arXiv subjects

Maleeha Masood

Publications and source records attributed to Maleeha Masood.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Trail: Accurate Local Smart Home Control Using Decision Models

Natural-language driven smart home control remains challenging: cloud-hosted Large Language Models (LLMs) raise privacy concerns, while local Small Language Models (SLMs) can generate invalid actions or misinterpret requests. We introduce Trail (Typed Registry-Anchored Inference for Language commands in Smart Homes), a fully local framework that replaces open-ended command generation with hierarchical typed decisions. Trail exploits the natural structure of a home's action space, selecting a room, device, and operation from candidates derived from the runtime device registry. This ensures valid actions while enabling confidence-based abstention when requests cannot be reliably resolved. We also design a structured memory module that uses typed decisions to support user preferences, device references, and multi-turn interactions. To evaluate Trail, we extend HomeBench and generate three datasets: Trek-Base, which tests natural-language variation; Trek-Robust, which evaluates robustness to changes in the home and its description; and Trek-Memory, which assesses conversational memory across multi-turn interactions. Trail achieves 85.3% accuracy on Trek-Robust versus 69.8% for a finetuned Qwen3.5-4B baseline, while remaining competitive on Trek-Base requests. With memory, Trail resolves 75.6% of the requests that depend on earlier turns, compared with 42.5% for the finetuned baseline given conversation history.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Can You Check That? The Checkability Boundary for Local LLM Network Automation

Sending every network-automation input to a third-party frontier LLM exports sensitive artifacts such as production configurations, topologies, and logs. Querying small language models (SLMs) locally avoids this egress, but SLM outputs can be error-prone for direct use. This work introduces checkability as a criterion for determining which tasks are suitable for local inference. A task is checkable when it exposes a cheap, deterministic test - an intrinsic check - that rejects outputs violating a necessary correctness condition. We instantiate this idea in Touchstone, a local-first pipeline that uses seven off-the-shelf SLMs (1-8B parameters) to generate candidates, uses task-specific intrinsic checks to reject responses, and escalates unresolved inputs to a frontier LLM. On conflict detection and intent translation tasks, Touchstone reaches 98.6% and 93.8% end-to-end accuracy while escalating only 16% and 17% of inputs, respectively. On TeleQnA, a knowledge-only control that has no task-specific intrinsic checks, Touchstone is unable to match the accuracy of the frontier baseline. Our results support a simple deployment rule: keep inference local when task semantics support precise, low-cost checks; escalate the rest.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

Bandwidth, Latency, and 400 Million Kilometers: The Case for Mars-Local Compute

There have been recent proposals for human settlements on Mars in 2030s. Any human activity on Mars must be preceded by extensive robotic exploration. However, Mars exploration is bottlenecked by the low bandwidth, intermittent Mars-Earth link. For example, HiRISE, a high-resolution camera onboard the Martian orbiter MRO imaged less than 3% of Mars over eleven years, even though MRO's low resolution Context Camera had mapped more than 99% of Mars in that time. We present a systems case for shared compute for Mars exploration. Such Mars-local compute, paired with advances in computer vision and AI, can enable large volumes of data to be collected and processed on Mars while sending periodic updates, insights, and selective datasets to Earth. To overcome the lack of surface infrastructure on Mars, we propose a two-tier in-orbit deployment of computational satellites that provides consistent coverage and bandwidth. Our analysis shows that the proposed deployment can start small: one areostationary node makes compute reachable from all active Mars missions, two additional areostationary nodes can extend this coverage to roughly 90% of the planet, while low-Mars-orbit nodes add high-rate surface links and compute capacity where demand grows.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

SILC: Lookahead Caching for Short-form Video Delivery Systems

Short video platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts have gained immense popularity in the last few years and are responsible for a large and growing fraction of Internet traffic. We identify two unique opportunities for improving short video delivery using their existing interactions with content delivery networks (CDNs). First, short videos use a push-based recommendation system, where the user is presented a sequence of videos recommended by the algorithm rather than user explicitly picking content to watch (e.g., in YouTube). Such push-based short video systems offer a unique opportunity for system design by providing visibility into upcoming requests. Second, the popularity of these videos follows a highly skewed Pareto distribution, leading to geographical and temporal overlap amongst videos being served. We leverage these opportunities to build SILC - a lookahead-aware caching system, aimed at (i) reducing CDN cache miss rates, as well as (ii) reducing midgress bandwidth between the CDN and the origin server. Our evaluation of SILC uses traces that we collect from real users, through (i) an in-person user study, and (ii) a data donation program involving 100 TikTok users across the world. Using a combination of these traces, we simulate traffic from 10,000 simultaneous users. Our evaluation shows that, compared to 10 state-of-the-art heuristic and learning-based cache eviction policies, SILC reduces a CDN's midgress costs by 11.1% to 111%.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

Counting How the Seconds Count: Understanding Algorithm-User Interplay in TikTok via ML-driven Analysis of Video Content

Short video streaming systems such as TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, etc., have reached billions of active users worldwide. At the core of such systems are (proprietary) recommendation algorithms which recommend a sequence of videos to each user, in a personalized way. We aim to understand the temporal evolution of recommendations made by such algorithms, as well as the interplay between the recommendations and user experience. While past work has studied recommendation algorithms using textual data (e.g., titles, hashtags, etc.) as well as user studies and interviews, we add a third modality of analysis - we perform automated analysis of the videos themselves. To perform such multimodal analysis, we develop a new HCI measurement approach that starts with our new tool called VCA (Video Content Analysis) that leverages recent advances in Vision Language Models (VLMs). We apply VCA on a trifecta of HCI methodologies - real user studies, interviews, and data donation. This allows us to understand temporal aspects of how well TikTok's recommendation algorithm is perceived by users, is affected by user interactions, and aligns with user history; how users are sensitive to the order of videos recommended; and how the algorithm's effectiveness itself may be predictable in the future. While it is not our goal to reverse-engineer TikTok's recommendation algorithm, our new findings indicate behavioral aspects that the TikTok user community can benefit from.

cs.SI↗