Nicholas Fidalgo

Nicholas Fidalgo, Aaron Contreras, Katherine Harvey et al.

This project investigates the use of multimodal AI-driven approaches to automate and enhance suspect sketching. Three pipelines were developed and evaluated: (1) baseline image-to-image Stable Diffusion model, (2) same model integrated with a pre-trained CLIP model for text-image alignment, and (3) novel approach incorporating LoRA fine-tuning of the CLIP model, applied to self-attention and cross-attention layers, and integrated with Stable Diffusion. An ablation study confirmed that fine-tuning both self- and cross-attention layers yielded the best alignment between text descriptions and sketches. Performance testing revealed that Model 1 achieved the highest structural similarity (SSIM) of 0.72 and a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 25 dB, outperforming Model 2 and Model 3. Iterative refinement enhanced perceptual similarity (LPIPS), with Model 3 showing improvement over Model 2 but still trailing Model 1. Qualitatively, sketches generated by Model 1 demonstrated the clearest facial features, highlighting its robustness as a baseline despite its simplicity.

Nicholas Fidalgo, Puyuan Ye

Modern key-value stores rely heavily on Log-Structured Merge (LSM) trees for write optimization, but this design introduces significant read amplification. Auxiliary structures like Bloom filters help, but impose memory costs that scale with tree depth and dataset size. Recent advances in learned data structures suggest that machine learning models can augment or replace these components, trading handcrafted heuristics for data-adaptive behavior. In this work, we explore two approaches for integrating learned predictions into the LSM-tree lookup path. The first uses a classifier to selectively bypass Bloom filter probes for irrelevant levels, aiming to reduce average-case query latency. The second replaces traditional Bloom filters with compact learned models and small backup filters, targeting memory footprint reduction without compromising correctness. We implement both methods atop a Monkey-style LSM-tree with leveled compaction, per-level Bloom filters, and realistic workloads. Our experiments show that the classifier reduces GET latency by up to 2.28x by skipping over 30% of Bloom filter checks with high precision, though it incurs a modest false-negative rate. The learned Bloom filter design achieves zero false negatives and retains baseline latency while cutting memory usage per level by 70-80%. Together, these designs illustrate complementary trade-offs between latency, memory, and correctness, and highlight the potential of learned index components in write-optimized storage systems.