Brakedown (CRYPTO 2023) is a transparent polynomial commitment scheme with fast proving. Its reliance on codes with small minimum distance forces the protocol to sample more columns to achieve soundness, resulting in larger proof sizes. Replacing the underlying code with Reed-Solomon codes yields better distance properties and should reduce the number of required queries. However, the standard row-wise RS protocol cannot exploit proximity results beyond the unique-decoding radius, such as the... Read more ›
Time-series databases (TSDBs) employ diverse storage architectures optimized for specific workload characteristics, leading to distinct performance profiles and bottlenecks that are often not apparent under conventional benchmarking approaches. System architects designing robust data backends must understand which storage engines are efficient for their particular pipelines and which exhibit the lowest risk of encountering future scalability con... Read more ›
While serverless computing is popular, its dominant Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) model is ill-suited for stream processing because its stateless, centrally orchestrated functions cannot efficiently handle continuous, low-latency event flows. We introduce Epico, a serverless runtime explicitly designed to resolve these inefficiencies at the runtime level. Epico executes pipeline stages as persistent WebAssembly components, enabling independent, z... Read more ›
Query optimization of Basic Graph Patterns (BGP) SPARQL queries over Knowledge Graphs (KG) requires accurate cardinality estimation. Recently published learned estimators outperform statistics- and sampling-based approaches, but share a limitation preventing their adoption in real-world triplestores: they are transductive and require retraining when the underlying graph changes or when applied to new graphs. We present FICE (Fully Inductive Card... Read more ›
Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart spaces and buildings are an emerging class of distributed systems with critical safety requirements. This paper presents Knox, the first system to enable safety checking in IoT-enabled smart spaces. Knox's contributions include (i) safety specifications: a new language for safety clauses in such smart spaces, and (ii) static safety checking: two new algorithms for static verification of multiple safety p... Read more ›
AI agents are moving from advisory interfaces into systems that execute consequential operations: issuing refunds, reserving scarce inventory, provisioning cloud resources, and initiating financial transfers. These workflows require governance over effects, not only over model outputs. Existing safeguards often decide whether an action is allowed from the information available when the action is requested. For stateful policies, that request-tim... Read more ›
A common task in legal Information Retrieval (IR) is to find relevant legal sources from case-law collections. While legal practice often requires pinpoint citations (pincites) to specific case paragraphs, most existing public legal IR datasets lack paragraph-level citation annotations. Yet, publicly available datasets with such information contain data leakage in the query text and exclude paragraphs that are neither citing nor cited from the c... Read more ›
Graph-based indexes have become the dominant approach to approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) over high-dimensional data and play a crucial role in real-world applications such as retrieval-augmented generation, recommendation systems, and vector databases. Despite extensive progress in static graph construction and search, efficient in-place deletion remains challenging because obsolete vectors must be removed without allowing stale incom... Read more ›
AUR validator.malware (stage2 agent linux x86_64). GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets. Read more ›
This week, I presented this paper at ICCCN'26. This is joint work with Aleksey Charapko (University of New Hampshire) and my MongoDB colleagues Matt Broadstone, Daniel Gomez Ferro, and Akshat Vig. The paper investigates how to build a metastability tolerant execution control system (ECS) for a database.Why?Modern databases are complex networked systems serving mixed workloads: short queries (that want an answer in milliseconds) sitting next to analytics jobs (that want the CPU for multiple se... Read more ›
Relying solely on encryption for privacy-preserving computations is prone to leakage-abuse/access-pattern attacks. TEEs, while cost-effective, are also vulnerable to side-channel attacks. Oblivious primitives, such as oblivious memory (ORAM) and data structures (ODS), are effective building blocks to mitigate these risks by concealing memory access patterns and side-channel information. Applications range from private contact discovery (Signal) to anonymous key transparency, encrypted email s... Read more ›
Energy efficiency has become a first-order concern in modern high-performance computing systems, as it directly determines achievable throughput under fixed power budgets. Although Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) provides an effective mechanism for reducing GPU energy consumption, existing runtime systems decouple DVFS from task placement and inter-GPU communication, focus on single-GPU execution, or cannot adapt frequency to task g... Read more ›
As datasets and the dimensionality of feature vectors continue to grow, Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) in large multimedia databases becomes increasingly relevant. Graph-based approaches have demonstrated to offer the best trade-off between retrieval precision and search time. Despite their ability to deliver search times several orders of magnitude faster than exact search techniques, existing methods suffer from slow constructions ... Read more ›
Joins are second-class citizens in search engines: existing query-time join implementations in Lucene are limited either in performance or in capability, forcing a choice between fast joins scoped to a single index and slower joins that span independently managed indices. We carry Valduriez's join-index technique from relational systems to Lucene's flush-based (LSM-style) segment storage: for every pair of a parent and a child segment we materia... Read more ›
We present fabric_ext, an eBPF middleware compiler and runtime for extensible OS policies over GPU--CXL fabrics. fabric_ext lets one policy program execute across GPU hooks, driver/runtime hooks, DPU/NIC hooks, and CXL switch or near-memory hooks. The key abstraction is a semantic movement graph: edges describe bytes, stride, reuse distance, read/write ratio, source and destination, ordering requirement, alias set, ownership, and transformations... Read more ›
Multimodal representation learning is a cornerstone of modern AI. By encoding multimodal queries and targets into vectors, it powers industrial search and recommendation and underpins modern agents. Real-world platforms with complex modalities and massive-scale content, such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and YouTube, demand both efficiency under billion-scale indexing and fine-grained discrimination for hard matching. Existing MLLM embedding models ra... Read more ›
C++26 adds a new container to the standard library: std::hive. It is meant to occupy the ground between std::vector and std::list. Like a vector, it keeps its elements in contiguous blocks of memory, so scanning it does not require you to chase a pointer for every element. Like a list, it never moves an element … Continue reading How fast is C++26’s std::hive? Read more ›
We revisit Tarski's Algebra of Relations (TAR), an old formalism of relations predating Codd's relational algebra by over 100 years, as a new foundation for relational databases. We argue TAR provides a better abstraction at both the semantic level and the physical level, in the context of modern application code and system architecture. To demonstrate the strengths of TAR, we design and implement Prela, a compositional and controllable query la... Read more ›
Recent work suggests that relational database management systems (RDBMSs) can execute quantum circuit simulation by compiling the simulation into SQL workloads (primarily join-and-aggregate tensor contractions). While early results are promising, they largely focus on a narrow set of highly structured circuits and offer limited support for systematic database research, such as query optimization, physical design, and engine-level evaluation ac... Read more ›
Practitioner summary. Do not copy Java's threshold of eight alone: when bins grow long, hybrid-batch (convert after load) still walks lists during insert, while hybrid-incremental (convert as soon as a bin hits k) matches always-tree. Prefer hybrid-incremental or always-tree for overloaded bins; reserve hybrid-batch for pure bulk load then query when chains stay short after resize. Hybrid-incremental approximates Java conversion timing, not a Ha... Read more ›