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Jul 8

Lightweight LLM Agent Memory with Small Language Models

Although LLM agents can leverage tools for complex tasks, they still need memory to maintain cross-turn consistency and accumulate reusable information in long-horizon interactions. However, retrieval-based external memory systems incur low online overhead but suffer from unstable accuracy due to limited query construction and candidate filtering. In contrast, many systems use repeated large-model calls for online memory operations, improving accuracy but accumulating latency over long interactions. We propose LightMem, a lightweight memory system for better agent memory driven by Small Language Models (SLMs). LightMem modularizes memory retrieval, writing, and long-term consolidation, and separates online processing from offline consolidation to enable efficient memory invocation under bounded compute. We organize memory into short-term memory (STM) for immediate conversational context, mid-term memory (MTM) for reusable interaction summaries, and long-term memory (LTM) for consolidated knowledge, and uses user identifiers to support independent retrieval and incremental maintenance in multi-user settings. Online, LightMem operates under a fixed retrieval budget and selects memories via a two-stage procedure: vector-based coarse retrieval followed by semantic consistency re-ranking. Offline, it abstracts reusable interaction evidence and incrementally integrates it into LTM. Experiments show consistent gains across model scales, with an average F1 improvement of about 2.5 over A-MEM on LoCoMo, while achieving higher efficiency and low median latency (83 ms for retrieval and 581 ms end-to-end).

  • 12 authors
·
Apr 21

MUSE: A Simple Yet Effective Multimodal Search-Based Framework for Lifelong User Interest Modeling

Lifelong user interest modeling is crucial for industrial recommender systems, yet existing approaches rely predominantly on ID-based features, suffering from poor generalization on long-tail items and limited semantic expressiveness. While recent work explores multimodal representations for behavior retrieval in the General Search Unit (GSU), they often neglect multimodal integration in the fine-grained modeling stage -- the Exact Search Unit (ESU). In this work, we present a systematic analysis of how to effectively leverage multimodal signals across both stages of the two-stage lifelong modeling framework. Our key insight is that simplicity suffices in the GSU: lightweight cosine similarity with high-quality multimodal embeddings outperforms complex retrieval mechanisms. In contrast, the ESU demands richer multimodal sequence modeling and effective ID-multimodal fusion to unlock its full potential. Guided by these principles, we propose MUSE, a simple yet effective multimodal search-based framework. MUSE has been deployed in Taobao display advertising system, enabling 100K-length user behavior sequence modeling and delivering significant gains in top-line metrics with negligible online latency overhead. To foster community research, we share industrial deployment practices and open-source the first large-scale dataset featuring ultra-long behavior sequences paired with high-quality multimodal embeddings. Our code and data is available at https://taobao-mm.github.io.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 8, 2025

Prompt replay: speeding up grpo with on-policy reuse of high-signal prompts

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) plays a crucial role in expanding the capacities of LLM reasoning, but GRPO-style training is dominated by expensive rollouts and wastes compute on unusable prompts. We propose Prompt Replay, an overhead-free online data selection method for GRPO that reuses prompts only (not trajectories), to preserve on-policy optimization. After each step, we insert prompts with medium difficulty into a buffer, and prioritize prompts closer to a pass rate of 0.5 (half answers correct, half wrong) to maximize the advantage, thus learning signal. Training batches are formed by mixing reused prompts with fresh samples, with cooldown steps and max reuse times controlling aggressiveness vs risk of overfitting. Across multiple model families (Llama-3.2- 3B, Qwen3-8B) and training datasets (Dolci, Polaris), evaluated using average accuracy on six standard math benchmarks, Prompt Replay reduces zero-variance prompts, increases mean absolute advantage and shows faster initial accuracy gains. Yet, it plateaus and converges with the baseline, as too aggressive configuration was used. The method is most efficient when the rollouts are the primary bottleneck and the dataset is difficult for the model. We additionally observe that Qwen2.5-Math can exhibit spurious-reward effects that invalidates ablations, raising a warning signal for using it as a sole testbed for GRPO method research.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 21 1

KVTuner: Sensitivity-Aware Layer-Wise Mixed-Precision KV Cache Quantization for Efficient and Nearly Lossless LLM Inference

KV cache quantization can improve Large Language Models (LLMs) inference throughput and latency in long contexts and large batch-size scenarios while preserving LLMs effectiveness. However, current methods have three unsolved issues: overlooking layer-wise sensitivity to KV cache quantization, high overhead of online fine-grained decision-making, and low flexibility to different LLMs and constraints. Therefore, we theoretically analyze the inherent correlation of layer-wise transformer attention patterns to KV cache quantization errors and study why key cache is generally more important than value cache for quantization error reduction. We further propose a simple yet effective framework KVTuner to adaptively search for the optimal hardware-friendly layer-wise KV quantization precision pairs for coarse-grained KV cache with multi-objective optimization and directly utilize the offline searched configurations during online inference. To reduce the computational cost of offline calibration, we utilize the intra-layer KV precision pair pruning and inter-layer clustering to reduce the search space. Experimental results show that we can achieve nearly lossless 3.25-bit mixed precision KV cache quantization for LLMs like Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and 4.0-bit for sensitive models like Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct on mathematical reasoning tasks. The maximum inference throughput can be improved by 21.25\% compared with KIVI-KV8 quantization over various context lengths. Our code and searched configurations are available at https://github.com/cmd2001/KVTuner.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 6, 2025

SiFo: Wireless Foundation Model for Low-Overhead Site-Specific CSI Feedback

SiFo, a wireless foundation model-based framework, is proposed for low-overhead site-specific channel state information (CSI) feedback. In 3GPP NR, Type-II feedback provides an expressive codebook-based CSI representation, but it requires substantial reference-signal overhead, UE-side search, and feedback. Learning-based site-specific feedback can reduce these online costs while retaining high-quality subspace representation by exploiting deployment-dependent propagation structure. However, existing site-specific designs typically train a dedicated neural network for each new site, which limits scalability when the number of deployments is large. SiFo addresses this scalability issue by pretraining a CSI feedback model across source sites and adapting it to a target site through lightweight calibration. A small set of target-site users reports low-dimensional reference signal received power (RSRP) fingerprints, and their full-CSI-based subspace labels are stored as calibration memory. During online operation, a served user is matched to calibrated users through the same SSB probing and RSRP reporting procedure, so nearby calibration samples provide site-specific subspace guidance without updating model parameters. SiFo therefore transfers common propagation knowledge while retaining local adaptation. Numerical results across ten city scenarios demonstrate that SiFo (i) achieves higher CSI-capture efficiency than separately trained site-specific learning baselines under the same target-site labeled budget, (ii) approaches the high-overhead 3GPP NR Type-II feedback reference using only RSRP measurements collected during online SSB probing, and (iii) converts the high CSI-capture efficiency and low overhead into effective spectral efficiency improvement under limited target-site data.

  • 4 authors
·
May 14

MOORL: A Framework for Integrating Offline-Online Reinforcement Learning

Sample efficiency and exploration remain critical challenges in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), particularly in complex domains. Offline RL, which enables agents to learn optimal policies from static, pre-collected datasets, has emerged as a promising alternative. However, offline RL is constrained by issues such as out-of-distribution (OOD) actions that limit policy performance and generalization. To overcome these limitations, we propose Meta Offline-Online Reinforcement Learning (MOORL), a hybrid framework that unifies offline and online RL for efficient and scalable learning. While previous hybrid methods rely on extensive design components and added computational complexity to utilize offline data effectively, MOORL introduces a meta-policy that seamlessly adapts across offline and online trajectories. This enables the agent to leverage offline data for robust initialization while utilizing online interactions to drive efficient exploration. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that the hybrid approach enhances exploration by effectively combining the complementary strengths of offline and online data. Furthermore, we demonstrate that MOORL learns a stable Q-function without added complexity. Extensive experiments on 28 tasks from the D4RL and V-D4RL benchmarks validate its effectiveness, showing consistent improvements over state-of-the-art offline and hybrid RL baselines. With minimal computational overhead, MOORL achieves strong performance, underscoring its potential for practical applications in real-world scenarios.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 11, 2025

KVCOMM: Online Cross-context KV-cache Communication for Efficient LLM-based Multi-agent Systems

Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems are increasingly adopted for complex language processing tasks that require communication and coordination among agents. However, these systems often suffer substantial overhead from repeated reprocessing of overlapping contexts across agents. In typical pipelines, once an agent receives a message from its predecessor, the full context-including prior turns-must be reprocessed from scratch, leading to inefficient processing. While key-value (KV) caching is an effective solution for avoiding redundant computation in single-agent settings where prefixes remain unchanged, it cannot be directly reused in multi-agent scenarios due to diverging prefixes introduced by agent-specific context extensions. We identify that the core challenge lies in the offset variance of KV-caches across agents. To address this, we propose KVCOMM, a training-free framework that enables efficient prefilling in multi-agent inference by reusing KV-caches and aligning cache offsets of overlapping contexts under diverse prefix contexts. KVCOMM estimates and adjusts KV-caches for shared content by referencing a pool of cached examples-termed anchors-that store observed cache deviations under varying prefixes. The anchor pool is maintained and updated online, allowing dynamic adaptation to distinct user requests and context structures. KVCOMM achieves over 70% reuse rate across diverse multi-agent workloads, including retrieval-augmented generation, math reasoning, and collaborative coding tasks, all without quality degradation. Particularly, when each fully-connected agent receives 1K input tokens with 512 prefix tokens and 512 output tokens under a five-agent setting, KVCOMM achieves up to 7.8x speedup compared to the standard prefill pipeline, reducing TTFT from ~430 ms to ~55 ms.

Dynamic Gradient Alignment for Online Data Mixing

The composition of training data mixtures is critical for effectively training large language models (LLMs), as it directly impacts their performance on downstream tasks. Our goal is to identify an optimal data mixture to specialize an LLM for a specific task with access to only a few examples. Traditional approaches to this problem include ad-hoc reweighting methods, importance sampling, and gradient alignment techniques. This paper focuses on gradient alignment and introduces Dynamic Gradient Alignment (DGA), a scalable online gradient alignment algorithm. DGA dynamically estimates the pre-training data mixture on which the models' gradients align as well as possible with those of the model on the specific task. DGA is the first gradient alignment approach that incurs minimal overhead compared to standard pre-training and outputs a competitive model, eliminating the need for retraining the model. Experimentally, we demonstrate significant improvements over importance sampling in two key scenarios: (i) when the pre-training set is small and importance sampling overfits due to limited data; and (ii) when there is insufficient specialized data, trapping importance sampling on narrow pockets of data. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of gradient alignment methods in optimizing training data mixtures, particularly in data-constrained environments, and offer a practical solution for enhancing LLM performance on specific tasks with limited data availability.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 3, 2024

Can Prompt Difficulty be Online Predicted for Accelerating RL Finetuning of Reasoning Models?

Recent advances have witnessed the effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). The optimization process often requires numerous iterations to achieve satisfactory performance, resulting in high computational costs due to the need for frequent prompt evaluations under intensive LLM interactions and repeated policy updates. Appropriate online prompt selection methods reduce iteration steps by prioritizing informative prompts during training, while the pipeline's reliance on exhaustive prompt evaluation and subset selection for optimization still incurs substantial computational overhead due to frequent LLM inference calls. Distinguished from these direct evaluate-then-select schemes, this work investigates iterative approximate evaluation for arbitrary prompts and introduces Model Predictive Prompt Selection (MoPPS), a Bayesian risk-predictive framework that online estimates prompt difficulty without requiring costly LLM interactions. Technically, MoPPS models each prompt's success rate as a latent variable, performs streaming Bayesian inference, and employs posterior sampling in a constructed multi-armed bandit machine, enabling sample efficient and adaptive prompt selection. Extensive experiments across mathematics, planning, and vision-based geometry tasks show that MoPPS reliably predicts prompt difficulty and accelerates training with significantly reduced LLM rollouts.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 6, 2025

Learning Ego-Centric BEV Representations from a Perspective-Privileged View: Cross-View Supervision for Online HD Map Construction

Bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations derived from multi-camera input have become a central interface for online high-definition (HD) map construction. However, most approaches rely solely on ego-centric supervision, requiring large-scale scene structure to be inferred from incomplete observations, occlusions, and diminishing information density at long range, where perspective effects and spatial sparsity hinder consistent structural reasoning. We introduce Cross-View Supervision (CVS), a representation learning paradigm that transfers geometric and topological priors from an ego-aligned overhead perspective into camera-based BEV encoders. Rather than adding auxiliary semantic losses, CVS aligns representations in a shared BEV feature space and distills globally consistent structural knowledge from a perspective-privileged teacher into the ego-centric backbone. This supervision enhances structural coherence without modifying the inference architecture or requiring overhead input at test time. Experiments on nuScenes using ego-aligned aerial imagery from the AID4AD cross-view extension demonstrate consistent improvements over StreamMapNet while maintaining identical camera-only inference. CVS yields +3.9\,mAP in the standard 60times30,m region and +9.9\,mAP in the extended 100times50,m setting, corresponding to a 44\% relative gain at long range. These results highlight perspective-privileged structural supervision as a promising training principle for improving BEV representation learning in HD map construction.

  • 4 authors
·
May 11

OSDN: Improving Delta Rule with Provable Online Preconditioning in Linear Attention

Linear attention and state-space models offer constant-memory alternatives to softmax attention, but often struggle with in-context associative recall. The Delta Rule mitigates this by writing each token via one step of online gradient descent. However, its step size relies on a single scalar gate that ignores the feature-wise curvature of the inner objective. We propose Online Scaled DeltaNet (OSDN), which augments the scalar gate with a diagonal preconditioner updated online via hypergradient feedback. Crucially, this right-preconditioning is algebraically equivalent to a per-feature scaling of the write-side key. This equivalence allows OSDN to strictly preserve the hardware-friendly chunkwise parallel pipeline of DeltaNet without incurring high-dimensional state overhead. Theoretically, by exploiting the exact-quadratic structure of the inner regression loss, we establish super-geometric convergence against a right-Newton comparator and prove an algorithm-aligned token-local residual contraction bound. To handle non-stationary contexts, we further introduce Adaptive Preconditioner Forgetting (APF) to dynamically refresh stale calibration. Empirically, OSDN demonstrates strong performance across scales. At the 340M-parameter scale, OSDN improves JRT-style in-context recall by 32% over DeltaNet. Scaling to 1.3B parameters, it achieves a 39% reduction in the recall residual ratio while maintaining parity on general downstream tasks (e.g., perplexity and LongBench) -- demonstrating that our online-preconditioning mechanism effectively transfers and amplifies at the billion-parameter scale.

  • 6 authors
·
May 12

AdaWorldPolicy: World-Model-Driven Diffusion Policy with Online Adaptive Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Effective robotic manipulation requires policies that can anticipate physical outcomes and adapt to real-world environments. Effective robotic manipulation requires policies that can anticipate physical outcomes and adapt to real-world environments. In this work, we introduce a unified framework, World-Model-Driven Diffusion Policy with Online Adaptive Learning (AdaWorldPolicy) to enhance robotic manipulation under dynamic conditions with minimal human involvement. Our core insight is that world models provide strong supervision signals, enabling online adaptive learning in dynamic environments, which can be complemented by force-torque feedback to mitigate dynamic force shifts. Our AdaWorldPolicy integrates a world model, an action expert, and a force predictor-all implemented as interconnected Flow Matching Diffusion Transformers (DiT). They are interconnected via the multi-modal self-attention layers, enabling deep feature exchange for joint learning while preserving their distinct modularity characteristics. We further propose a novel Online Adaptive Learning (AdaOL) strategy that dynamically switches between an Action Generation mode and a Future Imagination mode to drive reactive updates across all three modules. This creates a powerful closed-loop mechanism that adapts to both visual and physical domain shifts with minimal overhead. Across a suite of simulated and real-robot benchmarks, our AdaWorldPolicy achieves state-of-the-art performance, with dynamical adaptive capacity to out-of-distribution scenarios.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 22

PANDO: Efficient Multimodal AI Agents via Online Skill Distillation

Recent advances in multimodal web agents often rely on increased inference-time computation, including rollout search, verifier passes, offline skill discovery, and specialist model stacks. This raises a central question: can a web agent become more efficient as it accumulates experience, rather than more expensive? We first analyze trajectories from VisualWebArena and identify three recurring sources of inefficiency: repeat-action loops, hidden discovery costs, and low prompt-cache reuse. We then introduce PANDO, a single-rollout online skill-distillation framework that maintains a structured Skill Library and combines progress reflection, confidence-based skill demotion, hierarchical routing, visual compression, and cache-aware prompting. On the full set of 910 VisualWebArena tasks, PANDO achieves a 58.3% success rate, outperforming SGV (54.0%) and our WALT reproduction (45.2%), while using 58% fewer tokens than SGV and 61% fewer tokens than WALT, without any pre-evaluation discovery budget. A 300-task ablation further shows that rules and routines provide most of the success gains, while routing, compression, and cache-aware prompting convert the larger skill library into lower marginal token cost. Finally, we introduce three trajectory-level efficiency metrics -- Action Repetition Rate, Step Overhead Ratio, and Prompt Cache Utilization -- to make efficiency visible beyond terminal success.

Tadpole: Autoencoders as Foundation Models for 3D PDEs with Online Learning

We introduce Tadpole, a novel foundation model for three-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs) that addresses key challenges in transferability, scalability to high dimensionality, and multi-functionality. Tadpole is pre-trained as an autoencoder on synthetic 3D PDE data generated by an efficient online data-generation framework. This enables large-scale, diverse training without storage or I/O overhead, demonstrated by scaling to an equivalent of hundreds of terabytes of training data. By autoencoding single-channel spatial crops, Tadpole learns rich and transferable representations across heterogeneous physical systems with varying numbers of state variables and spatial resolutions. Although pre-trained solely as an autoencoder, Tadpole can be efficiently applied for multiple downstream tasks beyond reconstruction, including dynamics learning and generative modeling. For dynamics learning, we propose a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy that integrates low-rank adaptation, latent-space transformations, and reintroduced skip connections, achieving accurate temporal modeling with a minimal number of trainable parameters. Tadpole demonstrates strong fine-tuning performance across various downstream tasks, highlighting its versatility and effectiveness as a foundation model for 3D PDE learning. Source code and pre-trained weights of Tadpole are available at https://github.com/tum-pbs/tadpole

  • 4 authors
·
May 13

S2O: Early Stopping for Sparse Attention via Online Permutation

Attention scales quadratically with sequence length, fundamentally limiting long-context inference. Existing block-granularity sparsification can reduce latency, but coarse blocks impose an intrinsic sparsity ceiling, making further improvements difficult even with carefully engineered designs. We present S2O, which performs early stopping for sparse attention via online permutation. Inspired by virtual-to-physical address mapping in memory systems, S2O revisits and factorizes FlashAttention execution, enabling inference to load non-contiguous tokens rather than a contiguous span in the original order. Motivated by fine-grained structures in attention heatmaps, we transform explicit permutation into an online, index-guided, discrete loading policy; with extremely lightweight preprocessing and index-remapping overhead, it concentrates importance on a small set of high-priority blocks. Building on this importance-guided online permutation for loading, S2O further introduces an early-stopping rule: computation proceeds from high to low importance; once the current block score falls below a threshold, S2O terminates early and skips the remaining low-contribution blocks, thereby increasing effective sparsity and reducing computation under a controlled error budget. As a result, S2O substantially raises the practical sparsity ceiling. On Llama-3.1-8B under a 128K context, S2O reduces single-operator MSE by 3.82times at matched sparsity, and reduces prefill compute density by 3.31times at matched MSE; meanwhile, it preserves end-to-end accuracy and achieves 7.51times attention and 3.81times end-to-end speedups.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 25

VADE: Variance-Aware Dynamic Sampling via Online Sample-Level Difficulty Estimation for Multimodal RL

Group-based policy optimization methods like GRPO and GSPO have become standard for training multimodal models, leveraging group-wise rollouts and relative advantage estimation. However, they suffer from a critical gradient vanishing problem when all responses within a group receive identical rewards, causing advantage estimates to collapse and training signals to diminish. Existing attempts to mitigate this issue fall into two paradigms: filtering-based and sampling-based methods. Filtering-based methods first generate rollouts broadly and then retroactively filter out uninformative groups, leading to substantial computational overhead. Sampling-based methods proactively select effective samples before rollout but rely on static criteria or prior dataset knowledge, lacking real-time adaptability. To address these issues, we propose VADE, a Variance-Aware Dynamic sampling framework via online sample-level difficulty Estimation. Our framework integrates three key components: online sample-level difficulty estimation using Beta distributions, a Thompson sampler that maximizes information gain through the estimated correctness probability, and a two-scale prior decay mechanism that maintains robust estimation under policy evolution. This three components design enables VADE to dynamically select the most informative samples, thereby amplifying training signals while eliminating extra rollout costs. Extensive experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks show that VADE consistently outperforms strong baselines in both performance and sample efficiency, while achieving a dramatic reduction in computational overhead. More importantly, our framework can serves as a plug-and-play component to be seamlessly integrated into existing group-based RL algorithms. Code and models are available at https://VADE-RL.github.io.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 24, 2025

BOTS: A Unified Framework for Bayesian Online Task Selection in LLM Reinforcement Finetuning

Reinforcement finetuning (RFT) is a key technique for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences and enhancing reasoning, yet its effectiveness is highly sensitive to which tasks are explored during training. Uniform task sampling is inefficient, wasting computation on tasks that are either trivial or unsolvable, while existing task selection methods often suffer from high rollout costs, poor adaptivity, or incomplete evidence. We introduce BOTS, a unified framework for Bayesian Online Task Selection in LLM reinforcement finetuning. Grounded in Bayesian inference, BOTS adaptively maintains posterior estimates of task difficulty as the model evolves. It jointly incorporates explicit evidence from direct evaluations of selected tasks and implicit evidence inferred from these evaluations for unselected tasks, with Thompson sampling ensuring a principled balance between exploration and exploitation for task selection. To make implicit evidence practical, we instantiate it with an ultra-light interpolation-based plug-in that estimates difficulties of tasks without extra rollouts, adding negligible overhead. Empirically, across diverse domains and LLM scales, BOTS consistently improves data efficiency and performance over baselines and ablations, providing a practical and extensible solution for dynamic task selection in RFT. Code is available at https://github.com/agentscope-ai/Trinity-RFT/tree/main/examples/bots.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 30, 2025

RLinf-USER: A Unified and Extensible System for Real-World Online Policy Learning in Embodied AI

Online policy learning directly in the physical world is a promising yet challenging direction for embodied intelligence. Unlike simulation, real-world systems cannot be arbitrarily accelerated, cheaply reset, or massively replicated, which makes scalable data collection, heterogeneous deployment, and long-horizon effective training difficult. These challenges suggest that real-world policy learning is not only an algorithmic issue but fundamentally a systems problem. We present USER, a Unified and extensible SystEm for Real-world online policy learning. USER treats physical robots as first-class hardware resources alongside GPUs through a unified hardware abstraction layer, enabling automatic discovery, management, and scheduling of heterogeneous robots. To address cloud-edge communication, USER introduces an adaptive communication plane with tunneling-based networking, distributed data channels for traffic localization, and streaming-multiprocessor-aware weight synchronization to regulate GPU-side overhead. On top of this infrastructure, USER organizes learning as a fully asynchronous framework with a persistent, cache-aware buffer, enabling efficient long-horizon experiments with robust crash recovery and reuse of historical data. In addition, USER provides extensible abstractions for rewards, algorithms, and policies, supporting online imitation or reinforcement learning of CNN/MLP, generative policies, and large vision-language-action (VLA) models within a unified pipeline. Results in both simulation and the real world show that USER enables multi-robot coordination, heterogeneous manipulators, edge-cloud collaboration with large models, and long-running asynchronous training, offering a unified and extensible systems foundation for real-world online policy learning.

RLinf RLinf
·
Feb 8 2

Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference via KV Cache Clustering

Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows have become increasingly prevalent for tackling complex tasks. However, the substantial Key-Value (KV) cache required for long-context LLMs poses significant deployment challenges. Existing approaches either discard potentially critical information needed for future generations or offer limited efficiency gains due to high computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce Chelsea, a simple yet effective framework for online KV cache clustering. Our approach is based on the observation that key states exhibit high similarity along the sequence dimension. To enable efficient clustering, we divide the sequence into chunks and propose Chunked Soft Matching, which employs an alternating partition strategy within each chunk and identifies clusters based on similarity. Chelsea then merges the KV cache within each cluster into a single centroid. Additionally, we provide a theoretical analysis of the computational complexity and the optimality of the intra-chunk partitioning strategy. Extensive experiments across various models and long-context benchmarks demonstrate that Chelsea achieves up to 80% reduction in KV cache memory usage while maintaining comparable model performance. Moreover, with minimal computational overhead, Chelsea accelerates the decoding stage of inference by up to 3.19times and reduces end-to-end latency by up to 2.72times.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 12, 2025

Federated Reconnaissance: Efficient, Distributed, Class-Incremental Learning

We describe federated reconnaissance, a class of learning problems in which distributed clients learn new concepts independently and communicate that knowledge efficiently. In particular, we propose an evaluation framework and methodological baseline for a system in which each client is expected to learn a growing set of classes and communicate knowledge of those classes efficiently with other clients, such that, after knowledge merging, the clients should be able to accurately discriminate between classes in the superset of classes observed by the set of clients. We compare a range of learning algorithms for this problem and find that prototypical networks are a strong approach in that they are robust to catastrophic forgetting while incorporating new information efficiently. Furthermore, we show that the online averaging of prototype vectors is effective for client model merging and requires only a small amount of communication overhead, memory, and update time per class with no gradient-based learning or hyperparameter tuning. Additionally, to put our results in context, we find that a simple, prototypical network with four convolutional layers significantly outperforms complex, state of the art continual learning algorithms, increasing the accuracy by over 22% after learning 600 Omniglot classes and over 33% after learning 20 mini-ImageNet classes incrementally. These results have important implications for federated reconnaissance and continual learning more generally by demonstrating that communicating feature vectors is an efficient, robust, and effective means for distributed, continual learning.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 31, 2021

Bridging the Gap Between Promise and Performance for Microscaling FP4 Quantization

The recent hardware-accelerated microscaling 4-bit floating-point formats such as MXFP4 and NVFP4, supported on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, promise to revolutionize large language model (LLM) inference. Yet, their practical benefits remain unproven. We present the first comprehensive study of MXFP4 and NVFP4 for post-training quantization, revealing gaps between their promise and real-world performance. Our analysis shows that state-of-the-art methods struggle with FP4, due to two key issues: (1) NVFP4's small group size provably neutralizes traditional outlier mitigation techniques; (2) MXFP4's power-of-two scale quantization severely degrades accuracy due to high induced error. To bridge this gap, we introduce Micro-Rotated-GPTQ (MR-GPTQ), a variant of the classic GPTQ quantization algorithm that tailors the quantization process to FP4's unique properties, by using block-wise Hadamard transforms and format-specific optimizations. We support our proposal with a set of high-performance GPU kernels that enable the MR-GPTQ format with negligible overhead, by rotation fusion into the weights, and fast online computation of the activations. This leads to speedups vs. FP16 of up to 3.6x layer-wise, and 2.2x end-to-end on NVIDIA B200, and of 6x layer-wise and 4x end-to-end on RTX5090. Our extensive empirical evaluation demonstrates that MR-GPTQ matches or outperforms state-of-the-art accuracy, significantly boosting MXFP4, to the point where it nears that of NVFP4. We conclude that, while FP4 is not an automatic upgrade over INT4, format-specialized methods like MR-GPTQ can unlock a new frontier of accuracy-performance trade-offs.

CORRECT: COndensed eRror RECognition via knowledge Transfer in multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly capable of tackling complex real-world tasks, yet their reliance on inter-agent coordination, tool use, and long-horizon reasoning makes error recognition particularly challenging. Minor errors can propagate across agents, escalating into task failures while producing long, intertwined execution trajectories that impose significant costs for both human developers and automated systems to debug and analyze. Our key insight is that, despite surface differences in failure trajectories (e.g., logs), MAS errors often recur with similar structural patterns. This paper presents CORRECT, the first lightweight, training-free framework that leverages an online cache of distilled error schemata to recognize and transfer knowledge of failure structures across new requests. This cache-based reuse allows LLMs to perform targeted error localization at inference time, avoiding the need for expensive retraining while adapting to dynamic MAS deployments in subseconds. To support rigorous study in this domain, we also introduce CORRECT-Error, a large-scale dataset of over 2,000 annotated trajectories collected through a novel error-injection pipeline guided by real-world distributions, and further validated through human evaluation to ensure alignment with natural failure patterns. Experiments across seven diverse MAS applications show that CORRECT improves step-level error localization up to 19.8% over existing advances while at near-zero overhead, substantially narrowing the gap between automated and human-level error recognition.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 28, 2025 2

Nacrith: Neural Lossless Compression via Ensemble Context Modeling and High-Precision CDF Coding

We present Nacrith, a lossless compression system that combines a 135M-parameter transformer language model (SmolLM2-135M) with an ensemble of lightweight online predictors and a 32-bit arithmetic coder. Beyond the base LLM-plus-arithmetic-coding paradigm, Nacrith introduces several contributions: (1) a CDF precision upgrade from 2^16 to 2^24 that eliminates ~75% of quantization overhead caused by minimum-probability floors in large vocabularies; (2) a token-level N-gram model for fast local predictions; (3) an adaptive log-space bias head correcting per-document LLM errors via online gradient descent; (4) confidence-based LLM skip for accelerating highly predictable tokens; (5) a hybrid binary format (NC06) extending neural compression to arbitrary binary files--to our knowledge a first among LLM-based compressors; (6) a llama.cpp inference backend achieving ~7x faster single-token decode than PyTorch; (7) parallel multi-GPU compression across up to 8 workers; and (8) native KV cache sliding window reducing per-slide cost by ~37x. The system requires only ~500 MB of GGUF weights and ~1.2 GB VRAM per worker, running on consumer GPUs. On alice29.txt (Canterbury Corpus, 152 KB), Nacrith achieves 0.918 bits per byte (bpb)--outperforming gzip by 3.1x, bzip2 by 2.5x, CMIX v21 by 44%, and ts_zip by 20%, while compressing below the 0th-, 1st-, and 2nd-order byte-level Shannon entropy bounds. On enwik8 (100 MB), Nacrith achieves 0.9389 bpb (11.74%), surpassing ts_zip (~1.11 bpb) by 15% and FineZip (1.024 bpb) by 8% despite using a 60x smaller model with no fine-tuning. An out-of-distribution evaluation on a document published after the model's training cutoff confirms these gains are not memorization artifacts, achieving 0.723 bpb on unseen text.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 23 3

KVServe: Service-Aware KV Cache Compression for Communication-Efficient Disaggregated LLM Serving

LLMs are widely adopted in production, pushing inference systems to their limits. Disaggregated LLM serving (e.g., PD separation and KV state disaggregation) improves scalability and cost efficiency, but it also turns KV into an explicit payload crossing network and storage boundaries, making KV a dominant end-to-end bottleneck. Existing KV compression are typically static runtime configurations, despite production service context varies over time in workload mix, bandwidth, and SLO/quality budgets. As a result, a fixed choice can be suboptimal or even increase latency. We present KVServe, the first service-aware and adaptive KV communication compression framework for disaggregated LLM serving: KVServe (1) unifies KV compression into a modular strategy space with new components and cross-method recomposition; (2) introduces Bayesian Profiling Engine that efficiently searches this space and distills a 3D Pareto candidate set, reducing 50times offline search overhead; and (3) deploys a Service-Aware Online Controller that combines an analytical latency model with a lightweight bandit to select profiles under constraints and correct offline-to-online mismatch. Integrated into vLLM and evaluated across datasets, models, GPUs and networks, KVServe achieves up to 9.13times JCT speedup in PD-separated serving and up to 32.8times TTFT reduction in KV-disaggregated serving.

SPILLage: Agentic Oversharing on the Web

LLM-powered agents are beginning to automate user's tasks across the open web, often with access to user resources such as emails and calendars. Unlike standard LLMs answering questions in a controlled ChatBot setting, web agents act "in the wild", interacting with third parties and leaving behind an action trace. Therefore, we ask the question: how do web agents handle user resources when accomplishing tasks on their behalf across live websites? In this paper, we formalize Natural Agentic Oversharing -- the unintentional disclosure of task-irrelevant user information through an agent trace of actions on the web. We introduce SPILLage, a framework that characterizes oversharing along two dimensions: channel (content vs. behavior) and directness (explicit vs. implicit). This taxonomy reveals a critical blind spot: while prior work focuses on text leakage, web agents also overshare behaviorally through clicks, scrolls, and navigation patterns that can be monitored. We benchmark 180 tasks on live e-commerce sites with ground-truth annotations separating task-relevant from task-irrelevant attributes. Across 1,080 runs spanning two agentic frameworks and three backbone LLMs, we demonstrate that oversharing is pervasive with behavioral oversharing dominates content oversharing by 5x. This effect persists -- and can even worsen -- under prompt-level mitigation. However, removing task-irrelevant information before execution improves task success by up to 17.9%, demonstrating that reducing oversharing improves task success. Our findings underscore that protecting privacy in web agents is a fundamental challenge, requiring a broader view of "output" that accounts for what agents do on the web, not just what they type. Our datasets and code are available at https://github.com/jrohsc/SPILLage.

Doing More with Less -- Implementing Routing Strategies in Large Language Model-Based Systems: An Extended Survey

Large Language Models (LLM)-based systems, i.e. interconnected elements that include an LLM as a central component (e.g., conversational agents), are typically monolithic static architectures that rely on a single LLM for all user queries. However, they often require different preprocessing strategies, levels of reasoning, or knowledge. Generalist LLMs (i.e. GPT-4), trained on very large multi-topic corpora, can perform well in a variety of tasks. However, they require significant financial, energy, and hardware resources that may not be justified for basic tasks. This implies potentially investing in unnecessary costs for a given query. To overcome this problem, a routing mechanism routes user queries to the most suitable components, such as smaller LLMs or experts in specific topics. This approach may improve response quality while minimising costs. Routing can be expanded to other components of the conversational agent architecture, such as the selection of optimal embedding strategies. This paper explores key considerations for integrating routing into LLM-based systems, focusing on resource management, cost definition, and strategy selection. Our main contributions include a formalisation of the problem, a novel taxonomy of existing approaches emphasising relevance and resource efficiency, and a comparative analysis of these strategies in relation to industry practices. Finally, we identify critical challenges and directions for future research.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 1, 2025

The Best of Many Worlds: Dual Mirror Descent for Online Allocation Problems

Online allocation problems with resource constraints are central problems in revenue management and online advertising. In these problems, requests arrive sequentially during a finite horizon and, for each request, a decision maker needs to choose an action that consumes a certain amount of resources and generates reward. The objective is to maximize cumulative rewards subject to a constraint on the total consumption of resources. In this paper, we consider a data-driven setting in which the reward and resource consumption of each request are generated using an input model that is unknown to the decision maker. We design a general class of algorithms that attain good performance in various input models without knowing which type of input they are facing. In particular, our algorithms are asymptotically optimal under independent and identically distributed inputs as well as various non-stationary stochastic input models, and they attain an asymptotically optimal fixed competitive ratio when the input is adversarial. Our algorithms operate in the Lagrangian dual space: they maintain a dual multiplier for each resource that is updated using online mirror descent. By choosing the reference function accordingly, we recover the dual sub-gradient descent and dual multiplicative weights update algorithm. The resulting algorithms are simple, fast, and do not require convexity in the revenue function, consumption function and action space, in contrast to existing methods for online allocation problems. We discuss applications to network revenue management, online bidding in repeated auctions with budget constraints, online proportional matching with high entropy, and personalized assortment optimization with limited inventory.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 4, 2021