Kavli Affiliate: Joseph Falson | Summary:Optically addressable shallow donors in ZnO combine efficient spin-selective optical transitions with the potential for long spin coherence in an isotopically purifiable host lattice, making them an attractive platform for spin-photon quantum technologies. A key missing capability, however, has been coherent control beyond the small-angle rotations accessible with ultrafast optical […]

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) is prohibitively expensive, requiring thousands of high-end GPUs. Existing works explore two directions to reduce cost: seed exploration improves training convergence by selecting high-contrast samples, yet adds compute to the critical path; spot GPUs offer 69–77% lower cost, yet sit idle during training […]

Kavli Affiliate: Mohammad Mirhosseini | Summary:Ferroelectric materials, with their strong nonlinearities, underpin key technologies across radio-frequency (RF) signal processing, optical communications, and emerging quantum systems. Barium titanate (BTO) is a notable example, combining strong piezoelectric and electro-optic responses. While bulk BTO has been studied for decades, the piezoelectric properties of its recently available thin films, […]

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Standard benchmarks evaluate time series foundation models (TSFMs) using aggregate metrics, but these can mask severe failures in critical operating regimes. We introduce regime-stratified evaluation and apply it to three TSFMs on two standard traffic speed benchmarks. Traffic exhibits abrupt regime switching between free-flow and congested states, producing bimodal speed distributions […]

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Agentic kernel optimization automates manual GPU kernel tuning via iterative generation, validation, and profiling with reasoning LLMs, casting the optimization task as feedback-guided search. However, our workload characterization reveals three system-level inefficiencies that limit search efficiency: (1) long generation latency due to LLM reasoning, (2) insufficient profiling feedback, and (3) underutilized […]

Kavli Affiliate: Austin Minnich | Summary:Thermal laser evaporation is a physical vapor deposition technique of increasing interest because of its ability to evaporate essentially any solid element, even the most refractory such as W. However, many films deposited by this method, especially non-epitaxial films, remain to be characterized; further, key system components such as the […]

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Reasoning models are increasingly used in settings where the final answer is not the only object of review: educational tools may show students intermediate steps, decision-support systems may require human oversight, and audit workflows may inspect traces for misleading or biased input. In such settings, two responses can receive the same […]