Sara Babakniya
About
I am a Ph.D. student studying Computer Science at the University of Southern California. I am a member of Information Theory and Machine Learning (vITAL) research lab under the supervision of Prof. Salman Avestimehr. Generally, I am interested in different challenges in ML, such as privacy and efficiency. My experience has been primarily in exploring these challenges in Federated Learning and Natural Language Processing.
I finished my B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at the Sharif University of Technology in 2019, during which I gained some experience in implementing and designing networked systems.
Experience
Student Researcher (Aug 2024 - Present)
Google Research, New York, NYSWE Intern (Feb 2024 - May 2024)
Google, Sunnyvale, CAGraduate Research Assistant (Aug 2019 - Present)
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Publications
A Data-Free Approach to Mitigate Catastrophic Forgetting in Federated Class Incremental Learning for Vision Tasks
Sara Babakniya, Zalan Fabian, Chaoyang He, Mahdi Soltanolkotab and Salman Avestimehr
NeurIPS 2023
[Paper], [Code]Revisiting Sparsity Hunting in Federated Learning: Why does Sparsity Consensus Matter?
Sara Babakniya*, Souvik Kundu*, Saurav Prakash, Yue Niu and Salman Avestimehr
Transactions on Machine Learning Research 2023
[Paper], [Code]- SLoRA: Federated Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning of Language Models
Sara Babakniya*, Ahmed Roushdy Elkordy*, Yahya H Ezzeldin, Qingfeng Liu, Kee-Bong Song, Mostafa El-Khamy, Salman Avestimehr
FL@FM-NeurIPS 2023
Best Paper Award
[Paper] Don’t Memorize; Mimic The Past: Federated Class Incremental Learning Without Episodic Memory
Sara Babakniya, Zalan Fabian, Chaoyang He, Mahdi Soltanolkotab and Salman Avestimehr
ICML-FL 2023
[Paper]Federated Sparse Training: Lottery Aware Model Compression for Resource Constrained Edge
Sara Babakniya*, Souvik Kundu*, Saurav Prakash, Yue Niu and Salman Avestimehr
NeurIPS-FL 2022
[Paper]Defending Against Poisoning Backdoor Attacks on Federated Meta-Learning
Chien-Lun Chen, Sara Babakniya, Marco Paolieri, and Leana Golubchik
ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 2022
[Paper]- Deep-n-Cheap: An Automated Efficient and Extensible Search Framework for Cost-Effective Deep Learning
Sourya Dey, Sara Babakniya, Saikrishna C. Kanala, Marco Paolieri, Leana Golubchik, Peter A. Beerel, and Keith M. Chugg
Springer Nature Computer Science, 2021
[Paper], [Code]
Honors and Awards
- WiSE Travel Grant, 2024
- Best Paper Award, FL@FM-NeurIPS Workshop, 2023
- Outstanding Poster Presentation, USC MHI Research Festival, 2023
- Best Poster Presentation, USC-Meta Center Workshop, 2022
- Grace Hopper Celebration Travel Grant, USC 2022
- Grad Cohort Travel Grant, CRA-W 2022
- WiSE Qualcomm Top-Off Fellowship 2021
- Grace Hopper Celebration Scholarship 2021
Contact
Email: babakniy[at]usc[dot]edu
University of Southern California
Department of Computer Science
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0781
last update 9/16/2024