Desen Sun

Welcome! I am a PhD student at the University of Waterloo, where I pursue my passion for advancing the field of machine learning systems supervised by Prof Sihang Liu. I got my Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) degree from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) in 2020, and my Master of Science (M.S.) degree from Beihang University, working with Prof Yuebin Bai.

Research Interest

My research interest is broad, including using system and archtect methods to optimize the Machine Learning applications at both performance and security angle. During my PhD career, I typically focus on Diffusion models, which have emerged as powerful generative models capable of producing high-quality images, videos, text, and other complex data distributions.

Selected Publications

Preprint EmbAdvisor: Adaptive Cache Management for Sustainable LLM Serving
Yuyang Tian, Desen Sun, Yi Ding, Sihang Liu
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Preprint FlexCache: Flexible approximate cache system for video diffusion
Desen Sun, Yuyang Tian, Tim Lu, Sihang Liu
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Usenix Sec’26 Attacks on Approximate Caches in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Desen Sun, Shuncheng Jie, Sihang Liu
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PPoPP’26 MixFusion: A Patch-Level Parallel Serving System for Mixed-Resolution Diffusion Models
Desen Sun, Zepeng Zhao, Yuke Wang
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TPDS’23 CD-MSA: cooperative and deadline-aware scheduling for efficient multi-tenancy on DNN accelerators
Chunyang Wang, Yuebin Bai, Desen Sun
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PPoPP’23 PiPAD: pipelined and parallel dynamic GNN training on GPUs
Chunyang Wang, Desen Sun*, Yuebin Bai (: co-author)
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Professional Services

• [11/2025] Artifact Evaluation Committee for PPoPP’26