weekly-papers

Weekly Paper Notes — 🔁 Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-07-25 CS paper digest. Area: Distributed Computing. Authors: Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, Marshall Pease (SRI International) Venue: ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, Vol. 4, No. 3, July 1982, pp. 382–401. DOI: 10.1145/357172.357176 · PDF (SRI copy) Why the paper still matters Almost every distributed system in production today — Spanner, etcd, ZooKeeper, Kafka, every blockchain, every consensus protocol with a Greek letter in its name — is a descendant of the impossibility and possibility results in this 20-page paper....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-07-25 CS paper digest. Area: NLP / LLM Inference. Author: Alagappan Valliappan arXiv: 2607.21535 · PDF TL;DR Frontier LLMs increasingly ship a built-in Multi-Token-Prediction (MTP / NEXTN) draft head for speculative decoding, based on the assumption that the draft is negligibly cheap. Windowed-MTP shows that assumption breaks catastrophically at million-token context: the native MTP head does full attention over the entire KV cache at every draft step, so its cost grows linearly with context and comes to dominate — precisely where speculation is supposed to matter most....

arXiv: 2607.13276 · PDF: 2607.13276.pdf Authors: Marc Brooker, Marc Bowes, et al. (Amazon Web Services) TL;DR Aurora DSQL is AWS’s new serverless, PostgreSQL-compatible OLTP database designed for multi-region active-active writes. The architecture disaggregates compute (Firecracker MicroVMs running stateless SQL), storage, and transaction coordination into independent horizontally-scalable services. It uses MVCC with precision timestamps for coordination-free reads and optimistic concurrency control for writes, deferring all coordination to commit time via distributed adjudicators and a Journal replication tier....

Original: Leslie Lamport, Paxos Made Simple, ACM SIGACT News 32(4), December 2001. Canonical PDF: lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf Predecessor: The Part-Time Parliament, ACM TOCS 16(2), 1998 (the “island of Paxos” allegory that nobody could read). Why “made simple” Lamport originally described his consensus algorithm in 1998 in The Part-Time Parliament, a paper framed as archaeological reconstruction of the parliamentary procedures of an ancient Greek island. It was a joke. It was also, by broad consensus (pun deliberate), unreadable — reviewers hated it, adoption was near zero for years, and even engineers who wanted to build on it complained they couldn’t....

arXiv: 2607.15267 · PDF: 2607.15267.pdf Authors: Victoria Graf, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, et al. TL;DR Prior work on pretraining-data poisoning has mostly targeted curated sources like Wikipedia — a poor stand-in for the scale and heterogeneity of real pretraining corpora. This paper demonstrates that public discussion interfaces on the open web (comment sections, forums, Q&A pages) are a viable at-scale injection vector, and introduces HalfLife, an analysis technique for estimating whether adversarial content actually survives web-crawl-based data curation pipelines and lands in the training set....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-07-11 CS paper digest. Area: AI / ML. Authors: Shreyas Subramanian, Adewale Akinfaderin, Akarsha Sehwag (Amazon) arXiv: 2607.08733 · PDF TL;DR “Super Weights” — individual scalar parameters in a large language model whose removal collapses task accuracy — were the interpretability finding of 2024–2025. The natural inference was that if these coordinates matter that much for the forward pass, they should also matter that much for learning: freeze everything else, train only the Super Weights (or a small neighbourhood around them), and you should get parameter-efficient fine-tuning for essentially free....

Weekly Paper Notes — Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-07-11 CS paper digest. Area: Distributed Computing / Coordination. Author: Mike Burrows (Google) Venue: OSDI ‘06 — The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems Canonical link: OSDI ‘06 proceedings · PDF Why the paper still matters Twenty years after publication, Chubby is the paper you can point at to explain almost every coordination system in the modern datacenter....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-07-11 CS paper digest. Area: Distributed Computing / Systems. Authors: Hannah Atmer, Thiemo Voigt, Yuan Yao, Stefanos Kaxiras (Uppsala University) arXiv: 2607.08407 · PDF TL;DR DRAM is the choke point of the current generative-AI buildout. HBM3e stacks are backordered, contract prices are up, and hyperscalers are absorbing a large fraction of global DRAM output just to fan the same model weights out to ever more accelerators....

arXiv: 2607.02275 · PDF: pdf · Published: 2026-07-02 TL;DR Cadence is a Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocol that finalizes blocks at arbitrarily low block intervals by running each slot as an independent consensus instance — no slot waits for its predecessor to finish or propagate. It also drops the single-leader model in favor of multiple concurrent proposers (MCP) per slot, giving short-term censorship resistance and “hiding” (a proposer can’t craft its proposal in reaction to others’)....

arXiv: 2607.02401 · PDF: pdf · Published: 2026-07-02 TL;DR NVM key-value stores have gotten fast at ingest and point lookup, but they’ve skipped the interface guarantees a real database engine needs: point-in-time snapshots, consistent iterators, and atomic batches. FlintKV is an NVM-optimized, skiplist-based engine that natively supports all three under durable linearizability, using a novel flat-combining multi-version concurrency control algorithm co-designed with its persistence path. Standalone it beats prior work by up to 75% in end-to-end throughput; its durable skiplist can also be dropped into existing NVM stores as a component upgrade....