Papers for

web application 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.

WebGPU kernels speed up large language model tasks on consumer GPUs

GPU Goldmines: Tunable WebGPU Kernels for Edge LLM Inference

Abstract: As demand for LLM inference grows and consumer GPUs grow more capable, edge deployment is becoming increasingly attractive. WebGPU is compelling in this setting because it offers cross-platform portability and browser accessibility. However, these same strengths also make high performance difficult to achieve, as an implementation that performs well in one context may not perform well in another. To address this, we present GPU Goldmines, a framework for specifying, executing, and tuning WebGPU kernels. We instantiate GPU Goldmines with kernels for key LLM building blocks: matrix multiplication, matrix-vector multiplication, and flash attention. We characterize performance across diverse devices, shapes, and browsers, and use the resulting database to accelerate subsequent autotuning and configuration selection. On shapes drawn from Llama and Qwen models, our matrix multiplication kernels outperform ONNX Runtime and llama.cpp WebGPU kernels by 7.0x and 1.41x geometric mean, respectively, and deliver end-to-end improvements of 1.48x in the prefill stage of llama.cpp for chat workloads.

Mon 12 OctDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingMachine LearningPerformance
The gist
As more people want to use large language models (LLMs) on devices like laptops and phones, running these models fast on local GPUs is important. The authors show a new way to create and fine-tune WebGPU programs, which can run inside web browsers on many different devices. They build special programs for the common calculations LLMs use, like matrix multiplication, and test them on many GPUs and browsers. Their programs often run faster than existing tools, helping chat applications using LLMs respond quicker.
Open → 2610.17321v1

System enforces complex future data rules with low delay

Practical Runtime Enforcement of First-Order Temporal Requirements

Abstract: Runtime enforcers observe a system's behavior and exert control over it to ensure that the system always adheres to its requirements. Many natural requirements not only formulate restrictions on the system's present behavior, but also impose obligations on its future behavior; for instance, agentic security may require personal data collected during a run to be erased by some deadline. In an ever-growing compliance landscape, real-world systems may be subject to hundreds of such requirements. However, existing enforcement mechanisms supporting complex policies are often too slow for production software; instead, developers may resort to non-temporal access control mechanisms and ad-hoc instrumentation, but these scale poorly with requirement complexity. To address this problem, we introduce an efficient algorithm and tool for enforcing complex temporal requirements and demonstrate its performance. Specifically, we identify a fragment of Metric First-Order Temporal Logic (MFOTL) that can be enforced with low runtime complexity while supporting a rich family of practically relevant requirements, including obligations. We then design an enforcement algorithm for this fragment and implement it in EnfFlash, a novel tool that enforces requirements with latency up to 44x lower than EnfGuard, the previous state-of-the-art enforcer, on standard benchmarks, and up to three orders of magnitude lower on security policies for LLM agents. This performance is achieved by compiling requirements into imperative programs that we efficiently interpret. We evaluate EnfFlash both standalone, on existing benchmarks, and integrated in web applications as an enforcement backend. We demonstrate that it can enforce a substantial 400-line MFOTL formula specifying the GDPR on a social network while adding under 15 ms to each page view, which is sufficient for most interactive and real-time applications.

Sat 3 OctSoftware Engineering
The gist
Systems often need to follow rules that not only restrict what they do now but also require certain things to happen later, like deleting personal data on time. The authors present a new efficient method and tool called EnfFlash that watches and controls software to make sure it meets these complex timing rules without slowing it down much. EnfFlash works by turning these rules into simple programs that run quickly. Tested on benchmarks and real web apps, it enforces even detailed rules like GDPR with very little added delay.
Open → 2610.04611v1

Agentic systems struggle to turn web searches into usable 3D worlds

Search-to-World: Evaluation of 3D World Delivery from User Request through Web Search

Abstract: Agentic systems can interpret user requests, search the live web, and use external tools, but their ability to transform retrieved web content into a usable 3D world has not been systematically evaluated. No established end-to-end pipeline or benchmark exists for this capability. We introduce Search-to-World, an end-to-end evaluation task covering request understanding, web visual-content retrieval, and 3D-world delivery. We define Observed Retrieval Rate (ORR) and World Delivery Rate (WDR) to distinguish observing relevant content from successfully delivering a request-aligned, perceptually acceptable world. We also present WorldSearcher, a reuse-then-reconstruction harness that connects existing search agents to world delivery: it first retrieves reusable 3D worlds and, when none are available, reconstructs a world from video. A structured recovery controller revises temporal grounding, replaces source videos, or reformulates queries after failure. Using WorldSearcher, we benchmark representative models on Search-to-World and study supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for recovery subagents. Results show that delivery depends on the underlying agentic model, and that relevant-content observation does not ensure world delivery. Jointly training recovery agents improves delivery success and action efficiency. Search-to-World makes agentic 3D-world delivery measurable, while WorldSearcher provides a practical evaluation harness with recovery capabilities.

Mon 7 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
It is difficult for AI systems to take user requests, search the internet, and create 3D virtual environments that match what the user wants. The authors created a way to measure how well these systems perform this task by introducing two new scores that check if the retrieved content is relevant and if the 3D world delivered meets the user's request. They also built a system called WorldSearcher which tries to find ready-made 3D worlds or build them from videos, improving success by fixing mistakes along the way. Their findings show that even if a system finds relevant content, it does not always produce a good 3D world. Training parts of the system to recover from errors helps deliver better results more efficiently.
Open → 2609.07605v1