Faculty awards

Additionally, four faculty members received funding through the initiative for their projects. 

Muhammad Ali Gulzar, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, received funding for “Foundations on the Code Comprehensibility of Large Language Models.” LLMs have demonstrated strong performance in code generation. With the rise of agentic LLMs, their use is rapidly expanding into post development tasks requiring a deeper semantic understanding of code that is not strictly rooted in lexical and syntactic code features. While popular LLM benchmarks measure the accuracy of LLMs’ code generation, the extent to which LLMs truly understand code remains largely unevaluated. This project seeks to design a scalable, quantitative, and automated method for assessing how well an LLM understands code and the impact of this understanding on post-development tasks. The goal is to encourage more mindful use in coding tasks and, in the long run, provide an actionable basis for prioritizing training data for LLM fine-tuning.

Ming Jin, assistant professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received funding for “Enhancing Foundation Model Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning with Novel Reward Design.” Current efforts to enhance foundation model reasoning face limitations like high compute costs; reward hacking and stability issues with learned reward models; difficulty balancing reasoning quality and efficiency; and challenges in multimodal contexts. Improving complex reasoning of foundation models reliably and efficiently is critical for Amazon’s AI ecosystem. Producing both critiques and actionable hints for a richer signal has shown promise for improving optimization efficiency and effectiveness in previous research. This proposal builds on this foundation by designing novel reward signals that guide a model’s reasoning process, transforming it into a more autonomous agent capable of tackling complex, multi-step problems. 

Chang-Tien Lu, professor in the Department of Computer Science and associate director of the Sanghani Center, received funding for “Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Reasoning in Multi-Agent Systems.” Multi-agent systems enhance performance by combining a weaker but locally accessible model with a more powerful yet proprietary black-box remote model. This combination exposes local data to a remote agent, raising concerns about information leakage, especially in sensitive domains like healthcare information, financial records, and e-commerce activities. For virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa and smart home systems, which frequently process sensitive user data, robust local data protection is also crucial for preserving user privacy and trust. The goal of this research is to design a collaborative reasoning mechanism without exposing sensitive local data to thoroughly protect it before the black-box model inference. 

Tu Vu, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, received funding for “Efficient Model Development through Fine-tuning Transfer.” Large Language Models are continually evolving, with newer versions released to improve pretraining quality, architecture, or alignment. Yet each new version of the base model typically demands repeated and computationally expensive alignment procedures. This inefficiency extends to domain- or language-specific models, where fine-tuning must be redone from scratch with every base model upgrade. Transferring fine-tuning updates (i.e., weight differences or “diff vectors”) across model versions offers a compelling alternative: enabling model updates without full retraining. This proposed approach promises to significantly reduce training costs while maintaining competitive performance, making it a viable strategy for sustainable LLM development.

About the workshop

The invitation-only AI workshop was held in Ocotber at Academic Building One in Alexandria and included remarks by Lance Collins, vice president of the greater Washington, D.C., area; Ramakrishnan; and Anand Rathi, center liaison and director, software development, artificial general intelligence, at Amazon. 

“We are pleased to welcome our Amazon collaborators to Virginia Tech’s new Academic Building One in Alexandria for our annual gathering,” Ramakrishnan said. “It is a great opportunity to connect Virginia Tech faculty in the space of AI with Amazon researchers and foster future collaborations.”  

“Our collaboration with Virginia Tech represents a strategic investment in developing the next generation of AI talent and innovation,” said Rathi. “The research emerging from this partnership continues to advance our understanding of responsible and efficient AI systems while preparing students for the complex challenges of tomorrow.”

Additionally, Chalapathi Choppa, senior manager, security engineer, Amazon, discussed Amazon Artificial General Intelligence and the importance of responsible AI, and two Virginia Tech faculty members who have sponsored research projects with Amazon gave lightning talks. They were: 

• Ruoxi Jia, assistant professor, Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech, “A Compositional Framework for Proactive AI Safety”
• Hongliang Xin, assistant professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, “Next-Generation Catalysts for Fischer–Tropsch Synthesis”

Previous events related to the initiative have been held at the Virginia Tech Research Center — Arlington and on the university’s Blacksburg campus.

Next week’s ACC championship game won’t include the league’s best team. It will instead feature a doomsday scenario that could leave the power conference out of the College Football Playoff entirely.

First, the matchup: No. 18 Virginia vs. unranked Duke. The Cavaliers (10-2, 7-1 ACC) easily earned their spot with Saturday night’s 27-7 triumph over Virginia Tech. J’Mari Taylor rushed for a touchdown and threw for another in the first half, and the defense forced seven three-and-outs and snagged two interceptions in the Hokies’ first 10 drives to put the Cavaliers in the conference title game for the first time since 2019.

“This is what we came here for,” Cavaliers head coach Tony Elliott said on the ESPN broadcast. “Just super proud of the staff, super proud of the players, but we have four more quarters.”

Those four quarters are, surprisingly, against Duke, which ended up atop a log jam of five other teams with two conference losses (joining Miami, Pitt, SMU, Georgia Tech) … even though the Blue Devils were the only one unranked by the CFP selection committee.

Duke’s first appearance in the ACC championship since 2013 opens the door for a disastrous scenario for the conference. The CFP’s protocol does not guarantee a bid to every Power 4 conference. Rather, it reserves a spot for the five top conference champions, regardless of their league. Duke’s resume includes defeats against UConn, Illinois and Tulane. If the Blue Devils beat Virginia, the CFP selection committee could snub the ACC’s champion in favor of whoever wins the American Conference (Tulane or North Texas) and James Madison (11-1 entering next week’s Sun Belt championship) for the fourth and fifth automatic bids. The Mountain West’s champion (San Diego State, New Mexico, Boise State or UNLV) could also have a case.

The Athletic’s Playoff projection model gives Duke a 47 percent chance of winning the ACC title game, but just a 7 percent chance of making the Playoff — while James Madison has a 47 percent chance.

No. 12 Miami is regarded as the ACC’s top team, but losses to SMU and Louisville put the Hurricanes in a complicated web of tiebreakers despite Saturday’s 38-7 triumph at No. 22 Pitt.

The No. 21 Mustangs (8-4, 6-2) were in the best position to join Virginia in Charlotte, N.C., next week. All they had to do was beat a 6-5 Cal team led by interim coach Nick Rolovich to play for the ACC title for a second consecutive year.

They could not. SMU lost a wild game 38-35 on the road despite making a furious comeback. The Mustangs trailed by 17 early in the fourth quarter but scored touchdowns on four consecutive drives to take the lead with 2:22 to go. Cal’s standout freshman quarterback, Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele, led the Golden Bears on a 75-yard drive, and Kendrick Raphael twisted out of a would-be tackle and past the goal line for the winning score with 43 seconds remaining. SMU missed a 52-yard field goal in the closing seconds, sealing the loss.

CAL COMPLETES THE UPSET OVER SMU‼️ pic.twitter.com/8r9VenWZ2o

— ACC Network (@accnetwork) November 30, 2025

The Mustangs’ defeat gave the final spot to Duke, which did its part Saturday afternoon with a 49-32 win over Wake Forest. The Blue Devils (7-5, 6-2) recovered three fumbles, and quarterback Darian Mensah threw for two touchdowns to pass Maalik Murphy for the Blue Devils’ single-season record (28). Mensah also rushed for a touchdown.

Regardless of who wins the ACC, Miami would still have a shot at making the field as an at-large team. That bubble is crowded, too, however, as the Hurricanes compete against the likes of Notre Dame (which Miami beat), Alabama, BYU and Texas.