Fan Lai

About Me

I am a final-year PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan, advised by Prof. Mosharaf Chowdhury and Prof. Harsha V. Madhyastha, and was a visiting researcher at Meta AI. I got my B.S. degree in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2017.

Research Interests: Machine learning systems, big data analytics, and networked systems

I develop systems support across different layers of the software stack for efficient datacenter-scale and wide-area computing, including deep learning systems for the cloud, and distributed systems for fast federated computation over the Internet.

News

2023-03-23: AdaEmbed Accepted to Appear at OSDI'2023!!

2023-03-17: Fed-ensemble Accepted to Appear at IEEE Transactions on ASE'2023

2023-03-02: Wins Towner Prize for Distinguished Academic Achievement!

2023-01-22: CCS Accepted to Appear at ICLR'2023

2023-01-19: Egeria Accepted to Appear at EuroSys'2023

Selected Papers

OSDI'23 AdaEmbed: Adaptive Embedding for Large-Scale Recommendation Models
Fan Lai, Wei Zhang, Rui Liu, William Tsai, Xiaohan Wei, Yuxi Hu, Sabin Devkota, Jianyu Huang, Jongsoo Park, Xing Liu, Zeliang Chen, Ellie Wen, Paul Rivera, Jie You, Jason Chen, Mosharaf Chowdhury

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NSDI'23 ModelKeeper: Accelerating DNN Training via Automated Training Warmup
Fan Lai, Yinwei Dai, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Mosharaf Chowdhury

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ICML'22 FedScale: Benchmarking Model and System Performance of Federated Learning at Scale
Fan Lai, Yinwei Dai, Sanjay S. Singapuram, Jiachen Liu, Xiangfeng Zhu, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Mosharaf Chowdhury

Best Paper Award

OSDI'21 Oort: Efficient Federated Learning via Guided Participant Selection
Fan Lai, Xiangfeng Zhu, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Mosharaf Chowdhury

Distinguished Artifact Award

NSDI'20 Sol: Fast Distributed Computation Over Slow Networks
Fan Lai, Jie You, Xiangfeng Zhu, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Mosharaf Chowdhury

HotCloud'18 To Relay or Not to Relay for Inter-Cloud Transfers?
Fan Lai, Mosharaf Chowdhury, Harsha Madhyastha

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Other Recent Papers

EuroSys'23 Egeria: Efficient DNN Training with Knowledge-Guided Layer Freezing
Yiding Wang, Decang Sun, Kai Chen, Fan Lai, Mosharaf Chowdhury

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ICLR'23 Coverage-centric Coreset Selection for High Pruning Rates
Haizhong Zheng, Rui Liu, Fan Lai, Atul Prakash

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IEEE-TASE'23 Fed-ensemble: Improving Generalization through Model Ensembling in Federated Learning
Naichen Shi, Fan Lai, Raed Al Kontar, Mosharaf Chowdhury

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Preprint Auxo: Heterogeneity-Mitigating Federated Learning via Scalable Client Clustering
Jiachen Liu, Fan Lai, Yinwei Dai, Aditya Akella, Harsha Madhyastha, Mosharaf Chowdhury

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Preprint Swan: A Neural Engine for Efficient DNN Training on Smartphone SoCs
Sanjay S. Singapuram, Fan Lai, Chuheng Hu, Mosharaf Chowdhury

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Industry Experience

Visiting Researcher, Meta AI, Menlo Park, CA, February - August 2022
Project: Research on Machine Learning + Systems

Honors & Awards

Richard and Eleanor Towner Prize (3 of Entire College of Engineering)

Finalist, Meta PhD Research Fellowship (Top 10 in Broad AI & AISys Applicants)

Best Paper Award (ResilientFL'21)

Distinguished Artifact Award Winner (OSDI'21)

National Scholarship (Awarded by Ministry of Education of China)