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.

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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 11422 publications
An Empirical Study of Tablet Ergonomics: The Interplay of Temperature, Orientation, and Use Behaviors
Carmen Van Ommen
Mikki Phan
Arun Raghupathy
Daniel Huynh
Barbara Chaparro
Ergonomics in Design: The Quarterly of Human Factors Applications Journal (2026)
Preview abstract To balance computational performance with thermal comfort, this study explores a consolidated hotspot architecture at the top center of a tablet. We tested hotspot (39°C, 43°C, 45°C, 47°C) and ambient temperatures (25°C, 35°C) with 60 participants, measuring perception, action likelihood, and expectation. The hotspot was observed away from high contact areas, with 43°C identified as the threshold for significant discomfort. Discomfort increased with portrait mode use and higher device and ambient temperatures, while active use duration influenced acceptability. The findings underscore the importance of thermal mapping and contextual sensing, with direct applications for software throttling thresholds of coated aluminum enclosures. View details
Leveraging LLMs to Understand Public Perception of Earthquake Early Warnings: A Case Study of the 2025 M6.2 Türkiye Earthquake
Hanjing Wang
Marc Stogaitis
Youngmin Cho
Richard Allen
Boone Spooner
Patrick Robertson
Greg Wimpey
Robert Bosch
Nivetha Thiruverahan
Steve Malkos
Alexei Barski
Tajinder Gadh
Scientific Reports, 16 (2026), pp. 22226
Preview abstract Android's Earthquake Alert (AEA) system provided life-saving early warnings to millions during the M6.2 Marmara Ereğlisi, Türkiye earthquake on April 23, 2025. This event, the largest in the region in 25 years, served as a critical real-world test for smartphone-based Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) systems. The AEA system successfully delivered alerts to users with high precision, offering over a minute of warning before the strongest shaking reached urban areas. This study leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze 560 public social media posts from the X platform, extracting 42 distinct attributes related to user experience and behavior. Statistical analyses revealed significant relationships, notably a strong correlation between user trust and alert timeliness. Key findings indicate that alerts received before shaking, clear information, and audible notifications significantly increased the likelihood of active protective responses and enhanced perceived usefulness and future trust in the system. Conversely, annoyance and perceived inaccuracy led to inaction and diminished trust. The study highlights the profound impact of smartphone-based EEW in mitigating seismic risk, providing actionable insights for optimizing alert design, public education campaigns, and future behavioral research to improve the effectiveness of such systems in seismically active regions. View details
What’s on My Network? Using Large Language Models to Identify Real-World IoT Devices at Scale
Rameen Mahmood
Danny Yuxing Huang
Proceedings of ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (CoNEXT), Association for Computing Machinery (2026)
Preview abstract The growth of IoT devices in shared environments has outpaced our ability to identify them, posing urgent risks to privacy, safety, and accountability. This challenge is especially pronounced in open‑world environments, where network traffic metadata is often sparse, noisy, or adversarial. To address this problem, we introduce a semantic inference pipeline that reframes device identification as a language modeling task over real‑world network metadata. As this approach depends on reliable supervision, we first construct high‑fidelity vendor labels for the IoT Inspector dataset—the largest real‑world corpus of its kind—using an ensemble of large language models guided by mutual‑information and entropy‑based stability scores. We then instruction-tune a quantized LLaMA 3.1 8B model on this dataset using curriculum learning to support generalization under sparsity and long-tail vendor distributions. Our model achieves 98.69% top-1 and 90.73% macro accuracy across 2,015 vendors, while remaining robust to missing fields, protocol drift, and adversarial manipulation. We also evaluate the model on an independent IoT testbed dataset, assess explanation quality, and conduct adversarial tests to probe robustness under spoofed and obfuscated input. These results position instruction-tuned LLMs as a scalable, interpretable foundation for trustworthy device identification at scale. View details
Optimized Deferral for Imbalanced Settings
Anqi Mao
Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026)
Preview abstract Learning algorithms can be significantly improved by routing complex or uncertain inputs to specialized experts, balancing accuracy with computational cost. This approach, known as learning to defer, is essential in domains like natural language generation, medical diagnosis, and computer vision, where an effective deferral can reduce errors at low extra resource consumption. However, the two-stage learning to defer setting, which leverages existing predictors such as a collection of LLMs or other classifiers, often faces challenges due to an expert imbalance problem. This imbalance can lead to suboptimal performance, with deferral algorithms favoring the majority expert. We present a comprehensive study of two-stage learning to defer in expert imbalance settings. We cast the deferral loss optimization as a novel cost-sensitive learning problem over the input-expert domain. We derive new margin-based loss functions and guarantees tailored to this setting, and develop novel algorithms for cost-sensitive learning. Leveraging these results, we design principled deferral algorithms, MILD (Margin-based Imbalanced Learning to Defer), specifically suited for expert imbalance settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing clear improvements over existing baselines on both image classification and real-world Large Language Model (LLM) routing tasks. View details
Preview abstract Object-Counting for remote-sensing (RS) imagery is raising increasing research interest due to its crucial role in a wide and diverse set of applications. While several promising methods for RS object-counting have been proposed, existing methods focus on a closed, pre-defined set of object classes. This limitation necessitates costly re-annotation and model re-training to adapt current approaches for counting of novel objects that have not been seen during training, and severely inhibits their application in dynamic, real-world monitoring scenarios. To address this gap, in this work we propose RS-OVC - an adaptation of existing work for Open Vocabulary Counting (OVC) approach from general computer vision to the RS domain. We show that our model is capable of accurate counting of novel object classes, that are unseen during training, based solely on textual and/or visual conditioning. View details
Preview abstract This writeup defines the Hydration Proxy Pattern, a framework for building stateful conversational data systems over stateless LLM APIs. It describes a platform-agnostic approach to decoupling persistence from the AI provider through secure server-side intermediation and hybrid storage tiers. The abstract provides a blueprint for managing the "Persistence Gap" in enterprise AI integrations, detailing high-level strategies for session history management, streaming, and multi-stage semantic grounding without disclosing specific internal implementation details. View details
Preview abstract The fundamental theorem of statistical learning establishes that binary PAC learning is governed by a single parameter---the Vapnik-Chervonenkis ($\mathtt{VC}$) dimension---which controls both learnability and sample complexity. Extending this characterization to multiclass classification has long been challenging, since the early work of Natarajan in the late 80's that proposed the Natarajan dimension ($\mathtt{Nat}$) as a natural analogue of the VC dimension. Daniely and Shalev-Shwartz (2014) introduced the $\mathtt{DS}$ dimension, later shown by Brukhim et al.\ (2022) to characterize multiclass \emph{learnability}. Brukhim et al.\ (2022) also demonstrated that the Natarajan and $\mathtt{DS}$ dimensions can diverge arbitrarily, so that multiclass learning appears to be governed by $\mathtt{DS}$ rather than $\mathtt{Nat}$. We show that the agnostic multiclass PAC sample complexity is in fact governed by \emph{two distinct dimensions}. Specifically, we prove nearly tight agnostic sample complexity bounds that, up to logarithmic factors, take the form $$ \frac{\mathtt{DS}^{1.5}}{\epsilon} + \frac{\mathtt{Nat}}{\epsilon^2} $$ where $\epsilon$ is the excess risk. This bound is tight up to a $\sqrt{\mathtt{DS}}$ factor in the first lower-order term, nearly matching known $\mathtt{Nat}/\epsilon^2$ and $\mathtt{DS}/\epsilon$ lower bounds. The first term reflects the DS-controlled regime, while the second reveals that the Natarajan dimension still dictates asymptotic behavior for small $\epsilon$. Thus, unlike in binary or online classification---where a single dimension (VC or Littlestone) controls both phenomena---multiclass learning inherently involves \emph{two structural parameters}. Our technical approach departs significantly from traditional agnostic learning methods based on uniform convergence or reductions-to-realizable techniques. A key ingredient is a novel online procedure, based on a self-adaptive multiplicative-weights algorithm which performs a label-space reduction. This approach may be of independent interest and find further applications. View details
Productionizing Quantum Mass Production
Bill Huggins
Nathan Wiebe
arXiv for now (2026) (to appear)
Preview abstract 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. View details
Preview abstract We study the d-dimensional knapsack problem. We are given a set of items, each with a d-dimensional cost vector and a profit, along with a d-dimensional budget vector. The goal is to select a set of items that do not exceed the budget in all dimensions and maximize the total profit. A polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) with running time n^{Θ(d/{ε})} has long been known for this problem, where {ε} is the error parameter and n is the encoding size. Despite decades of active research, the best running time of a PTAS has remained O(n^{⌈ d/{ε} ⌉ - d}). Unfortunately, existing lower bounds only cover the special case with two dimensions d = 2, and do not answer whether there is a n^{o(d/({ε)})}-time PTAS for larger values of d. In this work, we show that the running times of the best-known PTAS cannot be improved up to a polylogarithmic factor assuming the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH). Our techniques are based on a robust reduction from 2-CSP, which embeds 2-CSP constraints into a desired number of dimensions. Then, using a recent result of [Bafna Karthik and Minzer, STOC'25], we succeed in exhibiting tight trade-off between d and {ε} for all regimes of the parameters assuming d is sufficiently large. Informally, our result also shows that under ETH, for any function f there is no f(d/({ε)}) ⋅ n^{õ(d/({ε)})}-time (1-{ε})-approximation for d-dimensional knapsack, where n is the number of items and õ hides polylogarithmic factors in d/({ε)}. View details
Preview abstract This article delves into how Google Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) leverage Gemini 3 and the Gemini CLI to aggressively reduce Mean Time to Mitigation (MTTM) during real-world outages. By focusing on the SRE motto of "Eliminate Toil," the article walks through a simulated incident, demonstrating how an agentic CLI acts as a human-in-the-loop copilot across the entire incident lifecycle: from initial paging and investigation, through safe, tool-driven mitigation and root cause analysis, to automated postmortem generation and action item filing. This direct integration of Gemini's reasoning capabilities with operational data and internal tools creates a virtuous cycle where past incident learnings continuously inform and improve future solutions. View details
Preview abstract Post-link optimizers (PLOs) such as Propeller and BOLT have demonstrated that precise, profile-guided code layout can extract significant performance gains from heavily optimized binaries. However, these systems are currently restricted to intra-procedural techniques, leaving the global potential of inter-procedural layout largely untapped. Inter-procedural code layout is historically difficult due to a combinatorially intractable search space and complex call-return semantics that are challenging to model. Consequently, the performance potential of fine-grained inter-procedural layout remains unproven in practice.Ours uses AlphaEvolve, an agentic workflow to evolve the compiler heuristic in Propeller into a fine-grained inter-procedural optimizer. While AlphaEvolve synthesizes novel code layout policies, Vizier fine-tunes the resulting policy hyperparameters. To ensure high-fidelity, we move away from approximate static cost models and the agentic workflow generates multiple layout variants that are executed on actual hardware to measure real performance counters, providing a precise reward signal for the evolutionary loop. Ours has been evaluated on several benchmarks including large warehouse-scale applications and experiments show performance improvements of 0.23% to 1.6% on these benchmarks optimized with state-of-the-art FDO and PLO. This is the first time ever that real-world applications have been optimized with fine-grained inter-procedural code layout. View details
Preview abstract This defensive publication describes a framework for multi-artificial intelligence (AI) orchestration that can be used to address potential limitations associated with reliance on single AI models, such as correlated systemic failures or cognitive blind spots. The described system is a cognitive orchestration framework that can function as a middleware layer to manage tasks across a heterogeneous ensemble of AI models. An orchestrator node can decompose a user request into a sequence of sub-tasks, which an arbitrage engine may then dynamically assign to suitable AI models based on certain factors, such as capability, cost, and latency. For certain tasks, such as those designated as high-risk, a byzantine consensus layer can route the task to multiple diverse models in parallel and may trigger a process, for example a 'cognitive debate,' which could be adjudicated by a third-party judge model to help resolve conflicting outputs. This framework can facilitate a more resilient system that may improve the accuracy and reliability of outputs when compared to some single-model architectures. View details
Preview abstract Autonomous research agents can now produce competitive solutions and complete manuscripts, yet their papers routinely contain fabricated citations, method descriptions disconnected from the code, and scores on incorrect scales---failures invisible to evaluations that assess fluency rather than evidentiary grounding. The core problem is verifiability: no existing system maintains a traceable chain from each claim in the paper to its grounding evidence, and current evaluation protocols assess output fluency rather than evidentiary grounding. We address this with Chaine-of-Evidence (CoE), a verifiability standard requiring every claim to trace to its grounding evidence, and instantiate it in Scientist One, an end-to-end research system that maintains evidence chains natively, and CoE Audit, an evaluation protocol with four integrity checks targeting the most damaging chain failures. Auditing 60 papers from four systems, we find every baseline exhibits at least one failure: phantom citations at 4--25%, method-code alignment in at most 2/15 papers. Scientist One achieves zero phantom citations (0/830), the highest alignment rate (7/15), and competitive solver scores. View details
FabScore: Fine-Grained Evaluation of Fabrications in Automated AI Research
James Xu Zhao
See-Kiong Ng
Dongfu Jiang
Bryan Hooi
Qianyun Guo
Hui Chen
Pang Wei Koh
Muhao Chen
Yiwei Wang
2026
Preview abstract In automated AI research, scientific rigor is not merely a matter of producing coherent papers and executable code; rather, it fundamentally requires that the experimental results claimed in a paper are faithfully supported by the accompanying implementation and verifiable through actual execution logs. When this alignment breaks down, AI-generated research may contain fabrications: discrepancies between the methods described in the paper and what the code actually implements, or between the reported results and those obtained by running the code. This motivates a systematic evaluation of fabrications that systematically examines the consistency between a paper's claimed experimental outcomes and its accompanying code files. In automated AI research, scientific rigor is not merely a matter of producing coherent papers and executable code; rather, it fundamentally requires that the experimental results claimed in a paper are faithfully supported by the accompanying implementation and verifiable through actual execution logs. When this alignment breaks down, AI-generated research may contain fabrications: discrepancies between the methods described in the paper and what the code actually implements, or between the reported results and those obtained by running the code. This motivates a systematic evaluation of fabrications that systematically examines the consistency between a paper's claimed experimental outcomes and its accompanying code files. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. This is a placeholder. View details
Preview abstract This disclosure describes systems and methods for a multi-agent framework that can automate and scale cognitive work. The framework can, for example, use a cognitive assembly line of specialized computational agents to perform tasks such as research and drafting. A beneficial component could be an adversarial review panel (ARP), which is a multi-agent review system where distinct agent personas critique a generated draft from varied perspectives. The structured feedback from the ARP can be used to automatically iterate on and refine the work product. This approach can improve the intellectual rigor of generated content and reduce the time required for production, which may allow human operators to focus on activities such as strategic oversight and final validation. View details
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