papers

Publications (22)

cs.IR2026

SPECTRA: Synthetic IR Test Collections with Relevance Oracles and Controlled Distractor Diagnostics

Eric Liang

Scalable information retrieval testing needs corpora that are large enough to stress index construction, ranking latency, query routing, and evaluation tooling, yet human-judged te…

cs.LG2018

Tune: A Research Platform for Distributed Model Selection and Training

Richard Liaw, Eric Liang, Robert Nishihara +3

Modern machine learning algorithms are increasingly computationally demanding, requiring specialized hardware and distributed computation to achieve high performance in a reasonabl…

cs.NI2026

Anycast Performance in Context

Eric Liang

IP anycast lets a service advertise one address from many physical sites, leaving BGP to map each client to a site. It is central to the DNS root server system, public resolvers, a…

cs.DB2019

Deep Unsupervised Cardinality Estimation

Zongheng Yang, Eric Liang, Amog Kamsetty +7

Cardinality estimation has long been grounded in statistical tools for density estimation. To capture the rich multivariate distributions of relational tables, we propose the use o…

cs.DC2018

Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applications

Philipp Moritz, Robert Nishihara, Stephanie Wang +8

The next generation of AI applications will continuously interact with the environment and learn from these interactions. These applications impose new and demanding systems requir…

q-bio.QM2025

Predicting COVID-19 Prevalence Using Wastewater RNA Surveillance: A Semi-Supervised Learning Approach with Temporal Feature Trust

Yifei Chen, Eric Liang

As COVID-19 transitions into an endemic disease that remains constantly present in the population at a stable level, monitoring its prevalence without invasive measures becomes inc…

cs.DC2025

The Streaming Batch Model for Efficient and Fault-Tolerant Heterogeneous Execution

Frank Sifei Luan, Ron Yifeng Wang, Yile Gu +12

While ML model training and inference are both GPU-intensive, CPU-based data processing is often the bottleneck. Distributed data processing systems based on the batch or stream pr…

cs.DC2023

Exoshuffle-CloudSort

Frank Sifei Luan, Stephanie Wang, Samyukta Yagati +7

We present Exoshuffle-CloudSort, a sorting application running on top of Ray using the Exoshuffle architecture. Exoshuffle-CloudSort runs on Amazon EC2, with input and output data…

cs.SE2026

Acceptance-Test-Driven Evaluation Protocols for Business-Centric LLM Systems

Eric Liang

Large language model (LLM) applications are increasingly expected to satisfy deterministic institutional requirements while relying on probabilistic generative components. This mis…

cs.LG2021

RLlib Flow: Distributed Reinforcement Learning is a Dataflow Problem

Eric Liang, Zhanghao Wu, Michael Luo +3

Researchers and practitioners in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) frequently leverage parallel computation, which has led to a plethora of new algorithms and systems in the…

cs.PL2026

SEMBridge: Tagless-Final Program Semantics with Weakest-Precondition and Bounded-Checking Interpretations

Eric Liang

Formal methods provide rigorous accounts of program behavior, but practical software engineering often works through executable libraries, tests, and incremental design. This paper…

cs.DC2023

Exoshuffle: An Extensible Shuffle Architecture

Frank Sifei Luan, Stephanie Wang, Samyukta Yagati +7

Shuffle is one of the most expensive communication primitives in distributed data processing and is difficult to scale. Prior work addresses the scalability challenges of shuffle b…

cs.DB2020

NeuroCard: One Cardinality Estimator for All Tables

Zongheng Yang, Amog Kamsetty, Sifei Luan +4

Query optimizers rely on accurate cardinality estimates to produce good execution plans. Despite decades of research, existing cardinality estimators are inaccurate for complex que…

cs.NI2019

Neural Packet Classification

Eric Liang, Hang Zhu, Xin Jin +1

Packet classification is a fundamental problem in computer networking. This problem exposes a hard tradeoff between the computation and state complexity, which makes it particularl…

cs.CV2022

Predicting Pedestrian Crosswalk Behavior Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Eric Liang, Mark Stamp

A common yet potentially dangerous task is the act of crossing the street. Pedestrian accidents contribute a significant amount to the high number of annual traffic casualties, whi…

cs.LG2020

Variable Skipping for Autoregressive Range Density Estimation

Eric Liang, Zongheng Yang, Ion Stoica +3

Deep autoregressive models compute point likelihood estimates of individual data points. However, many applications (i.e., database cardinality estimation) require estimating range…

cs.CV2026

Feature-Optimized Vision for Adaptive 3D Scene Reconstruction

Eric Liang

Three-dimensional scene reconstruction depends on local image evidence that is both visually discriminative and geometrically useful. Fixed feature thresholds and uniform feature b…

cs.DC2021

Hoplite: Efficient and Fault-Tolerant Collective Communication for Task-Based Distributed Systems

Siyuan Zhuang, Zhuohan Li, Danyang Zhuo +5

Task-based distributed frameworks (e.g., Ray, Dask, Hydro) have become increasingly popular for distributed applications that contain asynchronous and dynamic workloads, including…

cs.LG2020

IMPACT: Importance Weighted Asynchronous Architectures with Clipped Target Networks

Michael Luo, Jiahao Yao, Richard Liaw +2

The practical usage of reinforcement learning agents is often bottlenecked by the duration of training time. To accelerate training, practitioners often turn to distributed reinfor…

cs.CR2026

SECUREVENT: Hybrid AI/ML Security Monitoring for Distributed Event-Based Systems

Eric Liang

Distributed event-based systems have become a common substrate for Internet-scale publish/subscribe services, IoT telemetry, cloud-native microservices, and security operations pip…

cs.AI2018

RLlib: Abstractions for Distributed Reinforcement Learning

Eric Liang, Richard Liaw, Philipp Moritz +6

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms involve the deep nesting of highly irregular computation patterns, each of which typically exhibits opportunities for distributed computation…

cs.CV2019

Population Based Augmentation: Efficient Learning of Augmentation Policy Schedules

Daniel Ho, Eric Liang, Ion Stoica +2

A key challenge in leveraging data augmentation for neural network training is choosing an effective augmentation policy from a large search space of candidate operations. Properly…