Juan Pablo Munoz

Abdullah Al Asif, Sixing Yu, Juan Pablo Munoz et al.

SplitFed Learning (SFL) combines federated learning and split learning to enable collaborative training across distributed edge devices; however, it faces significant challenges in heterogeneous environments with diverse computational and communication capabilities. This paper proposes \textit{SuperSFL}, a federated split learning framework that leverages a weight-sharing super-network to dynamically generate resource-aware client-specific subnetworks, effectively mitigating device heterogeneity. SuperSFL introduces Three-Phase Gradient Fusion (TPGF), an optimization mechanism that coordinates local updates, server-side computation, and gradient fusion to accelerate convergence. In addition, a fault-tolerant client-side classifier and collaborative client--server aggregation enable uninterrupted training under intermittent communication failures. Experimental results on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 with up to 100 heterogeneous clients show that SuperSFL converges $2$--$5\times$ faster in terms of communication rounds than baseline SFL while achieving higher accuracy, resulting in up to $20\times$ lower total communication cost and $13\times$ shorter training time. SuperSFL also demonstrates improved energy efficiency compared to baseline methods, making it a practical solution for federated learning in heterogeneous edge environments.

Daniel Cummings, Anthony Sarah, Sharath Nittur Sridhar et al.

Recent advances in Neural Architecture Search (NAS) such as one-shot NAS offer the ability to extract specialized hardware-aware sub-network configurations from a task-specific super-network. While considerable effort has been employed towards improving the first stage, namely, the training of the super-network, the search for derivative high-performing sub-networks is still under-explored. Popular methods decouple the super-network training from the sub-network search and use performance predictors to reduce the computational burden of searching on different hardware platforms. We propose a flexible search framework that automatically and efficiently finds optimal sub-networks that are optimized for different performance metrics and hardware configurations. Specifically, we show how evolutionary algorithms can be paired with lightly trained objective predictors in an iterative cycle to accelerate architecture search in a multi-objective setting for various modalities including machine translation and image classification.

Md Anwar Hossen, Fatema Siddika, Juan Pablo Munoz et al.

Large language models (LLMs) can acquire new capabilities through fine-tuning, but continual adaptation often leads to catastrophic forgetting. We propose CRAFT, a continual learning framework that avoids updating model weights by instead learning low-rank interventions on hidden representations. CRAFT proceeds in three stages: it first routes each task to a group of similar tasks based on output-distribution divergence; it then fine-tunes the model using a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence against the group's prior state, which directly controls forgetting and determines convergence; finally, it merges interventions for the updated task into the shared representation using the same KL signal. This design unifies routing, regularization, and merging through a single KL-based objective. CRAFT improves overall performance and reduces forgetting compared to strong LoRA-based approaches across multiple benchmarks and model scales, while remaining robust to task ordering. These results suggest that controlling adaptation in representation space, guided by output-space divergence, provides a scalable and principled approach to continual learning in LLMs.

Le Chen, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Akash Dutta et al.

Recently, language models (LMs), especially large language models (LLMs), have revolutionized the field of deep learning. Both encoder-decoder models and prompt-based techniques have shown immense potential for natural language processing and code-based tasks. Over the past several years, many research labs and institutions have invested heavily in high-performance computing, approaching or breaching exascale performance levels. In this paper, we posit that adapting and utilizing such language model-based techniques for tasks in high-performance computing (HPC) would be very beneficial. This study presents our reasoning behind the aforementioned position and highlights how existing ideas can be improved and adapted for HPC tasks.

Juan Pablo Munoz, Scott Dexter

We present a novel approach to place recognition well-suited to environments with many dynamic objects--objects that may or may not be present in an agent's subsequent visits. By incorporating an object-detecting preprocessing step, our approach yields high-quality place representations that incorporate object information. Not only does this result in significantly improved place recognition in dynamic environments, it also significantly reduces memory/storage requirements, which may increase the effectiveness of mobile agents with limited resources.