration with Apple on the implementation. We discuss the requirements for hardening, the benefits of rolling out to production instead of pre-production environments. Lastly, we discuss the bugs found, the performance work required to make such a change, and the lasting impact.
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