Papers for

mobile ai developers

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.

Efficient legal AI model runs on phones for Bangladesh law

Efficient LLM Distillation for Bangladesh Legal Context: A Smartphone-Compatible Retrieval-Augmented Generation Model

Abstract: Legal information in Bangladesh is inaccessible to most citizens. Statutory text is English-only, trained lawyers are concentrated in urban centres, and cloud-dependent AI fails where mobile connectivity is unreliable, a setting in which hallucinated legal text causes direct harm. The system addresses statutory interpretation only; queries that require judicial precedent or case-law reasoning fall outside its scope. We target the statutory access gap by compressing a 9-billion-parameter Gemma-2 teacher into a 2-billion-parameter student through two-phase progressive knowledge distillation. Phase 1 performs supervised fine-tuning on 9,429 quality-gated legal question-answer pairs (65% acceptance from 14,514 generated queries); Phase 2 minimises sparse Kullback-Leibler divergence against the teacher's top-50 per-token logits at temperature tau = 4.0, implemented via QLoRA (4-bit NF4, rank-32 LoRA adapters). Prior legal language models target general legal English; this system specialises in Bangladeshi statutory law. Every response is grounded through hybrid retrieval combining dense semantic search (60%) and BM25 (40%) across 36,029 statutory passages from the Bangladesh Constitution and national legislation. On a 50-query English benchmark, the distilled model reaches ROUGE-L 0.4715 and BERTScore F1 0.5679, a 103% ROUGE-L and 143% BERTScore gain over the retrieval-augmented undistilled baseline (ROUGE-L 0.2323, BERTScore 0.2340). The adapter quantises to 1.6 GB (GGUF Q4_K_M) and runs at 4-8 tokens per second on a Pixel 6 with no network access. Cross-lingual evaluation on 50 Bangla queries yields ROUGE-L 0.4083 and BERTScore 0.8133, showing effective retrieval from Bangla input against an English-only corpus. In a single-evaluator pilot, a practising lawyer rated 50 responses at a weighted mean of 4.16/5 (90% rated 4 or 5), supporting utility beyond text-overlap metrics.

Mon 21 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Many people in Bangladesh cannot easily access legal information because laws are written only in English and trained lawyers are mostly in big cities. The authors created a smaller, faster AI that understands Bangladeshi statutory laws and can run on a smartphone without internet access. This AI answers legal questions by finding and combining relevant passages from the country's laws, making legal information more accessible. Tests show it works well for both English and Bangla queries, with a lawyer confirming its usefulness.
Open 2609.24177v1

QVAC Genesis III boosts small STEM language model training accuracy

QVAC Genesis III: A Large-Scale, High-Quality Open Synthetic STEM Corpus for Efficient Language Model Pre-Training

Abstract: High-quality pre-training data is a critical bottleneck for educational and STEM-specific language models targeting edge AI and on-device deployment where token budgets are tightly constrained. While major organizations train ever-larger models on private corpora, the open ecosystem lacks STEM-focused synthetic datasets that deliver high per-token learning value efficiently for small models. To address this gap, we introduce QVAC Genesis III, a 191.43B-token, STEM-focused multi-domain synthetic corpus covering 19 domains across several difficulty levels and different educational styles. QVAC Genesis III is built via a dual generation strategy that performs targeted teacher distillation using a weak edge-scale student model as signal: the student's failures are converted into corrective explanations, while its successes are expanded into contrastive option-level reasoning over all answer choices. We further introduce an LLM-as-a-parser evaluation protocol that extracts final answers from free-form outputs and tracks both accuracy and answer validity. To validate the effectiveness of our QVAC Genesis III data, we conduct controlled from-scratch ablations with 1.7B-parameter models, showing that models trained with QVAC Genesis III consistently outperform both models trained with the open-source synthetic corpus Cosmopedia-v2 and the publicly released Cosmo-1B model across ARC, GPQA Diamond, and MMLU STEM benchmarks, achieving up to +28.57% on ARC-E and +21.35% on ARC-C, while reaching a Valid Answer Rate of up to 99.45%.

Thu 17 SeptArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
Training language models to understand science and math topics well is hard because good teaching data is rare and expensive. The authors created QVAC Genesis III, a huge and high-quality set of synthetic educational questions and answers across many STEM subjects. They teach small models more efficiently by using a unique two-step approach that learns from both the model’s mistakes and successes. Models trained this way performed better on tough STEM tests than other publicly available options. This makes training educational AI more effective for devices with limited computing power.
Open 2609.19513v1

Improving federated learning accuracy and speed over unreliable wireless networks

Joint Optimization for Federated Learning and Transmission over Unreliable Wireless Networks with Heterogeneous Data

Abstract: In wireless federated learning (FL), data heterogeneity and multiple local updates induce client drift, degrading model convergence. It is further affected by unreliable wireless links, as transmission errors may invalidate model updates. To address these challenges, we propose a federated random walk averaging (FedRW) framework, which is a variant of federated averaging (FedAvg) that mitigates data heterogeneity by updating models along random walk (RW) paths and aggregating them at the server. Model parameters are transmitted in packets with retransmission support to improve training quality by mitigating wireless errors along RW paths. Meanwhile, wireless transmission delays hinder the exploration of FedRW. To this end, we formulate a joint optimization problem that integrates learning, RW path selection, and transmission parameter tuning, aiming to minimize the training loss under delay constraints. By deriving an upper bound on the expected convergence of FedRW over unreliable wireless networks, we reduce the problem to a general form agnostic to task type and model architecture. A distributed solution is then proposed, in which the server or clients optimize packet size and maximum number of retransmissions locally, and efficiently select reliable and expandable next-hop nodes via a resilience-aware beam search with dynamic pruning. Simulation results show that FedRW achieves 2.26%-9% higher accuracy than state-of-the-art baselines under high data heterogeneity. Furthermore, the jointly optimized FedRW yields at least 2.78% higher accuracy and faster convergence compared to baselines.

Sun 13 SeptDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingMachine Learning
The gist
Federated learning lets multiple devices train a shared AI model without sharing their data directly, but when data is very different across devices or wireless connections are unreliable, the process slows down or becomes less accurate. The authors introduce a new method called federated random walk averaging (FedRW) that carefully chooses the order of device updates and resends data packets if errors occur, improving learning even with bad connections and diverse data. They also optimize how devices communicate and update the model within delay limits to speed up learning. Their experiments show this new approach achieves higher accuracy and converges faster than existing methods, especially when device data varies a lot.
Open 2609.14246v1

Security weaknesses found and fixed in on-device AI model protection

Understanding the Security Boundary of Obfuscation-based On-Device LLM Protection

Abstract: Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) offer a promising mechanism for safeguarding the intellectual property of on-device Large Language Models (LLMs). To overcome the inherent computational bottlenecks of TEEs, existing TEE-Shielded LLM Partition (TSLP) methods apply efficient obfuscation schemes to computationally intensive layers, offloading them to external GPUs while retaining only lightweight operations within the TEE. Although a growing body of TSLP-based approaches has emerged, these defense mechanisms remain largely heuristic. Consequently, some methods are proven vulnerable to certain specialized adversarial attacks designed to exploit their specific architectural implementations. To overcome the limitations of these heuristic designs, this paper addresses a fundamental research question: can we establish common primitives to unify representative prior methodologies, characterize the security boundary of their compositions, and systematically extend them? To this end, we formalize a set of obfuscation primitives, defined as dual-tuples of linear computations satisfying specific algebraic properties. We demonstrate that the matrix-level weight transformations of the representative efficient TSLP frameworks studied in this paper can be expressed as compositions of these primitives; consequently, the canonical form of these primitive compositions, denoted as O_prior, characterizes the structural boundary of this primitive family. We then expose the vulnerabilities of O_prior through a novel primitive-guided attack methodology, Collapse, demonstrating a shared vulnerability in several prominent TSLP methods published in top-tier venues, such as ArrowCloak (Security'25), TSQP (S&P'25), and LoRO (NeurIPS'25). Finally, we introduce two novel obfuscation primitives and integrate them with existing constructs to formulate O_ext, extending this security boundary.

Wed 9 SeptCryptography and Security
The gist
Protecting complex AI language models running on devices is tricky because secure environments are slow and limited. To speed things up, some parts of the model are hidden cleverly while others run outside the secure area. The authors studied common ways to do this and found predictable weak spots that attackers can exploit. They then created new hiding methods that strengthen these protections and make them harder to break.
Open 2609.10117v1