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, NY

  • SWE Intern (Feb 2024 - May 2024)
    Google, Sunnyvale, CA

  • Graduate 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