Ranveer Chandra

Prasoon Patidar, Alex Crown, Kevin Hsieh et al.

The remarkable performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) has inspired many applications, which often necessitate edge-cloud collaboration due to connectivity, privacy, and cost considerations. Traditional methods primarily focus on selecting the best LLM model for optimizing performance, while neglecting the critical interplay between the components of the LLM serving pipeline (context retrieval, query preprocessing, etc.) or the changing latency and cost constraints. We introduce ECO-LLM (Edge-Cloud Orchestrator for LLMs), a novel system that reframes this problem as a joint optimization challenge and solves it by systematically exploring component configurations and dynamically selecting optimal strategies at the query level. ECO-LLM consists of two components: (1) the ECO-LLM Emulator, which efficiently explores the vast configuration space utilizing query clustering and pareto-optimal path selection, gathering domain-specific performance metrics without exhaustive evaluation; and (2) the ECO-LLM Runtime, which leverages these metrics to dynamically select optimal resolution strategies for user queries while meeting user-defined Service Level Objectives (SLOs). We evaluate ECO-LLM on a smart home and a smart car assistant scenarios. With an exhaustive exploration of all possible configurations for seen queries, ECO-LLM outperforms cloud-based models like GPT-4o in terms of accuracy (90% vs. 74% on average) while reducing costs by 90% and latency by 55%, demonstrating the value of its joint optimization at the query level. In practical deployment for previously unseen queries, ECO-LLM selects configurations that reduce costs by 62% or improve response times by 62% on average compared to state-of-the-art model routing approaches, while maintaining higher accuracy and consistently adhering to specified latency and cost constraints.

Shashank Shreedhar Bhatt, Tanmay Rajore, Khushboo Aggarwal et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in enterprise settings where they interact with multiple users and are trained or fine-tuned on sensitive internal data. While fine-tuning enhances performance by internalizing domain knowledge, it also introduces a critical security risk: leakage of confidential training data to unauthorized users. These risks are exacerbated when LLMs are combined with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines that dynamically fetch contextual documents at inference time. We demonstrate data exfiltration attacks on AI assistants where adversaries can exploit current fine-tuning and RAG architectures to leak sensitive information by leveraging the lack of access control enforcement. We show that existing defenses, including prompt sanitization, output filtering, system isolation, and training-level privacy mechanisms, are fundamentally probabilistic and fail to offer robust protection against such attacks. We take the position that only a deterministic and rigorous enforcement of fine-grained access control during both fine-tuning and RAG-based inference can reliably prevent the leakage of sensitive data to unauthorized recipients. We introduce a framework centered on the principle that any content used in training, retrieval, or generation by an LLM is explicitly authorized for \emph{all users involved in the interaction}. Our approach offers a simple yet powerful paradigm shift for building secure multi-user LLM systems that are grounded in classical access control but adapted to the unique challenges of modern AI workflows. Our solution has been deployed in Microsoft Copilot Tuning, a product offering that enables organizations to fine-tune models using their own enterprise-specific data.

Angela Busheska, Vikram Iyer, Bruno Silva et al.

Understanding land use over time is critical to tracking events related to climate change, like deforestation. However, satellite-based remote sensing tools which are used for monitoring struggle to differentiate vegetation types in farms and orchards from forests. We observe that metrics such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), based on plant photosynthesis, have unique temporal signatures that reflect agricultural practices and seasonal cycles. We analyze yearly NDVI changes on 20 farms for 10 unique crops. Initial results show that NDVI curves are coherent with agricultural practices, are unique to each crop, consistent globally, and can differentiate farms from forests. We develop a novel longitudinal NDVI dataset for the state of California from 2020-2023 with 500~m resolution and over 70 million points. We use this to develop the TerraTrace platform, an end-to-end analytic tool that classifies land use using NDVI signatures and allows users to query the system through an LLM chatbot and graphical interface.