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 10270 publications
Preview abstract
https://www.overleaf.com/project/65ba7d45dae2bce751dba252
Hashing is a fundamental operation in various computer sci-
ence applications. Despite the prevalence of specific key
formats like social security numbers, MAC addresses, plate
numbers, and URLs, hashing libraries typically treat them as
general byte sequences. This paper introduces a technique
for synthesizing specialized hash functions tailored to par-
ticular byte formats. The proposed code generation method
leverages three prevalent patterns: (i) fixed-length keys, (ii)
keys with common subsequences, and (iii) keys ranging on
predetermined sequences of bytes. The code generation pro-
cess involves two algorithms: one identifies relevant regular
expressions within key examples, and the other generates
specialized hash functions based on these expressions. This
approach, straightforward to implement, showcases improve-
ments over highly optimized hash function implementations.
Comparative analysis demonstrates that our synthetic func-
tions outperform counterparts in the C++ Standard Template
Library and the Google Abseil Library, achieving speedups
ranging from 2% to 11%, depending on the key format.
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SMaCk: Efficient Instruction Cache Attacks via Self-Modifying Code Conflicts
Seonghun Son
Berk Gulmezoglu
ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) (2025) (to appear)
Preview abstract
Self-modifying code (SMC) allows programs to alter their own instructions, optimizing performance and functionality on x86 processors. Despite its benefits, SMC introduces unique microarchitectural behaviors that can be exploited for malicious purposes. In this paper, we explore the security implications of SMC by examining how specific x86 instructions affecting instruction cache lines lead to measurable timing discrepancies between cache hits and misses. These discrepancies facilitate refined cache attacks, making them less noisy and more effective. We introduce novel attack techniques that leverage these timing variations to enhance existing methods such as Prime+Probe and Flush+Reload. Our advanced techniques allow adversaries to more precisely attack cryptographic keys and create covert channels akin
to Spectre across various x86 platforms. Finally, we propose a dynamic detection methodology utilizing hardware performance counters to mitigate these enhanced threats.
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Triaging mammography with artificial intelligence: an implementation study
Samantha Winter
Atilla Kiraly
Scott Mayer McKinney
Jie Yang
Krish Eswaran
Shravya Shetty
Timo Kohlberger
Stacey Caron
Fereshteh Mahvar
David Melnick
Sonya Bhole
Arnav Agharwal
David V. Schacht
Dipti Gupta
Basil Mustafa
Alejandra Maciel
Martha Sevenich
Sarah M. Friedewald
Mozziyar Etemadi
Sunny Jansen
Shiro Kadowaki
Gavin Duggan
Rubin Zhang
Luca Speroni
Breast Cancer Research and Treatment (2025)
Preview abstract
Purpose
Many breast centers are unable to provide immediate results at the time of screening mammography which results in delayed patient care. Implementing artificial intelligence (AI) could identify patients who may have breast cancer and accelerate the time to diagnostic imaging and biopsy diagnosis.
Methods
In this prospective randomized, unblinded, controlled implementation study we enrolled 1000 screening participants between March 2021 and May 2022. The experimental group used an AI system to prioritize a subset of cases for same-visit radiologist evaluation, and same-visit diagnostic workup if necessary. The control group followed the standard of care. The primary operational endpoints were time to additional imaging (TA) and time to biopsy diagnosis (TB).
Results
The final cohort included 463 experimental and 392 control participants. The one-sided Mann-Whitney U test was employed for analysis of TA and TB. In the control group, the TA was 25.6 days [95% CI 22.0–29.9] and TB was 55.9 days [95% CI 45.5–69.6]. In comparison, the experimental group's mean TA was reduced by 25% (6.4 fewer days [one-sided 95% CI > 0.3], p<0.001) and mean TB was reduced by 30% (16.8 fewer days; 95% CI > 5.1], p=0.003). The time reduction was more pronounced for AI-prioritized participants in the experimental group. All participants eventually diagnosed with breast cancer were prioritized by the AI.
Conclusions
Implementing AI prioritization can accelerate care timelines for patients requiring additional workup, while maintaining the efficiency of delayed interpretation for most participants. Reducing diagnostic delays could contribute to improved patient adherence, decreased anxiety and addressing disparities in access to timely care.
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Context is Key for Agent Security
Eugene Bagdasaryan
Lillian Tsai
arXiv (2025)
Preview abstract
Judging the safety of an action, whether taken by a human or a system, must take into account the context in which the action takes place. For example, deleting an email from a user's mailbox may or may not be appropriate depending on the email's content, the user's goals, or even available space. Systems today that make these judgements---providing security against harmful or inappropriate actions---rely on manually-crafted policies or user confirmation for each relevant context. With the upcoming deployment of systems like generalist agents, we argue that we must rethink security designs to adapt to the scale of contexts and capabilities of these systems. As a first step, this paper explores contextual security in the domain of agents and proposes contextual security for agents (Conseca), a framework to generate just-in-time, contextual, and human-verifiable security policies.
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TOKENFORMER: Rethinking Transformers Scaling with Tokenized Model Parameters
Jan Eric Lenssen
Haiyang Wang
Liwei Wang
Fan Yue
Bernt Schiele
2025
Preview abstract
Transformers have become the predominant architecture in foundation models due to their excellent performance across various domains. However, the substantial cost of scaling these models remains a significant concern. This problem arises primarily from their dependence on fixed parameters within linear projections, especially when architectural modifications (e.g., channel dimensions) are introduced. Each scaling iteration typically requires retraining the entire model from the beginning, leading to suboptimal utilization of computational resources. To overcome this limitation, we introduce TokenFormer, a naturally scalable architecture that leverages the attention mechanism exclusively for computations among input tokens and interactions between input tokens and model parameters, thereby enhancing architectural flexibility. By treating model parameters as tokens, we replace all the linear projections in Transformer with our token-parameter attention layer, where input tokens act as queries and model parameters as keys and values. This innovative approach allows for progressive and efficient scaling without necessitating retraining from scratch. Our model scales from 124 million to 1.4 billion parameters by incrementally adding new key-value parameters, achieving performance comparable to models trained from scratch while greatly reducing training costs. Code and models will be publicly available.
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Preview abstract
We consider the Coalition Structure Learning (CSL) problem in multi-agent systems, motivated by the existence of coalitions in many real-world systems, e.g., trading platforms and auction systems. In this problem, there is a hidden coalition structure within a set of $n$ agents, which affects the behavior of the agents in games. Our goal is to actively design a sequence of games
for the agents to play, such that observations in these games can be used to learn the hidden coalition structure. In particular, we consider the setting where in each round, we design and present a game together with a strategy profile to the agents, and receive a multiple-bit observation -- for each agent, we observe whether or not they would like to deviate from the specified strategy in this given game. Our contributions are three-fold: First, we show that we can learn the coalition structure in $O(\log n)$ rounds if we are allowed to choose any normal-form game in each round, matching the information-theoretical lower bound, and the result can be extended to congestion games. Second, in a more restricted setting where we can only choose a graphical game with degree limit $d$, we develop an algorithm to learn the coalition structure in $O(n/d+\log d)$ rounds. Third, when we can only learn the coalition structure through running second-price auctions with personalized reserve prices, we show that the coalition structure can be learned in $O(c\log n)$ rounds, where $c$ is the size of the largest coalition.
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Scaling Laws for Downstream Task Performance in Machine Translation
Hussein Hazimeh
Natalia Ponomareva
Sanmi Koyejo
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) (2025) (to appear)
Preview abstract
Scaling laws provide important insights that can guide the design of large language models (LLMs). Existing work has primarily focused on studying scaling laws for pretraining (upstream) loss. However, in transfer learning settings, in which LLMs are pretrained on an unsupervised dataset and then finetuned on a downstream task, we often also care about the downstream performance. In this work, we study the scaling behavior in a transfer learning setting, where LLMs are finetuned for machine translation tasks. Specifically, we investigate how the choice of the \emph{pretraining} data and its size affect downstream performance (translation quality) as judged by: downstream cross-entropy and translation quality metrics such as BLEU and COMET scores. Our experiments indicate that the size of the finetuning dataset and the distribution alignment between the pretraining and downstream data significantly influence the scaling behavior. With sufficient alignment, both downstream cross-entropy and translation quality scores improve monotonically with more pretraining data. In such cases, we show that it is possible to predict the downstream translation quality metrics with good accuracy using a log-law. However, there are cases where moderate misalignment causes the downstream translation scores to fluctuate or get worse with more pretraining, whereas downstream cross-entropy monotonically improves. By analyzing these, we provide new practical insights for choosing appropriate pretraining data.
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Preview abstract
Mainstream artificial neural network models, such as Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are computation-heavy and energy-hungry. Weightless Neural Networks (WNNs) are natively built with RAM-based neurons and represent an entirely distinct type of neural network computing compared to DNNs. WNNs are extremely low-latency, low-energy, and suitable for efficient, accurate, edge inference. The WNN approach derives an implicit inspiration from the decoding process observed in the dendritic trees of biological neurons, making neurons based on Random Access Memories (RAMs) and/or Lookup Tables (LUTs) ready-to-deploy neuromorphic digital circuits. Since FPGAs are abundant in LUTs, LUT based WNNs are a natural fit for implementing edge inference in FPGAs.
WNNs has been demonstrated to be an energetically efficient AI model, both in software, as well as in hardware. For instance, the most recent DWN – Differential Weightless Neural Network – model demonstrates up to 135× reduction in energy costs in FPGA implementations compared to other multiplication-free approaches, such as binary neural networks (BNNs) and DiffLogicNet, up to 9% higher accuracy in deployments on constrained devices, and culminate in up to 42.8× reduction in circuit area for ultra-low-cost chip implementations. This tutorial will help participants understand how WNNs work, why WNNs were underdogs for such a long time, and be introduced to the most recent members of the WNN family, such as BTHOWeN , LogicWiSARD, COIN, ULEEN and DWN, and contrast to BNNs and LogicNets.
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Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Engineering: Data, AI, Automation, and the Future of Compliance to Audits
Eric Zhang
Ruchi Khurana
Vikram Khare
2025
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In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) leaders in large, complex organizations face unprecedented challenges. The cloud has revolutionized how businesses operate, offering unprecedented scalability, flexibility, cost-efficiency, additional security and resilience. However, this transformation also presents new challenges for GRC professionals. In a cloud-native world, where applications are built and deployed in dynamic, distributed environments, traditional GRC on-prem approaches, manual processes and spreadsheets struggle to keep pace. The key to success lies in embracing a data-driven GRC strategy that leverages the power of the cloud to enhance agility, visibility, and resilience.
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SSDTrain: Faster Large Language Model Training Using SSD-Based Activation Offloading
Mert Hidayetoğlu
Steven Lumetta
Kun Wu
Sitao Huang
Jeongmin Brian Park
Wen-mei Hwu
Vikram Sharma Mailthody
Design Automation Conference (DAC) (2025)
Preview abstract
The scaling up of Large Language Models (LLMs) demands more memory than current GPUs can provide, hindering the training process. To address this challenge, we propose SSDTrain to efficiently offload activations, the intermediate tensors produced during LLM training, to SSDs. This approach reduces GPU memory usage without impacting performance by adaptively overlapping data transfers with computation. SSDTrain is compatible with popular deep learning frameworks like PyTorch, Megatron, and DeepSpeed, and it employs techniques such as tensor deduplication, forwarding, and adaptive offloading to further enhance efficiency. We conduct extensive experiments on Llama, BERT, and T5. Results demonstrate that SSDTrain effectively reduces 45% of the activation peak memory usage. It can perfectly overlap the IO with the computation without introducing performance penalty. SSDTrain can achieve a performance boost of up to 31% compared to the conventional training strategy using the same GPU systems.
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Online Bidding under RoS Constraints without Knowing the Value
Sushant Vijayan
Swati Padmanabhan
The Web Conference (2025)
Preview abstract
We consider the problem of auto-bidding in online advertising from the perspective of a single advertiser. The goal of the advertiser is to maximize their value under the Return-on-Spend (RoS) constraint, with performance measured in terms of \emph{regret} against the optimal offline solution that knows all queries a priori. Importantly, the value of the item is \textit{unknown} to the bidder ahead of time. The goal of the bidder is to quickly identify the optimal bid, while simultaneously satisfying budget and RoS constraints. Using a simple UCB-style algorithm, we provide the first result which achieves optimal regret and constraint violation for this problem.
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From Few to Many: Self-Improving Many-Shot Reasoners Through Iterative Optimization and Generation
Ke Jiang
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) (2025) (to appear)
Preview abstract
Recent advances in long-context large language models (LLMs) have led to the emerging paradigm of many-shot in-context learning (ICL), where it is observed that scaling many more demonstrating examples beyond the conventional few-shot setup in the context can lead to performance benefits. However, despite its promise, it is unclear what aspects dominate the benefits and whether simply scaling to more examples is the most effective way of improving many-shot ICL. In this work, we first provide an analysis of the factors driving many-shot ICL, and we find that 1) many-shot performance can still be attributed to often a few disproportionately influential examples and 2) identifying such influential examples ("optimize") and using them as demonstrations to regenerate new examples ("generate") can lead to further improvements. Inspired by the findings, we propose BRIDGE, an algorithm that alternates between the optimize step with Bayesian optimization to discover the influential sets of examples and the generate step to reuse this set to expand the reasoning paths of the examples back to the many-shot regime automatically. On Gemini, Claude, and Mistral LLMs of different sizes, we show that BRIDGE to significant improvements across a diverse set of tasks, including symbolic reasoning, numerical reasoning, and code generation.
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H2E: Hand, Head, Eye: A Multimodal Cascade of Natural Inputs
Ken Pfeuffer
Hans Gellersen
Khushman Patel
IEEE VR (2025)
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Eye-based interaction techniques for extended reality, such as gaze and pinch, are simple to use however suffer from input precision issues. We present H2E, a fine and coarse-grained pointing technique that cascades Hand, Head, and Eye inputs. As users initiate a pinch gesture, a cursor appears at the gaze point that can be dragged by head pointing before pinch confirmation. This has the potential advantage that it can add a precision component without changing the semantics of the technique. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of the technique. Furthermore, we present an evaluation of our method in a Fitts-based user study, exploring the speed-accuracy trade-offs against a gaze and pinch interaction baseline.
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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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