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 11125 publications
ARM MTE Performance in Practice
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Taehyun Noh
Yingchen Wang
Tal Garfinkel
Mahesh Madhav
Mattan Erez
Shravan Narayan
Usenix Security (2026)
VISTA: Towards Test-Time Self-Improving Video Generation Agent
Hootan Nakhost
Xuan Long Do
The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (to appear) (2026)
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Despite rapid advances in text-to-video (T2V) synthesis, generated video quality remains critically dependent on precise user prompts. Existing test-time optimization methods, successful in other domains, struggle with the multi-faceted nature of video. To address this, we introduce VISTA, a novel multi-agent system that autonomously refines prompts to improve video generation. VISTA operates in an iterative loop, first decomposing a user's idea into a structured temporal plan. After generation, the best video is identified through a robust pairwise tournament. This winning video is then critiqued by a trio of specialized agents focusing on visual, audio, and contextual fidelity. Finally, a reasoning agent synthesizes this feedback to introspectively rewrite and enhance the prompt for the next generation cycle. To rigorously evaluate our proposed approach, we introduce MovieGen-Bench, a new benchmark of diverse single- and multi-scene video generation tasks. Experiments show that while prior methods yield inconsistent gains, VISTA consistently improves video quality, achieving up to 60% pairwise win rate against state-of-the-art baselines. Human evaluators concur, preferring VISTA's outputs in 68% of comparisons.
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`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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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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In today's AI landscape, success depends not just on prompting large language models but on orchestrating them into intelligent systems that are scalable, compliant, and cost-effective. GenAI on Google Cloud is your hands-on guide to bridging that gap. Whether you're an ML engineer or an enterprise leader, this book offers a practical game plan for taking agentic systems from prototype to production.
Written by practitioners with deep experience in AgentOps, data engineering, and GenAI infrastructure, this guide takes you through real-world workflows from data prep and deployment to orchestration and integration. With concrete examples, field-tested frameworks, and honest insights, you'll learn how to build agentic systems that deliver measurable business value.
> Bridge the production gap that stalls 90% of vertical AI initiatives using systematic deployment frameworks
> Navigate AgentOps complexities through practical guidance on orchestration, evaluation, and responsible AI practices
> Build robust multimodal systems for text, images, and video using proven agent architectures
> Optimize for scale with strategies for cost management, performance tuning, and production monitoring
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Phoenix: Rowhammer Attacks on DDR5 with Self-Correcting Synchronization
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Michele Marazzi
Kaveh Razavi
Salman Qazi
Diego Meyer
Patrick Jattke
IEEE Security & Privacy (S&P) (2026)
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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Audio Description ( AD) provides essential access to visual media for blind and low vision ( BLV) audiences. Yet current AD production tools remain largely inaccessible to BLV video creators, who possess valuable expertise but face barriers due to visually- driven interfaces. We present ADCanvas, a multimodal authoring system that supports non- visual control
over audio description ( AD) creation. ADCanvas combines conversational interaction with keyboard- based playback control and a plain- text, screen reader–
accessible editor to support end- to- end AD authoring and visual question answering ( VQA). Combining screen- reader- friendly controls with a multimodal
LLM agent, ADCanvas supports live VQA, script generation, and AD modification. Through a user study with 12 BLV video creators, we find that users adopt
the conversational agent as an informational aide and drafting assistant, while maintaining agency through verification and editing. For example, participants
saw themselves as curators who received information from the model and filtered it down for their audience. Our findings offer design implications for
accessible media tools, including precise editing controls, accessibility support for creative ideation, and configurable rules for human- AI collaboration.
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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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Generative AI is reshaping software development, yet its psychological impact remains under-researched. During May and August 2025 we conducted reflexive thematic analysis of interviews with 12 senior engineers (≥5 years experience) recruited from Western technology hubs to explore shifts in professional identity. We identify a central transition from "coder to conductor," where AI acts as a cognitive partner. Key findings include: (1) a re-architecting of focus from implementation to strategy; (2) a shift in productivity metrics from output to impact; and (3) a dual-impact on agency, where AI empowers autonomy but threatens competence through de-skilling anxieties. These findings suggest that as implementation becomes commoditised, organisational training and career progression must prioritise architectural mastery and metacognitive oversight to ensure sustained developer motivation and system integrity.
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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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ConvApparel: A Benchmark Dataset and Validation Framework for User Simulators in Conversational Recommenders
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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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
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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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The Ontic-Epistemic Distinction: Implications for Robust Machine Intelligence
Shreya Ishita
Master's Thesis (2026) (to appear)
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The current pursuit of robust Machine Intelligence is largely predicated on a substrate independent, functionalist view of cognition, where sufficiently large syntactic processing is expected to eventually yield semantic understanding. This paper explores the ontological distinctions between these computational frameworks and biological cognition, specifically regarding the emergence of robustness. By analyzing phenomena such as the "reversal curse" and performance on novel reasoning benchmarks (e.g., ARC-AGI), I examine whether current limitations are transient artifacts of scale or indicative of a distinct architectural category.
Synthesizing Stevan Harnad’s "Symbol Grounding Problem" with Evan Thompson’s framework of Intrinsic Normativity in autopoietic systems, I argue that true generality requires "Sense-Making", a process distinct from "Information Processing", whereby an agent’s internal states are causally coupled with its environment via survival or system wide stakes. Without this intrinsic normativity, machines may remain epistemic instruments rather than ontic agents. By defining this "Ontic Gap," this paper offers a theoretical lens for evaluating AI safety and governance, moving beyond behavioral simulation to address the structural conditions of understanding.
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