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Hongxiang Fan

Publications and source records attributed to Hongxiang Fan.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

AOSpec: Action and Observation Co-Speculation for Low-Latency Agent Serving

Large language model agents increasingly act through stateful tools, yet model generation and environment execution remain serialized at every step. As decoding accelerates, tool execution becomes a growing bottleneck. Existing action- or observation-only speculation leaves much of this latency exposed: value is concentrated in a few slow calls, some outcomes emerge only through execution, and longer lookahead typically requires an increasingly unlikely chain of action predictions. We present AOSpec, a lossless framework that co-speculates actions and observations across the full agent-environment loop. Expected Value Decoding (EVD) directs observation speculation toward outcomes with the greatest expected latency benefit, optimizing expected time hidden rather than hit rate. For outcomes only execution can reveal, AOSpec launches latency-critical target actions in isolated forks that contain their effects, while Joint Action-State Verification (JASV) verifies both the action and its origin state against committed execution before reuse. JASV recasts long-horizon action dependency from full-chain prediction into target action-state verification, breaking the lookahead--accuracy tradeoff and unlocking long-range overlap without sacrificing serial semantics. Across Terminal-Bench serving settings spanning four harnesses, five actor models, and five serving speeds, AOSpec outperforms every practical baseline, reducing mean end-to-end latency by 11.8-32.5% and p99 latency by up to 42.8%. Its gains increase as decoding accelerates, and its observation model transfers from Terminal-Bench to SWE-bench Verified without retraining.

cs.LG

TileSight: A First-Principles Tile-Centric Analytical GPU Performance Model from Cores to Clusters

Recent GPU programming frameworks such as Triton, TileLang, and CUDA Tile adopt tiles as first-class primitives, making tile-centric programming the prevailing approach for high-performance GPU kernels. Performance-analysis tooling has not followed: programmers still rely on coarse roofline bounds, opaque ML predictors, or post-hoc profilers to understand kernel execution. This gap is acute for modern AI workloads, where kernel fusion and distributed inference depend on tensor cores, CUDA cores, cache hierarchies, memory pipelines, and inter-GPU networks. We present TileSight, a tile-centric performance-modeling tool that elevates the tile from a programming primitive to an analysis primitive. Within a GPU core, TileSight models compute-memory pipeline overlap; across cores, it models the cache hierarchy; across GPUs, it models inter-node communication. All layers share the tile abstraction: the intra-tile layer expresses work as a resource vector spanning network, memory, and compute pipelines; the inter-tile layer schedules dependent and ordered actions to expose legal overlap and infers multi-level cache hit rates from tile reuse distance; and the cross-device layer maps remote tensor accesses to placements and routes them through an alpha-beta stage cost. On A100, H200, B200, and B6000, TileSight predicts single-GPU kernel latency with 12.35% pooled mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), outperforming state-of-the-art baselines and transferring better across architectures. Its L2 cache-hit-rate predictions are within roughly one percentage point of measurements on every GPU. At up to 32 GPUs, TileSight achieves 16.18% weighted MAPE (wMAPE) on fused distributed kernels and 13.52% wMAPE on end-to-end vLLM serving. In optimization, TileSight selects tile configurations competitive with strong vendor and expert baselines. TileSight will be open-sourced upon publication.

cs.DC

Model Guides You How to Draw: Adaptive Visual Gating for Unified Multimodal Reasoning

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) with interleaved reasoning, which generate both textual and visual steps as part of intermediate reasoning traces, have demonstrated great potential for visual mathematical reasoning tasks. However, we identify a key insight in this paradigm: generating intermediate visual reasoning steps is not always beneficial and can even be harmful, as self-generated visual steps may introduce erroneous visual evidence that misleads subsequent reasoning. Moreover, frequently triggering visual steps during reasoning incurs substantial computational and memory overhead, degrading inference efficiency. To address these accuracy and efficiency challenges, we observe that the model's internal signals can indicate whether a visual step will benefit reasoning before the entire visual generation is completed. Specifically, this work identifies two internal signals: 1) Generation Intent, which reflects whether the model has a concrete textual plan for what to draw, and 2) Visual Fidelity, which measures whether the visual generation remains grounded in the original input image. Leveraging these internal signals, we propose AdaViG, a training-free adaptive visual gating method for unified multimodal reasoning. AdaViG dynamically evaluates each triggered visual step at an early visual generation stage and aborts it when both signals are weak, thereby preventing misleading visual evidence from entering the reasoning trace while avoiding unnecessary computation. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that AdaViG improves accuracy by up to 5.7% while reducing visual generation FLOPs by 25.0%-91.0% and wall-clock latency by 15.4%-45.6%.

cs.CV

Coset Ensemble Decoder for Quantum Error Correction with Algorithm-Hardware Co-Design

Reliable large-scale quantum computation relies on fault-tolerant architectures, where quantum error correction (QEC) continuously extracts and decodes error syndromes in real time. A critical component in QEC is the decoder, a classical subsystem that must simultaneously deliver high logical accuracy and ultra-low latency. This paper presents a novel algorithm-hardware co-design that improves the accuracy-latency trade-off over existing approaches such as vanilla Minimum-Weight Perfect Matching (MWPM) and Union-Find (UF) decoders. At the algorithmic level, we introduce coset ensemble decoding, which improves UF decoding by explicitly exploiting logically equivalent cosets. Our method performs ensemble forest exploration to generate multiple coset-consistent candidates and aggregates them to approximate coset-level maximum-likelihood decoding. We further reduce computational and memory complexity via reverse-order elimination and lossless graph compression, without sacrificing accuracy. At the hardware level, we design a domain-specific architecture that temporally reuses resources, avoiding the code-distance-proportional resource growth in prior spatial architectures. Several optimizations, such as multi-bank memory hashing and hierarchical ID mapping, are proposed to mitigate pipeline stalls and memory conflicts under highly concurrent access patterns. Under a circuit-level depolarizing noise model, our co-design approach achieves a better accuracy-latency trade-off than prior MWPM- and UF-based decoders, while reducing FPGA LUT consumption by up to 8.2 times compared with reported UF-based decoder resources. The tunable candidate number further exposes a flexible design knob, enabling users to tailor decoding performance to the requirements of different fault-tolerant workloads. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/IMSeonL/coset-ensemble-decoder.

cs.AR

Context Memorization for Efficient Long Context Generation

Modern large language model (LLM) applications increasingly rely on long conditioning prefixes to control model behavior at inference time. While prefix-augmented inference is effective, it incurs two structural limitations: i) the prefix's influence fades as generation proceeds, and ii) attention computation over the prefix scales linearly with its length. Existing approaches either keep the prefix in attention while compressing it, or internalize it into model parameters through gradient-based training. The former still attends to the prefix at inference, while the latter is training-intensive and ill-suited to prefix updates. To address these issues, we propose attention-state memory, a training-free approach that externalizes the prefix into a lightweight, lookup-based memory of precomputed attention states between prefix and query tokens. On ManyICLBench with LLaMA-3.1-8B, our method improves accuracy over in-context learning at 1K-8K memory budgets while reducing attention latency by 1.36x at 8K, and surpasses full-attention RAG performance on NBA benchmark using only 20% of its memory footprint.

cs.CL

SPAC: Automating FPGA-based Network Switches with Protocol Adaptive Customization

With network requirements diverging across emerging applications, latency-critical services demand minimal logic delay, while hyperscale training and collectives require sustained line-rate throughput for synchronized bulk transfers. This divergence creates an urgent need for custom network switches tailored to specialized protocols and application-specific traffic patterns. This paper presents SPAC (Switch and Protocol Adaptive Customization), a novel approach that automates the generation of FPGA-based network switches co-optimized for custom protocols and application-specific traffic patterns. SPAC introduces a unified workflow with a domain-specific language (DSL) for protocol-architecture co-design, a library of modular HLS-based adaptive switch components, and a trace-aware Design Space Exploration (DSE) engine. By providing a multi-fidelity simulation stack, SPAC enables rapid identification of Pareto-optimal designs prior to deployment. We demonstrate the efficacy of the domain-specific adaptation of SPAC across a spectrum of real-world scenarios, spanning from latency-sensitive sensor and HFT networks to hyperscale datacenter fabrics. Experimental results show that by tailoring the micro-architecture and protocol to the specific workload, SPAC-generated designs reduce LUT and BRAM usage by 55% and 53%, respectively. Compared to fixed-architecture counterparts, SPAC delivers latency reductions ranging from 7.8% to 38.4% across various tasks while maintaining adequate resource consumption and packet drop rate.

cs.NI

GreenPeas: Unlocking adaptive quantum error correction with just-in-time decoding hypergraphs

Circuit-level decoders are essential for the realisation of low-overhead fault-tolerant quantum computing. However, they rely on complex hypergraphs that are traditionally compiled ahead-of-time. This static approach introduces a significant bottleneck for an emerging class of adaptive circuits, where the structure is modified during execution based on mid-circuit measurement outcomes. Pre-compiling hypergraphs for all possible circuit branches would incur an exponential memory cost, rendering current tools impractical for these workloads. Hence, we introduce GreenPeas, a just-in-time compiler for decoding hypergraphs. By lowering the realised circuit to a space-time error propagation graph, GreenPeas decomposes Stim's backtracking algorithm for error analysis into two sequentially dependent, internally parallelisable stages: (1) mapping physical errors to their corresponding equivalence classes, and (2) aggregating error probabilities within each class. Evaluated on surface and bivariate bicycle code memory circuits without user-annotated repeat blocks, GreenPeas achieves a geometric mean speedup of 13.2x over Stim using a high-end GPU. This speedup carries over to the adaptive regime, unlocking circuit-level decoding of [[4,2,2]]-concatenated surface code memories with adaptive syndrome measurements -- a capability previously restricted to less accurate phenomenological decoders -- yielding 6.7x lower logical error rate and 4.5x lower decoding latency at a representative outer code distance of 10.

quant-ph

DeepStack: Facilitating Co-Design Exploration of 3D DRAM-Stacked Accelerators for Distributed LLM Inference

Advances in hybrid bonding and packaging have driven growing interest in 3D DRAM-stacked AI accelerators. As large language models (LLMs) scale to hundreds of billions or trillions of parameters, distributed inference across multiple 3D chips has become essential for AI serving. This trend makes cross-stack co-design critical because system-level parallelization and scheduling choices are tightly coupled with hardware characteristics such as memory organization, interconnects, and thermal constraints. We present DeepStack, an accurate performance model and efficient design space exploration (DSE) framework for distributed 3D-stacked LLM inference. At the hardware level, DeepStack captures transaction-aware memory bandwidth, bank activation constraints, buffering limitations, and thermal and power behavior. At the system level, it incorporates comprehensive parallelization strategies and execution scheduling. Through a dual-stage network abstraction and tile-level compute-communication overlap modeling, DeepStack achieves up to 100,000x faster evaluation than state-of-the-art simulators at comparable accuracy. We cross-validate DeepStack against our in-house 3D designs, an NS-3 backend with 2.12% error, and vLLM serving on eight B200 GPUs with 12.92% error. Combined with hierarchical search, DeepStack efficiently explores about 2.5 x 10^14 design points spanning the number of stacked DRAM layers, DRAM vertical connectivity, interconnects, compute-memory allocation, and distributed scheduling under thermal and area constraints. A search-space ablation shows that restricted DSE baselines can miss up to 9.5x modeled throughput. Beyond modeling and DSE, DeepStack derives design implications for distributed 3D AI systems and guides performance optimization across the stack. Source code and artifacts are available at https://github.com/tile-ai/DeepStack/tree/ae.

cs.AR

Dynamic Expert Sharing: Decoupling Memory from Parallelism in Mixture-of-Experts Diffusion LLMs

Among parallel decoding paradigms, diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising candidate that balances generation quality and throughput. However, their integration with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures is constrained by an expert explosion: as the number of tokens generated in parallel increases, the number of distinct experts activated grows nearly linearly. This results in substantial memory traffic that pushes inference into a memory-bound regime, negating the efficiency gains of both MoE and parallel decoding. To address this challenge, we propose Dynamic Expert Sharing (DES), a novel technique that shifts MoE optimization from token-centric pruning and conventional expert skipping methods to sequence-level coreset selection. To maximize expert reuse, DES identifies a compact, high-utility set of experts to satisfy the requirements of an entire parallel decoding block. We introduce two innovative selection strategies: (1) Intra-Sequence Sharing (DES-Seq), which adapts optimal allocation to the sequence level, and (2) Saliency-Aware Voting (DES-Vote), a novel mechanism that allows tokens to collectively elect a coreset based on aggregated router weights. Extensive experiments on MoE dLLMs demonstrate that DES reduces unique expert activations by over 55% and latency by up to 38%, while retaining 99% of vanilla accuracy, effectively decoupling memory overhead from the degree of parallelism.

cs.LG

Enhancing Trustworthiness with Mixed Precision: Benchmarks, Opportunities, and Challenges

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising performance across various tasks. However, their autoregressive decoding process poses significant challenges for efficient deployment on existing AI hardware. Quantization alleviates memory and compute pressure by compressing weights, activations, and KV caches to low precisions while preserving generation quality. However, existing quantization frameworks typically focus on perplexity or classification accuracy, often omitting critical trustworthiness metrics. This gap introduces risks when applying quantized LLMs to downstream high-stakes domains such as finance and healthcare. In this work, we systematically investigate the impact of quantization on four trustworthiness metrics (adversarial robustness, fairness, machine ethics, and out-of-distribution robustness) and identify the instability across compression ratios and quantization methods. Building on these observations, we develop a novel precision-ensemble voting approach that leverages predictions from mixed-precision variants of the same model and consistently improves performance by up to $5.8\%$ on trustworthiness metrics. Our results highlight the importance of considering trustworthiness when developing model compression techniques and point to research opportunities at the intersection of compression and trustworthiness for safety-critical applications.

cs.LG

AdaBlock-dLLM: Semantic-Aware Diffusion LLM Inference via Adaptive Block Size

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) are gaining attention for their inherent capacity for parallel decoding, offering a compelling alternative to autoregressive LLMs. Among various decoding strategies, block-wise semi-autoregressive (semi-AR) approaches are widely adopted due to their support for KV caching and their favorable accuracy-speed trade-off. However, this paper identifies two fundamental limitations in the conventional semi-AR decoding approach that applies a fixed block size: i) late decoding overhead, where the unmasking of high-confidence tokens outside the current block is unnecessarily delayed, and ii) premature decoding error, where low-confidence tokens inside the current block are committed too early, leading to incorrect tokens. This paper presents the first systematic investigation challenging the fixed block size setting in semi-AR decoding. Through a statistical analysis of confidence dynamics during the denoising process, we identify a volatility band (VB) region during dLLM decoding, which encodes local semantic structure and can be used to guide adaptive block sizing. Leveraging these insights, we introduce AdaBlock-dLLM, a training-free, plug-and-play scheduler that adaptively aligns block boundaries with semantic steps by adjusting block size during runtime. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks show that AdaBlock-dLLM achieves up to 5.3% accuracy improvement under the same throughput budget. Beyond inference-time optimization, we hope our semantics-aware adaptive scheduling approach and confidence-based analysis will inspire future training strategies for dLLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/lgxi24/AdaBlock-dLLM.

cs.LG

Combating the Memory Walls: Optimization Pathways for Long-Context Agentic LLM Inference

LLMs now form the backbone of AI agents across a diverse range of applications, including tool use, command-line interfaces, and web or computer interaction. These agentic LLM inference tasks are fundamentally different from chatbot-focused inference. They often involve much longer context lengths to capture complex and prolonged inputs, such as an entire webpage DOM or complicated tool-call trajectories. This, in turn, generates significant off-chip memory traffic during inference and causes workloads to be constrained by two memory walls, namely the bandwidth wall and the capacity wall, preventing compute units from achieving high utilization. In this paper, we introduce PLENA, a hardware-software co-designed system built around three core optimization pathways. PLENA features a novel flattened systolic-array architecture (Pathway 1) and efficient compute and memory units that support an asymmetric quantization scheme (Pathway 2). It also provides native support for FlashAttention (Pathway 3). In addition, PLENA includes a complete software-hardware stack, consisting of a custom ISA, a compiler, a transaction-level simulator, and an automated design-space exploration flow. Experimental results show that PLENA delivers up to 2.23x and 4.70x higher throughput than the A100 GPU and TPU v6e, respectively, under identical multiplier counts and memory configurations during LLaMA agentic inference. PLENA also achieves up to 4.04x higher energy efficiency than the A100 GPU. The full PLENA system, including its simulator, compiler, ISA, and RTL implementation, will be open-sourced to the research community.

cs.AR

FastTTS: Accelerating Test-Time Scaling for Edge LLM Reasoning

Recent advances in reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) are driving the emergence of agentic AI systems. Edge deployment of LLM agents near end users is increasingly necessary to protect data privacy, enable offline use, and provide responsive interaction with local context. However, strict memory constraints on edge devices limit deployment to smaller LLMs, whose reasoning capabilities are much weaker than those of large cloud models, hindering practical deployment of edge agentic AI. Test-Time Scaling (TTS) offers a promising solution by allocating more compute during inference to enhance the reasoning capability of edge LLMs. However, current TTS methods introduce heavy hardware performance overhead on resource-constrained devices, making them impractical for real applications. To address this challenge, we present FastTTS, a serving system that enables fast and efficient TTS for memory-constrained LLM reasoning. After analyzing common patterns across various TTS methods and identifying their performance bottlenecks, we introduce three novel techniques: i) Speculative Beam Extension, which mitigates system stragglers caused by irregular reasoning paths, ii) Asymmetric Multi-Model Memory Allocation, which dynamically balances memory usage between token generation and reasoning-step verification, and iii) Dynamic Prefix-Aware Scheduling, which optimizes reasoning execution to maximize KV-cache reuse across search paths. FastTTS offers a plug-and-play third-party library on top of vLLM, enabling edge LLMs on a single consumer GPU to match cloud-model accuracy and cloud-measured latency. Comprehensive evaluation shows that FastTTS achieves an average 2.2x higher goodput and reduces latency by 38%--68% compared to the vLLM baseline; it pushes the boundaries of low-latency TTS on memory-constrained edge devices and highlights the potential for democratizing agentic AI.

cs.LG

SD-Acc: Accelerating Stable Diffusion through Phase-aware Sampling and Hardware Co-Optimizations

The emergence of diffusion models has significantly advanced generative AI, improving the quality, realism, and creativity of image and video generation. Among them, Stable Diffusion (StableDiff) stands out as a key model for text-to-image generation and a foundation for next-generation multi-modal algorithms. However, its high computational and memory demands hinder inference speed and energy efficiency. To address these challenges, we identify three core issues: (1) intensive and often redundant computations, (2) heterogeneous operations involving convolutions and attention mechanisms, and (3) diverse weight and activation sizes. We present SD-Acc, a novel algorithm and hardware co-optimization framework. At the algorithm level, we observe that high-level features in certain denoising phases show significant similarity, enabling approximate computation. Leveraging this, we propose an adaptive, phase-aware sampling strategy that reduces compute and memory loads. This framework automatically balances image quality and complexity based on the StableDiff model and user requirements. At the hardware level, we design an address-centric dataflow to efficiently handle heterogeneous operations within a simple systolic array. We address the bottleneck of nonlinear functions via a two-stage streaming architecture and a reconfigurable vector processing unit. Additionally, we implement adaptive dataflow optimizations by combining dynamic reuse and operator fusion tailored to StableDiff workloads, significantly reducing memory access. Across multiple StableDiff models, our method achieves up to a 3x reduction in computational demand without compromising image quality. Combined with our optimized hardware accelerator, SD-Acc delivers higher speed and energy efficiency than traditional CPU and GPU implementations.

cs.AR

Breaking Physical and Linguistic Borders: Multilingual Federated Prompt Tuning for Low-Resource Languages

Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have become a cornerstone of modern natural language processing, with their capabilities extending across a wide range of applications and languages. However, the fine-tuning of multilingual LLMs, especially for low-resource languages, faces significant challenges arising from data-sharing restrictions (the physical border) and inherent linguistic differences (the linguistic border). These barriers hinder users of various languages, particularly those in low-resource regions, from fully benefiting from the advantages of LLMs. To address these challenges, we propose the Federated Prompt Tuning Paradigm for multilingual scenarios, which utilizes parameter-efficient fine-tuning while adhering to data sharing restrictions. We design a comprehensive set of experiments and analyze them using a novel notion of language distance to highlight the strengths of our paradigm: Even under computational constraints, our method not only improves data efficiency but also facilitates mutual enhancements across languages, particularly benefiting low-resource ones. Compared to traditional local cross-lingual transfer tuning methods, our approach achieves 6.9\% higher accuracy with improved data efficiency, and demonstrates greater stability and generalization. These findings underscore the potential of our approach to promote social equality and champion linguistic diversity, ensuring that no language is left behind.

cs.CL

CLUES: Collaborative High-Quality Data Selection for LLMs via Training Dynamics

Recent research has highlighted the importance of data quality in scaling large language models (LLMs). However, automated data quality control faces unique challenges in collaborative settings where sharing is not allowed directly between data silos. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a novel data quality control technique based on the notion of data influence on the training dynamics of LLMs, that high quality data are more likely to have similar training dynamics to the anchor dataset. We then leverage the influence of the training dynamics to select high-quality data from different private domains, with centralized model updates on the server side in a collaborative training fashion by either model merging or federated learning. As for the data quality indicator, we compute the per-sample gradients with respect to the private data and the anchor dataset, and use the trace of the accumulated inner products as a measurement of data quality. In addition, we develop a quality control evaluation tailored for collaborative settings with heterogeneous domain data. Experiments show that training on the high-quality data selected by our method can often outperform other data selection methods for collaborative fine-tuning of LLMs, across diverse private domain datasets, in medical, multilingual and financial settings. Our code is released at github.com/Ryan0v0/CLUES.

cs.CL

VEDA: Efficient LLM Generation Through Voting-based KV Cache Eviction and Dataflow-flexible Accelerator

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in natural language processing tasks but pose significant computational and memory challenges for edge deployment due to their intensive resource demands. This work addresses the efficiency of LLM inference by algorithm-hardware-dataflow tri-optimizations. We propose a novel voting-based KV cache eviction algorithm, balancing hardware efficiency and algorithm accuracy by adaptively identifying unimportant kv vectors. From a dataflow perspective, we introduce a flexible-product dataflow and a runtime reconfigurable PE array for matrix-vector multiplication. The proposed approach effectively handles the diverse dimensional requirements and solves the challenges of incrementally varying sequence lengths. Additionally, an element-serial scheduling scheme is proposed for nonlinear operations, such as softmax and layer normalization (layernorm). Results demonstrate a substantial reduction in latency, accompanied by a significant decrease in hardware complexity, from O(N) to O(1). The proposed solution is realized in a custom-designed accelerator, VEDA, which outperforms existing hardware platforms. This research represents a significant advancement in LLM inference on resource-constrained edge devices, facilitating real-time processing, enhancing data privacy, and enabling model customization.

cs.AR

Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting with Axis-Shared Rasterization and Order-independent Transmittance

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful technique for novel view synthesis, combining high-quality reconstruction with efficient rendering. It has been widely adopted in domains such as AR/VR, robotics, and autonomous driving. However, achieving real-time performance on resource-constrained platforms remains challenging due to strict power and area budgets. Prior accelerators improve hardware performance but still overlook key inefficiencies, including insufficient rasterization efficiency, poor sorting scalability, and pipeline imbalance. This paper presents an architecture-algorithm co-design to address these challenges. First, we propose axis-shared rasterization, which precomputes and reuses common terms along the X- and Y-axes, reducing multiply-and-accumulate (MAC) operations by up to 38% while preserving high parallelism. Second, we develop a novel order-independent transmittance method that removes the need for explicit sorting by leveraging a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP) to directly approximate the transmittance of each Gaussian, enabling efficient alpha blending with negligible quality loss. Third, we design a unified reconfigurable PE array that supports both rasterization and MLP inference, sustaining high utilization without costly sorting hardware. Our experiments demonstrate that our design preserves rendering quality while achieving a 1.33 to 1.88x speedup over state-of-the-art 3DGS accelerators. Our code is open source at https://github.com/WangZhican/ISCA26_3DGS_Acc.

cs.GR