Selected Publications
A curated selection of work I consider most representative of my research. For the complete record, see the full publications list.
Machine Learning
Retrieval-of-Thought: Efficient Reasoning via Reusing Thoughts.
Ammar Ahmed, Azal Ahmad Khan, Ayaan Ahmad, Sheng Di, Zirui Liu, Ali Anwar.
The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
Beyond Expectations: Quantile-Guided Alignment for Risk-Calibrated Language Models.
Xinran Wang, Jin Du, Azal Khan, Qi Le, Enmao Diao, Jiawei Zhou, Jie Ding, and Ali Anwar.
The Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
[Spotlight Presentation]
MAP: Multi-Human-Value Alignment Palette.
Xinran Wang, Qi Le, Ammar Ahmed, Enmao Diao, Yi Zhou, Nathalie Baracaldo, Jie Ding, Ali Anwar
The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
[Oral Presentation]
Probe Pruning: Accelerating LLMs through Dynamic Pruning via Model-Probing.
Qi Le, Enmao Diao, Ziyan Wang, Xinran Wang, Jie Ding, Li Yang, Ali Anwar
The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
AID: Adaptive Integration of Detectors for Safe AI with Language Models.
Xinran Wang, Enmao Diao, Qi Le, Jie Ding, Ali Anwar
The 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the ACL (NAACL), 2025
[Main Conference]
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
ML Systems
ProToken: Token-Level Attribution for Federated Large Language Models.
Waris Gill, Ahmad Humayun, Ali Anwar, Muhammad Ali Gulzar
Ninth Annual Conference on Machine Learning and Systems (MLSys), 2026
FLStore: Efficient Federated Learning Storage for non-training workloads.
Samuel Fountain, Ahmad Faraz Khan, Ahmed M. Abdelmoniem, Ali R. Butt, Ali Anwar
The Eighth Annual Conference on Machine Learning and Systems (MLSys), 2025
Systems & Storage
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
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
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
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
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
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
Databases
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
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
Software Engineering
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
FedDebug: Systematic Debugging for Federated Learning Applications.
Waris Gill, Ali Anwar, Muhammad Ali Gulzar
45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2023
High-Performance Computing
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
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
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
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
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
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