Papers for

cloud ai engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Homomorphic advantage operator stabilizes encrypted reinforcement learning

Homomorphic Advantage Operator: Stabilizing Reinforcement Learning Under Fully Homomorphic Encryption Constraints

Abstract: Privacy-preserving machine learning presents significant deployment challenges on the cloud for intelligent systems with confidential data. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) offers a compelling solution for secure computation, preserving data confidentiality of cloud computations. However, applying FHE to reinforcement learning (RL) requires replacing non-linear operations with polynomial approximations, which diverge catastrophically due to a unique recursive error phenomenon known as the Bellman drift. This article introduces the Homomorphic Advantage Operator (HAO), a stabilization framework designed to prevent polynomial approximation divergence in FHE-based deep RL. HAO adapts the zero-mean centering projection from advantage-based value estimation directly to temporal-difference (TD) targets. This linear projection annihilates the uniform state-value baseline that drives the Bellman drift, maintaining per-state action rankings while requiring zero additional non-linear multiplicative depth and avoiding expensive ciphertext bootstrapping. The proposed HAO framework was evaluated using a three-tier experimental methodology, including a tabular Markov Decision Process (MDP), an encrypted CartPole environment using real CKKS cryptographic operations, and a 20-node logistics routing benchmark with dense continuous features. The results demonstrate that the proposed HAO strictly bounds network pre-activations within the safe polynomial approximation domain. The proposed HAO RL agents achieved 0% boundary breaches across all random seeds used, whereas regularization alone (L2 weight decay and gradient clipping) breached the bound on 3 of 5 seeds and the unstabilized baseline did so in 83.8% of episodes. Finally, HAO agents improve optimal policy accuracy by 18.0 percentage points in tabular domains and remain stable when DP-SGD-style Gaussian noise is added to the clipped gradients.

Thu 1 OctArtificial IntelligenceCryptography and Security
The gist
Reinforcement learning uses trial and error to teach computers how to make decisions, but keeping the data private during this process is hard. The paper shows that applying fully homomorphic encryption, which lets computers work on encrypted data, causes errors that make learning unstable. The researchers created a new method called the Homomorphic Advantage Operator that stops these errors from growing, keeping the learning process stable and accurate. They tested this method in different scenarios and found it worked well, even when extra noise was added to the learning.
Open → 2610.02074v1

Many-shot learning made faster and smaller with smarter memory use

MILO: Efficient Many-shot In-Context Learning with Block-wise Low-rank Compression

Abstract: Many-shot in-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to complex tasks by conditioning on thousands of demonstration examples, but this paradigm shifts the inference efficiency bottleneck to the key-value (KV) cache memory. Due to the linear scaling behavior of the KV cache, storing these intermediate tensors has become a paramount challenge for both online serving and on-device deployment. To address this issue, we propose a novel compression framework, termed MILO, that exploits the low-rank redundancy inherent in many-shot contexts. Specifically, MILO features a block-wise low-rank compression strategy that compresses the KV cache at the block granularity, where each block contains multiple many-shot examples. Furthermore, to handle the heterogeneous context density across different blocks, MILO dynamically allocates rank budgets based on the information entropy, preserving the fidelity of critical blocks while aggressively compressing redundant ones. Experimental results on Qwen2.5 models demonstrate that our method achieves up to 50% reduction in KV cache memory and 1.8x throughput improvement, with negligible performance degradation on classification and reasoning benchmarks, significantly outperforming prior baselines.

Thu 24 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Large language models can learn from many examples shown at once, but this uses a lot of computer memory, slowing things down. The authors proposed a way to compress the memory these models use by grouping examples and shrinking their stored data without losing important information. Their method adapts how much each group is compressed based on how much information it holds. Tests showed this approach halves the memory needs and nearly doubles speed with little drop in accuracy.
Open → 2609.29913v1