VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Alan Zhu 0001
dblp:358/6490-1
· DBLP profile ↗
4ranked-venue papers
0as first author
4since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0001-8694-9246ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1 · 1 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Artificial intelligence
1 paper |
Efficient and distributed learning · 91% Language models and text generation · 9% | |
| Human-computer interaction and pervasive computing
1 paper |
Personal fabrication and tangible interfaces · 77% User interface design and tools · 23% | |
| Databases, data mining, and information retrieval
1 paper |
Information retrieval · 100% | |
| Software engineering, system software, and programming languages
1 paper |
Concurrent programming · 100% |
Topics — the 6 heaviest of 8, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Machine learning › Efficient and distributed learning
distributed inference |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | SpecInfer: Accelerating Large Language Model Serving with Tree-based Speculative Inference and Verification · ASPLOS (3) 2024 |
Machine learning › Efficient and distributed learning
inference serving |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | SpecInfer: Accelerating Large Language Model Serving with Tree-based Speculative Inference and Verification · ASPLOS (3) 2024 |
Machine learning › Efficient and distributed learning › inference serving
large language model serving |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | SpecInfer: Accelerating Large Language Model Serving with Tree-based Speculative Inference and Verification · ASPLOS (3) 2024 |
Information retrieval
retrieval-augmented generation |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Accelerating Iterative Retrieval-augmented Language Model Serving with Speculation · ICML 2024 |
Concurrent programming
speculative execution |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Accelerating Iterative Retrieval-augmented Language Model Serving with Speculation · ICML 2024 |
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation
large language model |
0.2 | 1 | 2024 | SpecInfer: Accelerating Large Language Model Serving with Tree-based Speculative Inference and Verification · ASPLOS (3) 2024 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
speculative retrieval · 1.5speculation stride scheduling · 1.5prefetching · 1.5batched verification · 1.5asynchronous verification · 1.5tree-based speculative inference · 0.8parallel decoding · 0.8
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Supporting Our AI Overlords: Redesigning Data Systems to be Agent-First
Soujanya Ponnapalli, Shreya Shankar, Sepanta Zeighami, Alan Zhu 0001, Shubham Agarwal 0007, Samion Suwito, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Alvin Cheung, Natacha Crooks, Joseph Gonzalez 0001, Aditya G. Parameswaran |
CIDR | 5 |
| 2024 | SpecInfer: Accelerating Large Language Model Serving with Tree-based Speculative Inference and VerificationabstractThis paper introduces SpecInfer, a system that accelerates generative large language model (LLM) serving with tree-based speculative inference and verification. The key idea behind SpecInfer is leveraging small speculative models to predict the LLM's outputs; the predictions are organized as a token tree, whose nodes each represent a candidate token sequence. The correctness of all candidate token sequences represented by a token tree is verified against the LLM in parallel using a novel tree-based parallel decoding mechanism. SpecInfer uses an LLM as a token tree verifier instead of an incremental decoder, which significantly reduces the end-to-end latency and computational requirement for serving generative LLMs while provably preserving model quality. Our evaluation shows that SpecInfer outperforms existing LLM serving systems by 1.5-2.8× for distributed LLM inference and by 2.6-3.5× for offloading-based LLM inference, while preserving the same generative performance. SpecInfer is publicly available at https://github.com/flexflow/FlexFlow/ Xupeng Miao, Gabriele Oliaro, Zhihao Zhang 0001, Xinhao Cheng, Rae Ying Yee Wong, Alan Zhu 0001, Lijie Yang 0003, Xiaoxiang Shi, Chunan Shi, Zhuoming Chen, Daiyaan Arfeen, Reyna Abhyankar |
ASPLOS (3) | 8 |
| 2024 | Robotic Metamaterials: A Modular System for Hands-On Configuration of Ad-Hoc Dynamic ApplicationsabstractWe propose augmenting initially passive structures built from simple repeated cells, with novel active units to enable dynamic, shape-changing, and robotic applications. Inspired by metamaterials that can employ mechanisms, we build a framework that allows users to configure cells of this passive structure to allow it to perform complex tasks. A key benefit is that our structures can be repeatedly (re)configured by users inserting our configuration units to turn the passive material into, e.g., locomotion robots, integrated motion platforms, or interactive interfaces, as we demonstrate in this paper. Zhitong Cui, Violet Yinuo Han, Tucker Rae-Grant, Willa Yunqi Yang, Alan Zhu 0001, Scott E. Hudson, Alexandra Ion |
CHI | 6 |
| 2024 | Accelerating Iterative Retrieval-augmented Language Model Serving with SpeculationabstractThis paper introduces RaLMSpec, a framework that accelerates iterative retrieval-augmented language model (RaLM) with *speculative retrieval* and *batched verification*. RaLMSpec further introduces several important systems optimizations, including prefetching, optimal speculation stride scheduler, and asynchronous verification. The combination of these techniques allows RaLMSPec to significantly outperform existing systems. For document-level iterative RaLM serving, evaluation over three LLMs on four QA datasets shows that RaLMSpec improves over existing approaches by $1.75$-$2.39\times$, $1.04$-$1.39\times$, and $1.31$-$1.77\times$ when the retriever is an exact dense retriever, approximate dense retriever, and sparse retriever respectively. For token-level iterative RaLM (KNN-LM) serving, RaLMSpec is up to $7.59\times$ and $2.45\times$ faster than existing methods for exact dense and approximate dense retrievers, respectively. Zhihao Zhang 0001, Alan Zhu 0001, Lijie Yang 0003, Yihua Xu, Lanting Li, Phitchaya Mangpo Phothilimthana |
ICML | 2 |