Publications

TraceFL: Interpretability-Driven Debugging in Federated Learning via Neuron Provenance.
Waris Gill, Ali Anwar, and Muhammad Ali Gulzar
The 47th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2025

IP-FL: Incentive-driven Personalization in Federated Learning.
Ahmad Khan, Xinran Wang, Qi Le, Zain ul Abdeen, Azal Ahmad Khan, Haider Ali, Ming Jin, Jie Ding, Ali R. Butt, Ali Anwar
The 39th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), 2025

MeanCache: User-Centric Semantic Caching for LLM Web Services.
Waris Gill, Mohamed Elidrisi, Pallavi Kalapatapu, Ammar Ahmed, Ali Anwar, Muhammad Ali Gulzar
The 39th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), 2025

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Storage Compressibility of Pre-Trained ML Models but Were Afraid to Ask.
Zhaoyuan Su, Ammar Ahmed, Zirui Wang, Ali Anwar, Yue Cheng
50th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), 2024

FLOAT: Federated Learning Optimizations with Automated Tuning.
Ahmad Faraz Khan, Azal Ahmad Khan, Ahmed M. Abdelmoniem, Samuel Fountain, Ali Butt, Ali Anwar
The European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), 2024

An End-to-End High-performance Deduplication Scheme for Docker Registries and Docker Container Storage Systems.
Nannan Zhao, Muhui Lin, Hadeel Albahar, Arnab K. Paul, Zhijie Huang, Subil Abraham, Keren Chen, Vasily Tarasov, Dimitrios Skourtis, Ali Anwar, Ali R. Butt
Transactions on Storage, 2024

Balancing Costs and Durability for Serverless Data.
Alex Merenstein, Xinran Wang, Vasily Tarasov, Prajjawal Agarwal, Scott Guthridge, Kapil Thakkar, Katherine Wu, Ali Anwar, Erez Zadok
The 38th International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology (MSST), 2024

DynamicFL: Federated Learning with Dynamic Communication Resource Allocation.
Qi Le, Enmao Diao, Xinran Wang, Ahmad Faraz Khan, Vahid Tarokh, Jie Ding, and Ali Anwar
IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData), 2024 [Best student paper award]

ICL: An Incentivized Collaborative Learning Framework.
Xinran Wang, Qi Le, Ahmad Khan, Jie Ding, and Ali Anwar
IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData), 2024

Personalized Federated Learning Techniques: Empirical Analysis.
Azal Ahmad Khan, Ahmad Faraz Khan, Haidar Ali, and Ali Anwar
IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData), 2024

Mitigating Sycophancy in Large Language Models via Direct Preference Optimization.
Azal Ahmad Khan, Sayan Alam, Xinran Wang, Ahmad Faraz Khan, Debanga Raj Neog, and Ali Anwar
IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData), 2024

COLA: Collaborative Adaptation With Gradient Learning.
Enmao Diao, Qi Le, Suya W., Xinran Wang, Ali Anwar, Jie Ding, and Vahid Tarokh
arXiv:2404.13844

Privacy-Aware Semantic Cache for Large Language Models.
Waris Gill, Mohamed Elidrisi, Pallavi Kalapatapu, Ali Anwar, Muhammad Ali Gulzar
arXiv:2403.02694

Towards Scalable Quantum Networks.
Connor Howe, Mohsin Aziz, Ali Anwar
arXiv:2409.08416

HERL: Tiered Federated Learning with Adaptive Homomorphic Encryption using Reinforcement Learning.
Jiaxang Tang, Zeshan Fayyaz, Mohammad A Salahuddin, Raouf Boutaba, Zhi-Li Zhang, Ali Anwar
arXiv:2409.07631

FedDebug: Systematic Debugging for Federated Learning Applications.
Waris Gill, Ali Anwar, Muhammad Ali Gulzar
45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2023

InfiniStore: Elastic Serverless Cloud Storage.
Jingyuan Zhang, Ao Wang, Xiaolong Ma, Benjamin Carver, Nicholas John Newman, Ali Anwar, Lukas Rupprecht, Dimitrios Skourtis, Vasily Tarasov, Feng Yan, Yue Cheng
49th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 2023

F3: Serving Files Efficiently in Serverless Computing.
Alex Merenstein, Vasily Tarasov, Ali Anwar, Scott Guthridge, Erez Zadok
16th ACM International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR), 2023 [Best paper award]

Heterogeneous Federated Learning using Dynamic Model Pruning and Adaptive Gradient.
Sixing Yu, Phuong Nguyen, Ali Anwar, Ali Jannesari
23rd IEEE/ACM international Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid), 2023

HDFL: A Heterogeneity and Client Dropout-Aware Federated Learning Framework.
Syed Zawad, Ali Anwar, Yi Zhou, Nathalie Baracaldo, Feng Yan
23rd IEEE/ACM international Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid), 2023

Towards cost-effective and resource-aware aggregation at Edge for Federated Learning.
Ahmad Khan, Yuze Li, Xinran Wang, Sabaat Haroon, Haider Ali, Yue Cheng, Ali Butt, and Ali Anwar
To appear in the Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData), 2023

FedDefender: Backdoor Attack Defense in Federated Learning.
Waris Gill, Ali Anwar, Muhammad Ali Gulzar
Dependability and Trustworthiness of Safety-Critical Systems with Machine Learned Components (SE4SafeML), 2023

Robust and Efficient Quantum Communication.
Connor Howe, Xinran Wang, Ali Anwar
To appear in the Proceedings of the The Second International Workshop on Quantum Classical Cooperative Computing (QCCC), 2023

Robust and Efficient Quantum Communication.
Xinran Wang, Connor Howe, Ali Anwar
Workshop: I too can Quantum! (I2Q), 2023

ProvFL: Client-Driven Interpretability of Global Model Predictions in Federated Learning
Waris Gill, Ali Anwar, Muhammad Ali Gulzar
CoRR abs/2312.13632

PI-FL: Personalized and Incentivized Federated Learning
Ahmad Faraz Khan, Xinran Wang, Qi Le, Azal Ahmad Khan, Haider Ali, Jie Ding, Ali Butt, Ali Anwar
CoRR abs/2304.07514

A Framework for Incentivized Collaborative Learning
Xinran Wang, Qi Le, Ahmad Faraz Khan, Jie Ding, Ali Anwar
CoRR abs/2305.17052

SPATL: Salient Parameter Aggregation and Transfer Learning for Heterogeneous Federated Learning.
Sixing Yu, Phuong Nguyen, Waqwoya Abebe, Wei Qian, Ali Anwar, and Ali Jannesari
To appear in the Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC), 2022

Heterogeneity-Aware Adaptive Federated Learning Scheduling.
Jingoo Han, Ahmad Faraz Khan, Syed Zawad, Ali Anwar, Nathalie Baracaldo Angel, Yi Zhou, Feng Yan, Ali R. Butt
To appear in the Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData), 2022

Personalized Federated Recommender Systems with Private and Partially Federated AutoEncoders.
Qi Le, Enmao Diao, Xinran Wang, Ali Anwar, Vahid Tarokh, Jie Ding
To appear in the Proceedings of the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers (Asilomar), 2022

TIFF: Tokenized Incentive for Federated Learning.
Jingoo Han, Ahmad Faraz Khan, Syed Zawad, Ali Anwar, Nathalie Baracaldo, Yi Zhou, Feng Yan, Ali Raza Butt
To appear in the Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference On Cloud Computing (IEEE Cloud), 2022

DeTrust-FL: Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning in Decentralized Trust Setting
Runhua Xu, Nathalie Baracaldo, Yi Zhou, Ali Anwar, Heiko Ludwig and Swanand Kadhe
To appear in the Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference On Cloud Computing (IEEE Cloud), 2022

Sion: Elastic Serverless Cloud Storage
Jingyuan Zhang, Ao Wang, Xiaolong Ma, Benjamin Carver, Nicholas John Newman, Ali Anwar, Lukas Rupprecht, Dimitrios Skourtis, Vasily Tarasov, Feng Yan, Yue Cheng
CoRR abs/2209.01496

Towards an Accountable and Reproducible Federated Learning: A FactSheets Approach
Nathalie Baracaldo, Ali Anwar, Mark Purcell, Ambrish Rawat, Mathieu Sinn, Bashar Altakrouri, Dian Balta, Mahdi Sellami, Peter Kuhn, Ulrich Schöpp, Matthias Buchinger
CoRR abs/2202.12443

A Distributed and Elastic Aggregation Service for Scalable Federated Learning Systems
Ahmad Khan, Yuze Li, Ali Anwar, Yue Cheng, Thang Hoang, Nathalie Baracaldo, Ali Raza Butt
CoRR arXiv:2204.07767

DeTrust-FL: Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning in Decentralized Trust Setting
Runhua Xu, Nathalie Baracaldo, Yi Zhou, Ali Anwar, Swanand Kadhe, Heiko Ludwig
CoRR abs/2207.07779

Curse or Redemption? How Data Heterogeneity Affects the Robustness of Federated Learning
Syed Zawad, Ahsan Ali, Pin-Yu Chen, Ali Anwar, Yi Zhou, Nathalie Baracaldo, Yuan Tian, Feng Yan
Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2021

FedAT: A High-Performance and Communication-Efficient Federated Learning System with Asynchronous Tiers
Zheng Chai, Yujing Chen, Ali Anwar, Liang Zhao, Yue Cheng, Huzefa Rangwala
International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC), 2021

CNSBench: A Cloud Native Storage Benchmark
Alex Merenstein, Vasily Tarasov, Ali Anwar, Deepavali Bhagwat, Julie Lee, Lukas Rupprecht, Dimitris Skourtis, Yang Yang, Erez Zadok
19th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), 2021

LEGATO: A LayerwisE Gradient AggregaTiOn Algorithm for Mitigating Byzantine Attacks in Federated Learning
Kamala Varma, Yi Zhou, Nathalie Baracaldo, and Ali Anwar
IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (IEEE Cloud), 2021

FedV: Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning over Vertically Partitioned Data
Runhua Xu, Nathalie Baracaldo, Yi Zhou, Ali Anwar, James Joshi, Heiko Ludwig
Proceedings of the 14th ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security (AISec), 2021

Adaptive Dynamic Pruning for Non-IID Federated Learning.
Sixing Yu, Phuong Nguyen,Ali Anwar, Ali Jannesari
arXiv preprint, 2021

Large-Scale Analysis of the Docker Images and Performance Implications to Container Storage Systems
Nannan Zhao, Vasily Tarasov, Hadeel Albahar, Ali Anwar, Lukas Rupprecht, Dimitris Skourtis, Arnab K Paul, Keren Chen, Mohamed Mohamed, Ali R Butt
Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), 2020

Customizable Scale-Out Key-Value Stores
Ali Anwar, Yue Cheng, Hai Huang, Jingoo Han, Hyogi Sim, Dongyoon Lee, Fred Douglis, Ali R. Butt
Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), 2020

DupHunter: Flexible High-Performance Deduplication for Docker Registries
Nannan Zhao, Hadeel Albahar, Subil Abraham, Keren Chen, Vasily Tarasov, Dimitrios Skourtis, Lukas Rupprecht, Ali Anwar, Ali R. Butt
USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC), 2020

TiFL: A Tier-based Federated Learning System
Zheng Chai, Ahsan Ali, Syed Zawad, Stacey Truex, Ali Anwar, Nathalie Baracaldo, Yi Zhou, Heiko Ludwig, Feng Yan, Yue Cheng
ACM Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC), 2020

InfiniCache: Exploiting Ephemeral Serverless Functions to Build a Cost-Effective Memory Cache
Ao Wang, Jingyuan Zhang, Xiaolong Ma, Ali Anwar, Lukas Rupprecht, Dimitrios Skourtis, Vasily Tarasov, Feng Yan, Yue Cheng
18th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (USENIX FAST), 2020

Wukong: a scalable and locality-enhanced framework for serverless parallel computing
Benjamin Carver, Jingyuan Zhang, Ao Wang, Ali Anwar, Panruo Wu, Yue Cheng
ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC), 2020

Position: The Case for Benchmarking Control Operations in Cloud Native Storage
Alex Merenstein, Vasily Tarasov, Ali Anwar, Deepavali Bhagwat, Lukas Rupprecht, Dimitris Skourtis, Erez Zadok
12th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage), 2020

Position: Can Microservices Drive a Renaissance in Workload-Aware Storage Management? (Poster)
Pranav Bhandari, Avani Wildani, Dimitris Skourtis, Vasily Tarasov, Deepavali Bhagwat, Lukas Rupprecht, Ali Anwar
12th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage), 2020

MOANA: Modeling and Analyzing I/O Variability in Parallel System Experimental Design
Kirk W. Cameron, Ali Anwar, Yue Cheng, Li Xu, Bo Li, Uday Ananth, Jon Bernard, Chandler Jearls, Thomas Lux, Yili Hong, Layne T. Watson, Ali R. Butt.
Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (IEEE TPDS), 2019

Using BPM Technology to Deploy and Manage Distributed Analytics in Collaborative IoT-Driven Business Scenarios
Tim d'Hondt, Anna Wilbik, Paul Grefen, Heiko Ludwig, Natalie Baracaldo, Ali Anwar
International Conference on the Internet of Things, 2019

Large-Scale Analysis of the Docker Hub Dataset
Nannan Zhao, Vasily Tarasov, Hadeel Albahar, Ali Anwar, Lukas Rupprecht, Dimitrios Skourtis, Amit S. Warke, Mohamed Mohamed, and Ali R. Butt.
IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (IEEE Cluster 2019)

Slimmer: Weight Loss Secrets for Docker Registries
Nannan Zhao, Vasily Tarasov, Ali Anwar, Lukas Rupprecht, Dimitrios Skourtis, Amit S Warke, Mohamed Mohamed, Dean Hildebrand and Ali R. Butt
IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CLOUD COMPUTING (IEEE Cloud'19), 2019

Bolt: Towards a Scalable Docker Registry via Hyperconvergence
Michael Littley, Ali Anwar, Hannan Fayyaz, Zeshan Fayyaz, Vasily Tarasov, Lukas Rupprecht, Dimitrios Skourtis, Mohamed Mohamed, Heiko Ludwig, Yue Cheng, Ali R. Butt
IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CLOUD COMPUTING (IEEE Cloud'19), 2019

Introduction to Storage for Containers
Vasily Tarasov, Dimitris Skourtis, Ted Anderson, Ali Anwar
USENIX VAULT, 2019

Towards Federated Graph Learning for Collaborative Financial Crimes Detection.
Toyotaro Suzumura, Yi Zhou, Natahalie Baracaldo, Guangnan Ye, Keith Houck, Ryo Kawahara, Ali Anwar, Lucia Larise Stavarache, Yuji Watanabe, Pablo Loyola, Daniel Klyashtorny, Heiko Ludwig, Kumar Bhaskaran.
NeurIPS FSS workshop, 2019

Challenges in Storing Docker Images
Ali Anwar, Lukas Rupprecht, Dimitris Skourtis, and Vasily Tarasov
;login; The USENIX Magazine, 2019

HybridAlpha: An Efficient Approach for Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning
Runhua Xu, Nathalie Baracaldo, Yi Zhou, Ali Anwar, Heiko Ludwig
The 12th ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security (AISec 2019)

A Hybrid Approach to Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning
Stacey Truex, Nathalie Baracaldo,Ali Anwar, Thomas Steinke, Heiko Ludwig, Rui Zhang, Yi Zhou
The 12th ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security (AISec 2019) [Best paper award]

Towards Taming the Resource and Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning
Zheng Chai, Hannan Fayyaz, Zeshan Fayyaz, Ali Anwar, Yi Zhou, Nathalie Baracaldo, Heiko Ludwig, Yue Cheng
2019 USENIX Conference on Operational Machine Learning (USENIX OpML'19)

Towards Efficient and Flexible Object Storage Using Resource and Functional Partitioning
Ali Anwar
Doctoral Dissertation, 2018

BESPOKV: Application Tailored Scale-Out Key-Value Stores
Ali Anwar, Yue Cheng, Hai Huang, Jingoo Han, Hyogi Sim, Dongyoon Lee, Fred Douglis, Ali R. Butt
The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC), 2018

Improving Docker Registry Design based on Production Workload Analysis
Ali Anwar, Mohamed Mohamed, Vasily Tarasov, Michael Littley,  Lukas Rupprecht, Yue Cheng, Nannan Zhao, Dimitris Skourtis, Amit S Warke, Heiko Ludwig, Dean Hildebrand, Ali R Butt
USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), 2018

Chameleon: An Adaptive Wear Balancer for Flash Clusters
Nannan Zhao, Ali Anwar, Yue Cheng, Mohammed Salman, Daping Li, Jiguang Wan, Changsheng Xie, Xubin He, Feiyi Wang, Ali R. Butt
IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), 2018

Analyzing Alibaba's Co-located Datacenter Workloads
Yue Cheng, Ali Anwar, and Xuejing Duan
IEEE BigData 2018

Characterizing Co-located Datacenter Workloads: An Alibaba Case Study
Yue Cheng, Zheng Chai, Ali Anwar
9th ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys 2018)

A Hybrid Trust Model for Distributed Differential Privacy
Stacey Truex, Nathalie Baracaldo, Ali Anwar, Thomas Steinke, Heiko Ludwig and Rui Zhang
Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (TPDP) 2018

A Hybrid Approach to Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning
Truex, Stacey and Baracaldo, Nathalie and Anwar, Ali and Steinke, Thomas and Ludwig, Heiko and Zhang, Rui
arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.03224, 2018

MOANA: Modeling and Analyzing I/O Variability in Parallel System Experimental Design
Kirk W. Cameron, Ali Anwar, Yue Cheng, Li Xu, Bo Li, Uday Ananth, Thomas Lux, Yili Hong, Layne T. Watson, Ali R. Butt
Technical Report, 2018

MOS: Workload-aware Elasticity for Cloud Object Stores
Ali Anwar, Yue Cheng, Aayush Gupta, Ali R Butt
To appear in the Proceedings of the International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC), pp. 177--188, 2016

ClusterOn: Building Highly Configurable and Reusable Clustered Data Services Using Simple Data Nodes.
Ali Anwar, Yue Cheng, Hai Huang, Ali Raza Butt
To appear in the Proceedings of the HotStorage, 2016

Towards managing variability in the cloud
Ali Anwar, Yue Cheng, Ali R Butt
To appear in the Proceedings of the Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops, 2016 IEEE International, pp. 1081--1084

Analyzethis: an analysis workflow-aware storage system
Hyogi Sim, Youngjae Kim, Sudharshan S Vazhkudai, Devesh Tiwari, Ali Anwar, Ali R Butt, Lavanya Ramakrishnan
To appear in the Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC'15), pp. 1--12, 2015

Cost-aware cloud metering with scalable service management infrastructure
Ali Anwar, Anca Sailer, Andrzej Kochut, Charles O Schulz, Alla Segal, Ali R Butt
To appear in the Proceedings of the Cloud Computing (CLOUD), 2015 IEEE 8th International Conference on, pp. 285--292

Scalable metering for an affordable it cloud service management
Ali Anwar, Anca Sailer, Andrzej Kochut, Charles O Schulz, Alla Segal, Ali R Butt
To appear in the Proceedings of the Cloud Engineering (IC2E), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 207--212

Anatomy of cloud monitoring and metering: A case study and open problems
Ali Anwar, Anca Sailer, Andrzej Kochut, Ali R Butt
To appear in the Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems, pp. 6, 2015

Taming the cloud object storage with mos
Ali Anwar, Yue Cheng, Aayush Gupta, Ali R Butt
To appear in the Proceedings of the 10th Parallel Data Storage Workshop, pp. 7--12, 2015

hats: A heterogeneity-aware tiered storage for hadoop
Krish, KR and Anwar, Ali and Butt, Ali R
To appear in the Proceedings of the Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid), 2014 14th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on, pp. 502--511

On the use of microservers in supporting hadoop applications
Anwar, Ali and Krish, KR and Butt, Ali R
To appear in the Proceedings of the Cluster Computing (CLUSTER), 2014 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 66--74

[phi] sched: A heterogeneity-aware hadoop workflow scheduler
Krish, KR and Anwar, Ali and Butt, Ali R
To appear in the Proceedings of the Modelling, Analysis & Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS), 2014 IEEE 22nd International Symposium on, pp. 255--264