Benjamin Wu

Dwipam Katariya, Snehita Varma, Akshat Shreemali et al.

Transformer-based architectures are widely adopted in sequential recommendation systems, yet their application in Financial Services (FS) presents distinct practical and modeling challenges for real-time recommendation. These include:a) long-range user interactions (implicit and explicit) spanning both digital and physical channels generating temporally heterogeneous context, b) the presence of multiple interrelated products require coordinated models to support varied ad placements and personalized feeds, while balancing competing business goals. We propose FinTRec, a transformer-based framework that addresses these challenges and its operational objectives in FS. While tree-based models have traditionally been preferred in FS due to their explainability and alignment with regulatory requirements, our study demonstrate that FinTRec offers a viable and effective shift toward transformer-based architectures. Through historic simulation and live A/B test correlations, we show FinTRec consistently outperforms the production-grade tree-based baseline. The unified architecture, when fine-tuned for product adaptation, enables cross-product signal sharing, reduces training cost and technical debt, while improving offline performance across all products. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study of unified sequential recommendation modeling in FS that addresses both technical and business considerations.

Benjamin Wu, Oliver Hennigh, Jan Kautz et al.

Physics-informed neural networks allow models to be trained by physical laws described by general nonlinear partial differential equations. However, traditional architectures struggle to solve more challenging time-dependent problems due to their architectural nature. In this work, we present a novel physics-informed framework for solving time-dependent partial differential equations. Using only the governing differential equations and problem initial and boundary conditions, we generate a latent representation of the problem's spatio-temporal dynamics. Our model utilizes discrete cosine transforms to encode spatial frequencies and recurrent neural networks to process the time evolution. This efficiently and flexibly produces a compressed representation which is used for additional conditioning of physics-informed models. We show experimental results on the Taylor-Green vortex solution to the Navier-Stokes equations. Our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Taylor-Green vortex relative to other physics-informed baseline models.

Benjamin Wu, Aaron B. Wagner, G. Edward Suh

Side channels represent a broad class of security vulnerabilities that have been demonstrated to exist in many applications. Because completely eliminating side channels often leads to prohibitively high overhead, there is a need for a principled trade-off between cost and leakage. In this paper, we make a case for the use of maximal leakage to analyze such trade-offs. Maximal leakage is an operationally interpretable leakage metric designed for side channels. We present the most useful theoretical properties of maximal leakage from previous work and demonstrate empirically that conventional metrics such as mutual information and channel capacity underestimate the threat posed by side channels whereas maximal leakage does not. We also study the cost-leakage trade-off as an optimization problem using maximal leakage. We demonstrate that not only can this problem be represented as a linear program, but also that optimal protection can be achieved using a combination of at most two deterministic schemes.