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Jul 31

HEMA : A Hippocampus-Inspired Extended Memory Architecture for Long-Context AI Conversations

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with maintaining coherence in extended conversations spanning hundreds of turns, despite performing well within their context windows. This paper introduces HEMA (Hippocampus-Inspired Extended Memory Architecture), a dual-memory system inspired by human cognitive processes. HEMA combines Compact Memory - a continuously updated one-sentence summary preserving global narrative coherence, and Vector Memory - an episodic store of chunk embeddings queried via cosine similarity. When integrated with a 6B-parameter transformer, HEMA maintains coherent dialogues beyond 300 turns while keeping prompt length under 3,500 tokens. Experimental results show substantial improvements: factual recall accuracy increases from 41% to 87%, and human-rated coherence improves from 2.7 to 4.3 on a 5-point scale. With 10K indexed chunks, Vector Memory achieves P@5 >= 0.80 and R@50 >= 0.74, doubling the area under the precision-recall curve compared to summarization-only approaches. Ablation studies reveal two key insights: semantic forgetting through age-weighted pruning reduces retrieval latency by 34% with minimal recall loss, and a two-level summary hierarchy prevents cascade errors in ultra-long conversations exceeding 1,000 turns. HEMA demonstrates that combining verbatim recall with semantic continuity provides a practical solution for privacy-aware conversational AI capable of month-long dialogues without model retraining.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 23, 2025

TracLLM: A Generic Framework for Attributing Long Context LLMs

Long context large language models (LLMs) are deployed in many real-world applications such as RAG, agent, and broad LLM-integrated applications. Given an instruction and a long context (e.g., documents, PDF files, webpages), a long context LLM can generate an output grounded in the provided context, aiming to provide more accurate, up-to-date, and verifiable outputs while reducing hallucinations and unsupported claims. This raises a research question: how to pinpoint the texts (e.g., sentences, passages, or paragraphs) in the context that contribute most to or are responsible for the generated output by an LLM? This process, which we call context traceback, has various real-world applications, such as 1) debugging LLM-based systems, 2) conducting post-attack forensic analysis for attacks (e.g., prompt injection attack, knowledge corruption attacks) to an LLM, and 3) highlighting knowledge sources to enhance the trust of users towards outputs generated by LLMs. When applied to context traceback for long context LLMs, existing feature attribution methods such as Shapley have sub-optimal performance and/or incur a large computational cost. In this work, we develop TracLLM, the first generic context traceback framework tailored to long context LLMs. Our framework can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of existing feature attribution methods. To improve the efficiency, we develop an informed search based algorithm in TracLLM. We also develop contribution score ensemble/denoising techniques to improve the accuracy of TracLLM. Our evaluation results show TracLLM can effectively identify texts in a long context that lead to the output of an LLM. Our code and data are at: https://github.com/Wang-Yanting/TracLLM.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 4, 2025

HyLRA: Hybrid Layer Reuse Attention for Efficient Long-Context Inference

Long-context inference in Large Language Models (LLMs) is bottlenecked by the quadratic computation complexity of attention and the substantial memory footprint of Key-Value (KV) caches. While existing sparse attention mechanisms attempt to mitigate this by exploiting inherent sparsity, they often rely on rigid patterns or aggressive pruning, failing to achieve an optimal balance between efficiency and accuracy. In this paper, we introduce {\bf HyLRA} ({\bf Hy}brid {\bf L}ayer {\bf R}euse {\bf A}ttention), a novel framework driven by layer-wise sparsity profiling. Our empirical analysis uncovers a dual characteristic in attention mechanics: intra-layer sensitivity, where specific layers necessitate full attention to prevent feature distortion, and inter-layer similarity, where consecutive layers share substantial critical tokens. Based on these observations, HyLRA employs an offline dynamic programming approach to derive an optimal layer-wise policy. This hybrid strategy retains full attention for sensitive layers to ensure robustness, while enabling tolerant layers to bypass quadratic calculations by directly reusing top-k indices from preceding layers. This approach allows LLMs to restrict computation to the most critical tokens, effectively overcoming the quadratic bottleneck of dense attention. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that HyLRA improves inference throughput by 6\%--46\% while maintaining comparable performance (with <1% accuracy degradation), consistently outperforming state-of-the-art sparse attention methods. HyLRA is open source at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/unified-cache-management-CF80/{/r/unified-cache-management-CF80/}

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 31

Inference Scaling for Long-Context Retrieval Augmented Generation

The scaling of inference computation has unlocked the potential of long-context large language models (LLMs) across diverse settings. For knowledge-intensive tasks, the increased compute is often allocated to incorporate more external knowledge. However, without effectively utilizing such knowledge, solely expanding context does not always enhance performance. In this work, we investigate inference scaling for retrieval augmented generation (RAG), exploring strategies beyond simply increasing the quantity of knowledge. We focus on two inference scaling strategies: in-context learning and iterative prompting. These strategies provide additional flexibility to scale test-time computation (e.g., by increasing retrieved documents or generation steps), thereby enhancing LLMs' ability to effectively acquire and utilize contextual information. We address two key questions: (1) How does RAG performance benefit from the scaling of inference computation when optimally configured? (2) Can we predict the optimal test-time compute allocation for a given budget by modeling the relationship between RAG performance and inference parameters? Our observations reveal that increasing inference computation leads to nearly linear gains in RAG performance when optimally allocated, a relationship we describe as the inference scaling laws for RAG. Building on this, we further develop the computation allocation model to estimate RAG performance across different inference configurations. The model predicts optimal inference parameters under various computation constraints, which align closely with the experimental results. By applying these optimal configurations, we demonstrate that scaling inference compute on long-context LLMs achieves up to 58.9% gains on benchmark datasets compared to standard RAG.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 5, 2024 2

MMLongBench-Doc: Benchmarking Long-context Document Understanding with Visualizations

Understanding documents with rich layouts and multi-modal components is a long-standing and practical task. Recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made remarkable strides in various tasks, particularly in single-page document understanding (DU). However, their abilities on long-context DU remain an open problem. This work presents MMLongBench-Doc, a long-context, multi-modal benchmark comprising 1,062 expert-annotated questions. Distinct from previous datasets, it is constructed upon 130 lengthy PDF-formatted documents with an average of 49.4 pages and 20,971 textual tokens. Towards comprehensive evaluation, answers to these questions rely on pieces of evidence from (1) different sources (text, image, chart, table, and layout structure) and (2) various locations (i.e. page number). Moreover, 33.2% of the questions are cross-page questions requiring evidence across multiple pages. 22.8% of the questions are designed to be unanswerable for detecting potential hallucinations. Experiments on 14 LVLMs demonstrate that long-context DU greatly challenges current models. Notably, the best-performing model, GPT-4o, achieves an F1 score of only 42.7%, while the second-best, GPT-4V, scores 31.4%. Furthermore, 12 LVLMs (all except GPT-4o and GPT-4V) even present worse performance than their LLM counterparts which are fed with lossy-parsed OCR documents. These results validate the necessity of future research toward more capable long-context LVLMs. Project Page: https://mayubo2333.github.io/MMLongBench-Doc

  • 16 authors
·
Jul 1, 2024

LongStraw: Long-Context RL Beyond 2M Tokens under a Fixed GPU Budget

A growing gap separates inference context lengths from RL post-training: inference systems are approaching million-token contexts, while post-training workloads often remain at 256K tokens or below and rely on length generalization at deployment. The gap is especially important for AI agents, whose observations, tool outputs, documents, and prior decisions accumulate over long trajectories. LongStraw is an architecture-aware execution stack for million-token RL post-training under a fixed GPU budget, instantiated with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). It evaluates the shared prompt without autograd, retains only model-specific state needed by later tokens, and replays short response branches one at a time, reducing the live training graph at the cost of additional replay time. We implement it for the hybrid recurrent and full-attention Qwen3.6-27B and the compressed-attention mixture-of-experts GLM-5.2. On eight H20 GPUs, LongStraw completes grouped Qwen scoring and response backward at 2.1M positions for groups of 2 and 8; increasing the group size adds only 0.21 GB of peak allocated memory, while a separate stress test reaches 4.46M positions. On 32 H20 GPUs, we validate the end-to-end LongStraw execution path for a 2.1M-token prompt across all 78 layers of GLM-5.2. These experiments establish execution capacity rather than complete training correctness because the captured prompt state is detached and some distributed forward and gradient composition paths remain incomplete.

mindlab-research Mind Lab
·
Jul 15 3

Dolphin: Long Context as a New Modality for Energy-Efficient On-Device Language Models

This paper presents Dolphin, a novel decoder-decoder architecture for energy-efficient processing of long contexts in language models. Our approach addresses the significant energy consumption and latency challenges inherent in on-device models. Dolphin employs a compact 0.5B parameter decoder to distill extensive contextual information into a memory embedding, substantially reducing the input length for the primary 7B parameter decoder model. Inspired by vision-language models, we repurpose the image embedding projector to encode long textual contexts, effectively treating extended context as a distinct modality. This innovative method enables processing of substantially longer contexts without the typical computational overhead associated with extended input sequences. Empirical evaluations demonstrate a 10-fold improvement in energy efficiency and a 5-fold reduction in latency compared to conventional full-length context processing methods without losing quality of the response. Our work contributes to the development of more sustainable and scalable language models for on-device applications, addressing the critical need for energy-efficient and responsive AI technologies in resource-constrained environments while maintaining the accuracy to understand long contexts. This research has implications for the broader field of natural language processing, particularly in the domain of efficient model design for resource-limited settings. By enabling more sophisticated AI capabilities on edge devices, Dolphin paves the way for advanced language processing in a wide range of applications where computational resources are at a premium. The Dolphin model is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/NexaAIDev/Dolphin.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 28, 2024 4

Retrieval Head Mechanistically Explains Long-Context Factuality

Despite the recent progress in long-context language models, it remains elusive how transformer-based models exhibit the capability to retrieve relevant information from arbitrary locations within the long context. This paper aims to address this question. Our systematic investigation across a wide spectrum of models reveals that a special type of attention heads are largely responsible for retrieving information, which we dub retrieval heads. We identify intriguing properties of retrieval heads:(1) universal: all the explored models with long-context capability have a set of retrieval heads; (2) sparse: only a small portion (less than 5\%) of the attention heads are retrieval. (3) intrinsic: retrieval heads already exist in models pretrained with short context. When extending the context length by continual pretraining, it is still the same set of heads that perform information retrieval. (4) dynamically activated: take Llama-2 7B for example, 12 retrieval heads always attend to the required information no matter how the context is changed. The rest of the retrieval heads are activated in different contexts. (5) causal: completely pruning retrieval heads leads to failure in retrieving relevant information and results in hallucination, while pruning random non-retrieval heads does not affect the model's retrieval ability. We further show that retrieval heads strongly influence chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, where the model needs to frequently refer back the question and previously-generated context. Conversely, tasks where the model directly generates the answer using its intrinsic knowledge are less impacted by masking out retrieval heads. These observations collectively explain which internal part of the model seeks information from the input tokens. We believe our insights will foster future research on reducing hallucination, improving reasoning, and compressing the KV cache.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 23, 2024

LongRLVR: Long-Context Reinforcement Learning Requires Verifiable Context Rewards

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by optimizing them against factual outcomes. However, this paradigm falters in long-context scenarios, as its reliance on internal parametric knowledge is ill-suited for tasks requiring contextual grounding--the ability to find and reason over externally provided information. We identify a key reason for this failure: a reward based solely on the final answer is too sparse to effectively guide the model for identifying relevant evidence. We formally prove that the outcome-only reward leads to significant vanishing gradients for the context grounding process, rendering learning intractable. To overcome this bottleneck, we introduce LongRLVR to augment the sparse answer reward with a dense and verifiable context reward. This auxiliary signal directly incentivizes the model for selecting the correct grounding information, providing a robust learning gradient that solves the underlying optimization challenge. We validate our method on challenging long-context benchmarks using Qwen and LLaMA models. LongRLVR consistently and significantly outperforms the standard RLVR across all models and benchmarks, e.g., boosting a 14B model's scores on RULER-QA from 73.17 to 88.90 and on LongBench v2 from 39.8 to 46.5. Our work demonstrates that explicitly rewarding the grounding process is a critical and effective strategy for unlocking the full reasoning potential of LLMs in long-context applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/real-absolute-AI/LongRLVR.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 2

RedKnot: Efficient Long-Context LLM Serving with Head-Aware KV Reuse and SegPagedAttention

As the input length of large language model (LLM) serving continues to grow, the KV cache has become a dominant bottleneck in AI infrastructure. It limits GPU memory capacity, serving concurrency, cache reuse, and distributed scalability. Multiple important problems, including position-independent KV cache, prefix KV cache compression, hot/cold KV cache separation, and distributed KV cache management, all depend on how the KV cache is represented and managed. However, existing serving systems largely rely on a monolithic KV cache abstraction, where the KV cache is treated as a homogeneous sequence of token-level memory blocks and managed with similar policies across attention heads and serving scenarios. We observe that KV cache utility is highly structured across KV heads: different heads exhibit different functional roles, attention distances, and runtime importance. Therefore, a full KV cache is not always necessary for every head, token range, or serving scenario. We present RedKnot, a head-aware KV cache management system for LLM serving. RedKnot breaks the conventional monolithic KV cache abstraction by decomposing the KV cache along KV heads, whose importance and effective attention ranges vary significantly across serving scenarios. This head-level decomposition turns the KV cache from a monolithic tensor abstraction into a structured memory object, enabling RedKnot to uniformly support position-independent KV reuse, prefix KV compression, hot/cold KV separation, and distributed KV placement while preserving output fidelity and improving resource efficiency, without requiring model retraining or fine-tuning. RedKnot establishes a new foundation for AI infrastructure by transforming the KV cache from a monolithic, passive runtime artifact into a dynamic, model-aware runtime substrate for scalable LLM serving.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 25

AttnTrace: Attention-based Context Traceback for Long-Context LLMs

Long-context large language models (LLMs), such as Gemini-2.5-Pro and Claude-Sonnet-4, are increasingly used to empower advanced AI systems, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and autonomous agents. In these systems, an LLM receives an instruction along with a context--often consisting of texts retrieved from a knowledge database or memory--and generates a response that is contextually grounded by following the instruction. Recent studies have designed solutions to trace back to a subset of texts in the context that contributes most to the response generated by the LLM. These solutions have numerous real-world applications, including performing post-attack forensic analysis and improving the interpretability and trustworthiness of LLM outputs. While significant efforts have been made, state-of-the-art solutions such as TracLLM often lead to a high computation cost, e.g., it takes TracLLM hundreds of seconds to perform traceback for a single response-context pair. In this work, we propose AttnTrace, a new context traceback method based on the attention weights produced by an LLM for a prompt. To effectively utilize attention weights, we introduce two techniques designed to enhance the effectiveness of AttnTrace, and we provide theoretical insights for our design choice. We also perform a systematic evaluation for AttnTrace. The results demonstrate that AttnTrace is more accurate and efficient than existing state-of-the-art context traceback methods. We also show that AttnTrace can improve state-of-the-art methods in detecting prompt injection under long contexts through the attribution-before-detection paradigm. As a real-world application, we demonstrate that AttnTrace can effectively pinpoint injected instructions in a paper designed to manipulate LLM-generated reviews. The code is at https://github.com/Wang-Yanting/AttnTrace.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 5, 2025 2

Challenges in Deploying Long-Context Transformers: A Theoretical Peak Performance Analysis

Transformer-based long context generative models power emerging AI applications like hour-long video understanding and project-level coding agent. Deploying long context transformers (e.g., 100K to 10M tokens) is prohibitively expensive compared to short context (e.g., 4K tokens) model variants. Reducing the cost of long-context transformers is becoming a pressing research and engineering challenge starting from the year of 2024. This work describes a concurrent programming framework for quantitatively analyzing the efficiency challenges in serving multiple long-context requests under limited size of GPU high-bandwidth memory (HBM) regime. We give a detailed analysis of how all additional computational costs, compared to 4K context, trace back to one single source: the large size of the KV cache. We use a 34B GPT-3.5 level model of 50K context on A100 NVLink as a running example, and describe how its large KV cache causes four types of deployment challenges: (1) prefilling long inputs takes much longer compute time and GPU memory than short inputs; (2) after prefilling, the large KV cache residing on the GPU HBM substantially restricts the number of concurrent users being served; (3) during decoding, repeatedly reading the KV cache from HBM to SM largely increases latency; (4) when KV cache memory overflows, swapping it from HBM to DDR causes significant context switching latency. We use this framework to analyze existing works and identify possibilities of combining them to build end-to-end systems. Overall, this work offers a foundational framework for analyzing long context transformer deployment and identifies directions towards reducing the inference cost of 1M context to be as cheap as 4K.

  • 1 authors
·
May 14, 2024

Selecting Influential Samples for Long Context Alignment via Homologous Models' Guidance and Contextual Awareness Measurement

The expansion of large language models to effectively handle instructions with extremely long contexts has yet to be fully investigated. The primary obstacle lies in constructing a high-quality long instruction-following dataset devised for long context alignment. Existing studies have attempted to scale up the available data volume by synthesizing long instruction-following samples. However, indiscriminately increasing the quantity of data without a well-defined strategy for ensuring data quality may introduce low-quality samples and restrict the final performance. To bridge this gap, we aim to address the unique challenge of long-context alignment, i.e., modeling the long-range dependencies for handling instructions and lengthy input contexts. We propose GATEAU, a novel framework designed to identify the influential and high-quality samples enriched with long-range dependency relations by utilizing crafted Homologous Models' Guidance (HMG) and Contextual Awareness Measurement (CAM). Specifically, HMG attempts to measure the difficulty of generating corresponding responses due to the long-range dependencies, using the perplexity scores of the response from two homologous models with different context windows. Also, the role of CAM is to measure the difficulty of understanding the long input contexts due to long-range dependencies by evaluating whether the model's attention is focused on important segments. Built upon both proposed methods, we select the most challenging samples as the influential data to effectively frame the long-range dependencies, thereby achieving better performance of LLMs. Comprehensive experiments indicate that GATEAU effectively identifies samples enriched with long-range dependency relations and the model trained on these selected samples exhibits better instruction-following and long-context understanding capabilities.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024 3

Efficient Long Context Language Model Retrieval with Compression

Long Context Language Models (LCLMs) have emerged as a new paradigm to perform Information Retrieval (IR), which enables the direct ingestion and retrieval of information by processing an entire corpus in their single context, showcasing the potential to surpass traditional sparse and dense retrieval methods. However, processing a large number of passages within in-context for retrieval is computationally expensive, and handling their representations during inference further exacerbates the processing time; thus, we aim to make LCLM retrieval more efficient and potentially more effective with passage compression. Specifically, we propose a new compression approach tailored for LCLM retrieval, which is trained to maximize the retrieval performance while minimizing the length of the compressed passages. To accomplish this, we generate the synthetic data, where compressed passages are automatically created and labeled as chosen or rejected according to their retrieval success for a given query, and we train the proposed Compression model for Long context Retrieval (CoLoR) with this data via preference optimization while adding the length regularization loss on top of it to enforce brevity. Through extensive experiments on 9 datasets, we show that CoLoR improves the retrieval performance by 6% while compressing the in-context size by a factor of 1.91. Our code is available at: https://github.com/going-doer/CoLoR.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 24, 2024

Semantic Soft Bootstrapping: Long Context Reasoning in LLMs without Reinforcement Learning

Long context reasoning in large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated enhancement of their cognitive capabilities via chain-of-thought (CoT) inference. Training such models is usually done via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) in reasoning based problems, like math and programming. However, RLVR is limited by several bottlenecks, such as, lack of dense reward, and inadequate sample efficiency. As a result, it requires significant compute resources in post-training phase. To overcome these limitations, in this work, we propose Semantic Soft Bootstrapping (SSB), a self-distillation technique, in which the same base language model plays the role of both teacher and student, but receives different semantic contexts about the correctness of its outcome at training time. The model is first prompted with a math problem and several rollouts are generated. From them, the correct and most common incorrect response are filtered, and then provided to the model in context to produce a more robust, step-by-step explanation with a verified final answer. This pipeline automatically curates a paired teacher-student training set from raw problem-answer data, without any human intervention. This generation process also produces a sequence of logits, which is what the student model tries to match in the training phase just from the bare question alone. In our experiment, Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct on GSM8K dataset via parameter-efficient fine-tuning. We then tested its accuracy on MATH500, and AIME2024 benchmarks. Our experiments show a jump of 10.6%, and 10% improvements in accuracy, respectively, over group relative policy optimization (GRPO), which is a commonly used RLVR algorithm. Our code is available at https://github.com/purbeshmitra/semantic-soft-bootstrapping, and the model, curated dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/purbeshmitra/semantic-soft-bootstrapping.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 4, 2025

LongSpec: Long-Context Lossless Speculative Decoding with Efficient Drafting and Verification

As Large Language Models (LLMs) can now process extremely long contexts, efficient inference over these extended inputs has become increasingly important, especially for emerging applications like LLM agents that highly depend on this capability. Speculative decoding (SD) offers a promising lossless acceleration technique compared to lossy alternatives such as quantization and model cascades. However, most state-of-the-art SD methods are trained on short texts (typically fewer than 4k tokens), making them unsuitable for long-context scenarios. Specifically, adapting these methods to long contexts presents three key challenges: (1) the excessive memory demands posed by draft models due to large Key-Value (KV) cache; (2) performance degradation resulting from the mismatch between short-context training and long-context inference; and (3) inefficiencies in tree attention mechanisms when managing long token sequences. This work introduces LongSpec, a framework that addresses these challenges through three core innovations: a memory-efficient draft model with a constant-sized KV cache; novel position indices that mitigate the training-inference mismatch; and an attention aggregation strategy that combines fast prefix computation with standard tree attention to enable efficient decoding. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of LongSpec, achieving up to a 3.26x speedup over strong Flash Attention baselines across five long-context understanding datasets, as well as a 2.25x reduction in wall-clock time on the AIME24 long reasoning task with the QwQ model, demonstrating significant latency improvements for long-context applications. The code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/LongSpec.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 24, 2025

LCFO: Long Context and Long Form Output Dataset and Benchmarking

This paper presents the Long Context and Form Output (LCFO) benchmark, a novel evaluation framework for assessing gradual summarization and summary expansion capabilities across diverse domains. LCFO consists of long input documents (5k words average length), each of which comes with three summaries of different lengths (20%, 10%, and 5% of the input text), as well as approximately 15 questions and answers (QA) related to the input content. Notably, LCFO also provides alignments between specific QA pairs and corresponding summaries in 7 domains. The primary motivation behind providing summaries of different lengths is to establish a controllable framework for generating long texts from shorter inputs, i.e. summary expansion. To establish an evaluation metric framework for summarization and summary expansion, we provide human evaluation scores for human-generated outputs, as well as results from various state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). GPT-4o-mini achieves best human scores among automatic systems in both summarization and summary expansion tasks (~ +10% and +20%, respectively). It even surpasses human output quality in the case of short summaries (~ +7%). Overall automatic metrics achieve low correlations with human evaluation scores (~ 0.4) but moderate correlation on specific evaluation aspects such as fluency and attribution (~ 0.6). The LCFO benchmark offers a standardized platform for evaluating summarization and summary expansion performance, as well as corresponding automatic metrics, thereby providing an important evaluation framework to advance generative AI.

  • 13 authors
·
Dec 11, 2024

DELTA: Dynamic Layer-Aware Token Attention for Efficient Long-Context Reasoning

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks by generating long chains of intermediate steps, but their inference cost is dominated by decoding, where each new token must attend to the entire growing sequence. Existing sparse attention methods reduce computation by pruning the key-value (KV) cache, yet they suffer from severe accuracy degradation on reasoning tasks due to cumulative selection errors and the dynamic importance of tokens over long derivations. We present DELTA, a training-free sparse attention mechanism that achieves computational efficiency without sacrificing model accuracy. DELTA partitions transformer layers into three groups: initial layers that use full attention, a small set of selection layers that identify salient tokens via aggregated head-level attention scores, and subsequent sparse-attention layers that attend only to the selected subset. This design preserves the full KV cache in GPU memory for accuracy, while avoiding expensive full-attention computation over many layers. On reasoning benchmarks such as AIME and GPQA-Diamond, DELTA matches or surpasses full attention in accuracy, while reducing the number of attended tokens by up to 5times and delivering 1.5times end-to-end speedup. Our results show that selective reuse of intermediate attention maps offers a robust path toward efficient long-context reasoning.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 10, 2025

LycheeDecode: Accelerating Long-Context LLM Inference via Hybrid-Head Sparse Decoding

The proliferation of long-context large language models (LLMs) exposes a key bottleneck: the rapidly expanding key-value cache during decoding, which imposes heavy memory and latency costs. While recent approaches attempt to alleviate this by sharing a single set of crucial tokens across layers, such coarse-grained sharing undermines model performance by neglecting the functional diversity of attention heads. To address this, we propose LycheeDecode, an efficient decoding method centered on a fine-grained hybrid-head attention mechanism that employs a hardware-efficient top-k selection strategy. Specifically, the novel HardKuma-based mechanism partitions attention heads into a small subset of retrieval heads that dynamically identify crucial tokens and a majority of sparse heads that reuse them for efficient computation. Through extensive experiments on leading models like Llama3 and Qwen3 across diverse benchmarks for long-context understanding (e.g., LongBench, RULER) and complex reasoning (e.g., AIME24, OlympiadBench), we demonstrate that LycheeDecode achieves generative quality comparable to, and at times surpassing even the full-attention baseline. Crucially, this is accomplished with up to a 2.7x speedup at a 128K context length. By preserving the functional diversity of attention heads, our fine-grained strategy overcomes the performance bottlenecks of existing methods, providing a powerful and validated pathway to both efficient and high-quality long-context LLM inference.

Analysis and Optimized CXL-Attached Memory Allocation for Long-Context LLM Fine-Tuning

The growing prevalence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their substantial memory requirements have prompted renewed interest in CPU offloading as a method to compensate for limited GPU memory. In particular, when CPU memory is leveraged to temporarily store intermediate states of LLMs, CPU memory becomes a new bottleneck and soon reaches the capacity limitation of commodity CPUs. In this work, we investigate the effectiveness of Compute Express Link (CXL) add-in card (AIC) memory as an extension to CPU memory, enabling larger model sizes and longer context lengths during fine-tuning. Through extensive benchmarking, this study quantifies the performance overhead introduced by transferring data between CXL memory, CPU, and GPUs, focusing on how concurrency and data volume influence bandwidth utilization and latency. This study also compares CPUbased optimizer steps when model parameters, gradients, and optimizer states reside in local memory versus CXL memory, revealing that naive adoption of CXL often degrades performance during the optimizer phase. To overcome these challenges, this study proposes a CXL-aware allocation to strategically partition CPU offloading workloads across both local and CXL memory. This study further demonstrates that employing multiple AICs significantly reduces bandwidth contention, thus improving scalability. Experimental results show that these optimizations enable efficient long-context LLM fine-tuning, underscoring CXL as a promising avenue for unlocking the full potential of CPU offloading in long-context LLM fine-tuning.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 4, 2025

RealICU: Do LLM Agents Understand Long-Context ICU Data? A Benchmark Beyond Behavior Imitation

Intensive care units (ICU) generate long, dense and evolving streams of clinical information, where physicians must repeatedly reassess patient states under time pressure, underscoring a clear need for reliable AI decision support. Existing ICU benchmarks typically treat historical clinician actions as ground truth. However, these actions are made under incomplete information and limited temporal context of the underlying patient state, and may therefore be suboptimal, making it difficult to assess the true reasoning capabilities of AI systems. We introduce RealICU, a hindsight-annotated benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) under realistic ICU conditions, where labels are created after senior physicians review the full patient trajectory. We formulate four physician-motivated tasks: assess Patient Status, Acute Problems, Recommended Actions, and Red Flag actions that risk unsafe outcomes. We partition each trajectory with 30-min windows and release two datasets: RealICU-Gold with 930-window annotations from 94 MIMIC-IV patients, and RealICU-Scale with 11,862 windows extended by Oracle, a physician-validated LLM hindsight labeler. Existing LLMs including memory-augmented ones performed poorly on RealICU, exposing two failure modes: a recall-safety tradeoff for clinical recommendations, and an anchoring bias to early interpretations of the patient. We further introduce ICU-Evo to study structured-memory agents that improves long-horizon reasoning but does not fully eliminate safety failures. Together, RealICU provides a clinically grounded testbed for measuring and improving AI sequential decision-support in high-stakes care. Project page: https://chengzhi-leo.github.io/RealICU-Bench/

L-CiteEval: Do Long-Context Models Truly Leverage Context for Responding?

Long-context models (LCMs) have made remarkable strides in recent years, offering users great convenience for handling tasks that involve long context, such as document summarization. As the community increasingly prioritizes the faithfulness of generated results, merely ensuring the accuracy of LCM outputs is insufficient, as it is quite challenging for humans to verify the results from the extremely lengthy context. Yet, although some efforts have been made to assess whether LCMs respond truly based on the context, these works either are limited to specific tasks or heavily rely on external evaluation resources like GPT-4.In this work, we introduce L-CiteEval, a comprehensive multi-task benchmark for long-context understanding with citations, aiming to evaluate both the understanding capability and faithfulness of LCMs. L-CiteEval covers 11 tasks from diverse domains, spanning context lengths from 8K to 48K, and provides a fully automated evaluation suite. Through testing with 11 cutting-edge closed-source and open-source LCMs, we find that although these models show minor differences in their generated results, open-source models substantially trail behind their closed-source counterparts in terms of citation accuracy and recall. This suggests that current open-source LCMs are prone to responding based on their inherent knowledge rather than the given context, posing a significant risk to the user experience in practical applications. We also evaluate the RAG approach and observe that RAG can significantly improve the faithfulness of LCMs, albeit with a slight decrease in the generation quality. Furthermore, we discover a correlation between the attention mechanisms of LCMs and the citation generation process.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 2, 2024 3

InstInfer: In-Storage Attention Offloading for Cost-Effective Long-Context LLM Inference

The widespread of Large Language Models (LLMs) marks a significant milestone in generative AI. Nevertheless, the increasing context length and batch size in offline LLM inference escalate the memory requirement of the key-value (KV) cache, which imposes a huge burden on the GPU VRAM, especially for resource-constraint scenarios (e.g., edge computing and personal devices). Several cost-effective solutions leverage host memory or SSDs to reduce storage costs for offline inference scenarios and improve the throughput. Nevertheless, they suffer from significant performance penalties imposed by intensive KV cache accesses due to limited PCIe bandwidth. To address these issues, we propose InstInfer, a novel LLM inference system that offloads the most performance-critical computation (i.e., attention in decoding phase) and data (i.e., KV cache) parts to Computational Storage Drives (CSDs), which minimize the enormous KV transfer overheads. InstInfer designs a dedicated flash-aware in-storage attention engine with KV cache management mechanisms to exploit the high internal bandwidths of CSDs instead of being limited by the PCIe bandwidth. The optimized P2P transmission between GPU and CSDs further reduces data migration overheads. Experimental results demonstrate that for a 13B model using an NVIDIA A6000 GPU, InstInfer improves throughput for long-sequence inference by up to 11.1times, compared to existing SSD-based solutions such as FlexGen.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 8, 2024 2

Infinite-LLM: Efficient LLM Service for Long Context with DistAttention and Distributed KVCache

The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been a driving force in the growth of cloud-based LLM services, which are now integral to advancing AI applications. However, the dynamic auto-regressive nature of LLM service, along with the need to support exceptionally long context lengths, demands the flexible allocation and release of substantial resources. This presents considerable challenges in designing cloud-based LLM service systems, where inefficient management can lead to performance degradation or resource wastage. In response to these challenges, this work introduces DistAttention, a novel distributed attention algorithm that segments the KV Cache into smaller, manageable units, enabling distributed processing and storage of the attention module. Based on that, we propose DistKV-LLM, a distributed LLM serving system that dynamically manages KV Cache and effectively orchestrates all accessible GPU and CPU memories spanning across the data center. This ensures a high-performance LLM service on the cloud, adaptable to a broad range of context lengths. Validated in a cloud environment with 32 NVIDIA A100 GPUs in configurations from 2 to 32 instances, our system exhibited 1.03-2.4x end-to-end throughput improvements and supported context lengths 2-19x longer than current state-of-the-art LLM service systems, as evidenced by extensive testing across 18 datasets with context lengths up to 1,900K.

  • 13 authors
·
Jan 5, 2024 2

The PokeAgent Challenge: Competitive and Long-Context Learning at Scale

We present the PokeAgent Challenge, a large-scale benchmark for decision-making research built on Pokemon's multi-agent battle system and expansive role-playing game (RPG) environment. Partial observability, game-theoretic reasoning, and long-horizon planning remain open problems for frontier AI, yet few benchmarks stress all three simultaneously under realistic conditions. PokeAgent targets these limitations at scale through two complementary tracks: our Battling Track, which calls for strategic reasoning and generalization under partial observability in competitive Pokemon battles, and our Speedrunning Track, which requires long-horizon planning and sequential decision-making in the Pokemon RPG. Our Battling Track supplies a dataset of 20M+ battle trajectories alongside a suite of heuristic, RL, and LLM-based baselines capable of high-level competitive play. Our Speedrunning Track provides the first standardized evaluation framework for RPG speedrunning, including an open-source multi-agent orchestration system for modular, reproducible comparisons of harness-based LLM approaches. Our NeurIPS 2025 competition validates both the quality of our resources and the research community's interest in Pokemon, with over 100 teams competing across both tracks and winning solutions detailed in our paper. Participant submissions and our baselines reveal considerable gaps between generalist (LLM), specialist (RL), and elite human performance. Analysis against the BenchPress evaluation matrix shows that Pokemon battling is nearly orthogonal to standard LLM benchmarks, measuring capabilities not captured by existing suites and positioning Pokemon as an unsolved benchmark that can drive RL and LLM research forward. We transition to a living benchmark with a live leaderboard for Battling and self-contained evaluation for Speedrunning at https://pokeagentchallenge.com.

MIR-Bench: Benchmarking LLM's Long-Context Intelligence via Many-Shot In-Context Inductive Reasoning

Inductive Reasoning (IR), the ability to summarize rules from examples and apply on new ones, has long been viewed as a primal ability for general intelligence and widely studied by cognitive science and AI researchers. Many benchmarks have been proposed to measure such ability for Large Language Models (LLMs); however, they focus on few-shot (usually <10) setting and lack evaluation for aggregating many pieces of information from long contexts. On the other hand, the ever-growing context length of LLMs have brought forth the novel paradigm of many-shot In-Context Learning (ICL), which addresses new tasks with hundreds to thousands of examples without expensive and inefficient fine-tuning. However, many-shot evaluations are mostly focused on classification (a very limited aspect of IR), and popular long-context LLM tasks such as Needle-In-A-Haystack (NIAH) seldom require complicated intelligence for integrating many pieces of information. To fix the issues from both worlds, we propose MIR-Bench, the first many-shot in-context inductive reasoning benchmark that asks LLM to induce output via input-output examples from underlying functions with diverse data format. Based on MIR-Bench, we study many novel problems for inductive reasoning and many-shot ICL, including robustness against erroneous shots and the effect of Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and acquired insightful findings.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 14, 2025

ACC: Compiling Agent Trajectories for Long-Context Training

Recent development of agents has renewed demand for long-context reasoning capacity of LLMs. However, training LLMs for this capacity requires costly long-document curation or heuristic context synthesis. We observe that agents produce massive trajectories when solving problems, invoking tools and receiving environment observations across many turns. The evidence needed to answer the original question is thus scattered throughout these turns, requiring integration of distant context segments. Nevertheless, standard agent SFT masks tool responses and only trains turn-level tool selection, creating a supervision blind spot where these scattered signals go unused. We propose Agent Context Compilation (ACC), which converts trajectories from search, software engineering, and database querying agents into long-context QA pairs that combine the original question with tool responses and environment observations gathered across multiple turns, training the model to answer directly without tool use. This makes the dependencies between the question and the evidence explicit, enabling direct supervision of long-context reasoning over distant segments without additional annotation. ACC is a simple but effective approach that can be combined with any existing long-context extension or training method, providing scalable supervised fine-tuning data. We validate ACC on long-range dependency modeling tasks through MRCR and GraphWalks, challenging benchmarks requiring cross-turn coreference resolution and graph traversal over extended contexts. Training Qwen3-30B-A3B with ACC achieves 68.3 on MRCR (+18.1) and 77.5 on GraphWalks (+7.6), results comparable to Qwen3-235B-A22B, while preserving general capabilities on GPQA, MMLU-Pro, AIME, and IFEval. Further mechanism analysis reveals that the ACC-trained model exhibits task-adaptive attention restructuring and expert specialization.

InftyThink: Breaking the Length Limits of Long-Context Reasoning in Large Language Models

Advanced reasoning in large language models has achieved remarkable performance on challenging tasks, but the prevailing long-context reasoning paradigm faces critical limitations: quadratic computational scaling with sequence length, reasoning constrained by maximum context boundaries, and performance degradation beyond pre-training context windows. Existing approaches primarily compress reasoning chains without addressing the fundamental scaling problem. To overcome these challenges, we introduce InftyThink, a paradigm that transforms monolithic reasoning into an iterative process with intermediate summarization. By interleaving short reasoning segments with concise progress summaries, our approach enables unbounded reasoning depth while maintaining bounded computational costs. This creates a characteristic sawtooth memory pattern that significantly reduces computational complexity compared to traditional approaches. Furthermore, we develop a methodology for reconstructing long-context reasoning datasets into our iterative format, transforming OpenR1-Math into 333K training instances. Experiments across multiple model architectures demonstrate that our approach reduces computational costs while improving performance, with Qwen2.5-Math-7B showing 3-13% improvements across MATH500, AIME24, and GPQA_diamond benchmarks. Our work challenges the assumed trade-off between reasoning depth and computational efficiency, providing a more scalable approach to complex reasoning without architectural modifications.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 9, 2025

When Tokens Talk Too Much: A Survey of Multimodal Long-Context Token Compression across Images, Videos, and Audios

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made remarkable strides, largely driven by their ability to process increasingly long and complex contexts, such as high-resolution images, extended video sequences, and lengthy audio input. While this ability significantly enhances MLLM capabilities, it introduces substantial computational challenges, primarily due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention mechanisms with numerous input tokens. To mitigate these bottlenecks, token compression has emerged as an auspicious and critical approach, efficiently reducing the number of tokens during both training and inference. In this paper, we present the first systematic survey and synthesis of the burgeoning field of multimodal long context token compression. Recognizing that effective compression strategies are deeply tied to the unique characteristics and redundancies of each modality, we categorize existing approaches by their primary data focus, enabling researchers to quickly access and learn methods tailored to their specific area of interest: (1) image-centric compression, which addresses spatial redundancy in visual data; (2) video-centric compression, which tackles spatio-temporal redundancy in dynamic sequences; and (3) audio-centric compression, which handles temporal and spectral redundancy in acoustic signals. Beyond this modality-driven categorization, we further dissect methods based on their underlying mechanisms, including transformation-based, similarity-based, attention-based, and query-based approaches. By providing a comprehensive and structured overview, this survey aims to consolidate current progress, identify key challenges, and inspire future research directions in this rapidly evolving domain. We also maintain a public repository to continuously track and update the latest advances in this promising area.

Westlake-University Westlake University
·
Jul 27, 2025 2

DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence

We present a preview version of DeepSeek-V4 series, including two strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models -- DeepSeek-V4-Pro with 1.6T parameters (49B activated) and DeepSeek-V4-Flash with 284B parameters (13B activated) -- both supporting a context length of one million tokens. DeepSeek-V4 series incorporate several key upgrades in architecture and optimization: (1) a hybrid attention architecture that combines Compressed Sparse Attention (CSA) and Heavily Compressed Attention (HCA) to improve long-context efficiency; (2) Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) that enhance conventional residual connections; (3) and the Muon optimizer for faster convergence and greater training stability. We pre-train both models on more than 32T diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by a comprehensive post-training pipeline that unlocks and further enhances their capabilities. DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max, the maximum reasoning effort mode of DeepSeek-V4-Pro, redefines the state-of-the-art for open models, outperforming its predecessors in core tasks. Meanwhile, DeepSeek-V4 series are highly efficient in long-context scenarios. In the one-million-token context setting, DeepSeek-V4-Pro requires only 27% of single-token inference FLOPs and 10% of KV cache compared with DeepSeek-V3.2. This enables us to routinely support one-million-token contexts, thereby making long-horizon tasks and further test-time scaling more feasible. The model checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.

  • 319 authors
·
Apr 25 4

MMPB: It's Time for Multi-Modal Personalization

Visual personalization is essential in user-facing AI systems such as smart homes and healthcare, where aligning model behavior with user-centric concepts is critical. However, recent large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), despite their broad applicability, remain underexplored in their ability to adapt to individual users. In this paper, we introduce MMPB, the first extensive benchmark for evaluating VLMs on personalization. MMPB comprises 10k image-query pairs and includes 111 personalizable concepts across four categories: humans, animals, objects, and characters, with the human category enriched with preference-grounded queries. We structure personalization into three main task types, each highlighting a different key property of VLMs. Using 23 widely used VLMs including both open- and closed-source models, we evaluate personalization performance via a three-stage protocol: concept injection, multi-turn dialogue, and personalized querying. Our findings indicate that most VLMs (including some closed-source models) struggle with personalization, particularly in maintaining consistency over dialogue, handling user preferences, and adapting to visual cues. Our analysis reveals that the challenges in VLM personalization (such as refusal behaviors and long-context forgetting) highlight substantial room for improvement. By identifying these limitations and offering a scalable benchmark, MMPB offers valuable insights and a solid foundation for future research toward truly personalized multi-modal AI. Project Page: aidaslab.github.io/MMPB

snu-aidas AIDAS Lab
·
Sep 26, 2025 2

Confucius Code Agent: An Open-sourced AI Software Engineer at Industrial Scale

Real-world AI software engineering demands coding agents that can reason over massive repositories, maintain durable memory across and within long sessions, and robustly coordinate complex toolchains at test time. Existing open-source coding agents provide transparency but frequently fall short when pushed to these industrial-scale workloads, while proprietary coding agents offer strong practical performance but limited extensibility, interpretability, and controllability. We present the Confucius Code Agent (CCA), an open-sourced AI software engineer that can operate at an industrial scale. CCA is built atop the Confucius SDK, an open-sourced agent development platform designed around three complementary perspectives: Agent Experience (AX), User Experience (UX), and Developer Experience (DX). The SDK introduces a unified orchestrator with hierarchical working memory for long-context reasoning, a persistent note-taking system for cross-session continual learning, and a modular extension module for robust tool use. Moreover, a meta-agent automates the synthesis, evaluation, and refinement of agent configurations through a build-test-improve loop, enabling rapid agent development on new tasks, environments, and tool stacks. Instantiated on Confucius SDK with these mechanisms, CCA delivers strong performance on real-world software engineering tasks. On SWE-Bench-Pro, CCA achieves a state-of-the-art Resolve@1 performance of 54.3%, substantially improving over prior coding agents. Together, the Confucius SDK and CCA provide a transparent, extensible, and reproducible foundation for AI agents, bridge gaps between research prototypes and production-grade systems, and support agent development and deployment at industrial scale.

metaresearch Meta Research
·
Dec 11, 2025 6

Toward an Engineering of Science: Rebalancing Generation and Verification in the Age of AI

AI systems can now cheaply generate plausible scientific artifacts such as papers, reviews, and surveys. This creates a risk of epistemic pollution in our scientific systems, where unreliable but plausible-looking artifacts can accumulate faster than the system can filter them out. The problem is structural: the epistemic infrastructure of science was calibrated to a world where producing a plausible artifact required substantial expertise, labor, and time, so generation cost itself served as a rough filter; AI weakens that filter without comparably lowering verification cost. We argue that AI-era science should treat this as an engineering problem: redesigning epistemic infrastructure to rebalance the costs of generation and verification. The current paper-centered system makes verification expensive: papers compress long-context scientific logic into prose, forcing reviewers, human or AI, to reconstruct underlying argument structure before they can evaluate it. As one step in this direction, we propose blueprints as preliminary epistemic infrastructure: structured, decomposed research artifacts that represent claims, evidence, assumptions, and definitions as typed graph components. Blueprints are designed to trade an upfront generation cost for cheaper, more local, more distributed verification downstream. We have instantiated the proposal in a proof-of-concept prototype.

  • 1 authors
·
May 10

Towards Conversational AI for Disease Management

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in diagnostic dialogue, their capabilities for effective management reasoning - including disease progression, therapeutic response, and safe medication prescription - remain under-explored. We advance the previously demonstrated diagnostic capabilities of the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE) through a new LLM-based agentic system optimised for clinical management and dialogue, incorporating reasoning over the evolution of disease and multiple patient visit encounters, response to therapy, and professional competence in medication prescription. To ground its reasoning in authoritative clinical knowledge, AMIE leverages Gemini's long-context capabilities, combining in-context retrieval with structured reasoning to align its output with relevant and up-to-date clinical practice guidelines and drug formularies. In a randomized, blinded virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) study, AMIE was compared to 21 primary care physicians (PCPs) across 100 multi-visit case scenarios designed to reflect UK NICE Guidance and BMJ Best Practice guidelines. AMIE was non-inferior to PCPs in management reasoning as assessed by specialist physicians and scored better in both preciseness of treatments and investigations, and in its alignment with and grounding of management plans in clinical guidelines. To benchmark medication reasoning, we developed RxQA, a multiple-choice question benchmark derived from two national drug formularies (US, UK) and validated by board-certified pharmacists. While AMIE and PCPs both benefited from the ability to access external drug information, AMIE outperformed PCPs on higher difficulty questions. While further research would be needed before real-world translation, AMIE's strong performance across evaluations marks a significant step towards conversational AI as a tool in disease management.

  • 20 authors
·
Mar 7, 2025

AI-native Memory: A Pathway from LLMs Towards AGI

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the world with the sparks of artificial general intelligence (AGI). One opinion, especially from some startups working on LLMs, argues that an LLM with nearly unlimited context length can realize AGI. However, they might be too optimistic about the long-context capability of (existing) LLMs -- (1) Recent literature has shown that their effective context length is significantly smaller than their claimed context length; and (2) Our reasoning-in-a-haystack experiments further demonstrate that simultaneously finding the relevant information from a long context and conducting (simple) reasoning is nearly impossible. In this paper, we envision a pathway from LLMs to AGI through the integration of memory. We believe that AGI should be a system where LLMs serve as core processors. In addition to raw data, the memory in this system would store a large number of important conclusions derived from reasoning processes. Compared with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that merely processing raw data, this approach not only connects semantically related information closer, but also simplifies complex inferences at the time of querying. As an intermediate stage, the memory will likely be in the form of natural language descriptions, which can be directly consumed by users too. Ultimately, every agent/person should have its own large personal model, a deep neural network model (thus AI-native) that parameterizes and compresses all types of memory, even the ones cannot be described by natural languages. Finally, we discuss the significant potential of AI-native memory as the transformative infrastructure for (proactive) engagement, personalization, distribution, and social in the AGI era, as well as the incurred privacy and security challenges with preliminary solutions.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 26, 2024

GIRAFFE: Design Choices for Extending the Context Length of Visual Language Models

Visual Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in processing multimodal inputs, yet applications such as visual agents, which require handling multiple images and high-resolution videos, demand enhanced long-range modeling. Moreover, existing open-source VLMs lack systematic exploration into extending their context length, and commercial models often provide limited details. To tackle this, we aim to establish an effective solution that enhances long context performance of VLMs while preserving their capacities in short context scenarios. Towards this goal, we make the best design choice through extensive experiment settings from data curation to context window extending and utilizing: (1) we analyze data sources and length distributions to construct ETVLM - a data recipe to balance the performance across scenarios; (2) we examine existing position extending methods, identify their limitations and propose M-RoPE++ as an enhanced approach; we also choose to solely instruction-tune the backbone with mixed-source data; (3) we discuss how to better utilize extended context windows and propose hybrid-resolution training. Built on the Qwen-VL series model, we propose Giraffe, which is effectively extended to 128K lengths. Evaluated on extensive long context VLM benchmarks such as VideoMME and Viusal Haystacks, our Giraffe achieves state-of-the-art performance among similarly sized open-source long VLMs and is competitive with commercial model GPT-4V. We will open-source the code, data, and models.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

ATANT: An Evaluation Framework for AI Continuity

We present ATANT (Automated Test for Acceptance of Narrative Truth), an open evaluation framework for measuring continuity in AI systems: the ability to persist, update, disambiguate, and reconstruct meaningful context across time. While the AI industry has produced memory components (RAG pipelines, vector databases, long context windows, profile layers), no published framework formally defines or measures whether these components produce genuine continuity. We define continuity as a system property with 7 required properties, introduce a 10-checkpoint evaluation methodology that operates without an LLM in the evaluation loop, and present a narrative test corpus of 250 stories comprising 1,835 verification questions across 6 life domains. We evaluate a reference implementation across 5 test suite iterations, progressing from 58% (legacy architecture) to 100% in isolated mode (250 stories) and 100% in 50-story cumulative mode, with 96% at 250-story cumulative scale. The cumulative result is the primary measure: when 250 distinct life narratives coexist in the same database, the system must retrieve the correct fact for the correct context without cross-contamination. ATANT is system-agnostic, model-independent, and designed as a sequenced methodology for building and validating continuity systems. The framework specification, example stories, and evaluation protocol are available at https://github.com/Kenotic-Labs/ATANT. The full 250-story corpus will be released incrementally.

Kenotic-Labs Kenotic Labs
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Apr 7 2

Textual Equilibrium Propagation for Deep Compound AI Systems

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as part of compound AI systems that coordinate multiple modules (e.g., retrievers, tools, verifiers) over long-horizon workflows. Recent approaches that propagate textual feedback globally (e.g., TextGrad) make it feasible to optimize such pipelines, but we find that performance degrades as system depth grows. In particular, long-horizon agentic workflows exhibit two depth-scaling failure modes: 1) exploding textual gradient, where textual feedback grows exponentially with depth, leading to prohibitively long message and amplifies evaluation biases; and 2) vanishing textual gradient, where limited long-context ability causes models overemphasize partial feedback and compression of lengthy feedback causes downstream messages to lose specificity gradually as they propagate many hops upstream. To mitigate these issues, we introduce Textual Equilibrium Propagation (TEP), a local learning principle inspired by Equilibrium Propagation in energy-based models. TEP includes two phases: 1) a free phase where a local LLM critics iteratively refine prompts until reaching equilibrium (no further improvements are suggested); and 2) a nudged phase which applies proximal prompt edits with bounded modification intensity, using task-level objectives that propagate via forward signaling rather than backward feedback chains. This design supports local prompt optimization followed by controlled adaptation toward global goals without the computational burden and signal degradation of global textual backpropagation. Across long-horizon QA benchmarks and multi-agent tool-use dataset, TEP consistently improves accuracy and efficiency over global propagation methods such as TextGrad. The gains grows with depth, while preserving the practicality of black-box LLM components in deep compound AI system.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 1

AI Agentic Programming: A Survey of Techniques, Challenges, and Opportunities

AI agentic programming is an emerging paradigm in which large language models (LLMs) autonomously plan, execute, and interact with external tools like compilers, debuggers, and version control systems to iteratively perform complex software development tasks. Unlike conventional code generation tools, agentic systems are capable of decomposing high-level goals, coordinating multi-step processes, and adapting their behavior based on intermediate feedback. These capabilities are transforming the software development practice. As this emerging field evolves rapidly, there is a need to define its scope, consolidate its technical foundations, and identify open research challenges. This survey provides a comprehensive and timely review of AI agentic programming. We introduce a taxonomy of agent behaviors and system architectures, and examine core techniques including planning, memory and context management, tool integration, and execution monitoring. We also analyze existing benchmarks and evaluation methodologies used to assess coding agent performance. Our study identifies several key challenges, including limitations in handling long context, a lack of persistent memory across tasks, and concerns around safety, alignment with user intent, and collaboration with human developers. We discuss emerging opportunities to improve the reliability, adaptability, and transparency of agentic systems. By synthesizing recent advances and outlining future directions, this survey aims to provide a foundation for research and development in building the next generation of intelligent and trustworthy AI coding agents.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 14, 2025

MemOS: A Memory OS for AI System

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become an essential infrastructure for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), yet their lack of well-defined memory management systems hinders the development of long-context reasoning, continual personalization, and knowledge consistency.Existing models mainly rely on static parameters and short-lived contextual states, limiting their ability to track user preferences or update knowledge over extended periods.While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) introduces external knowledge in plain text, it remains a stateless workaround without lifecycle control or integration with persistent representations.Recent work has modeled the training and inference cost of LLMs from a memory hierarchy perspective, showing that introducing an explicit memory layer between parameter memory and external retrieval can substantially reduce these costs by externalizing specific knowledge. Beyond computational efficiency, LLMs face broader challenges arising from how information is distributed over time and context, requiring systems capable of managing heterogeneous knowledge spanning different temporal scales and sources. To address this challenge, we propose MemOS, a memory operating system that treats memory as a manageable system resource. It unifies the representation, scheduling, and evolution of plaintext, activation-based, and parameter-level memories, enabling cost-efficient storage and retrieval. As the basic unit, a MemCube encapsulates both memory content and metadata such as provenance and versioning. MemCubes can be composed, migrated, and fused over time, enabling flexible transitions between memory types and bridging retrieval with parameter-based learning. MemOS establishes a memory-centric system framework that brings controllability, plasticity, and evolvability to LLMs, laying the foundation for continual learning and personalized modeling.

  • 39 authors
·
Jul 4, 2025 3

On the limits and opportunities of AI reviewers: Reviewing the reviews of Nature-family papers with 45 expert scientists

With the advancement of AI capabilities, AI reviewers are beginning to be deployed in scientific peer review, yet their capability and credibility remain in question: many scientists simply view them as probabilistic systems without the expertise to evaluate research, while other researchers are more optimistic about their readiness without concrete evidence. Understanding what AI reviewers do well, where they fall short, and what challenges remain is essential. However, existing evaluations of AI reviewers have focused on whether their verdicts match human verdicts (e.g., score alignment, acceptance prediction), which is insufficient to characterize their capabilities and limits. In this paper, we close this gap through a large-scale expert annotation study, in which 45 domain scientists in Physical, Biological, and Health Sciences spent 469 hours rating 2,960 individual criticisms (each targeting one specific aspect of a paper) from human-written and AI-generated reviews of 82 Nature-family papers on correctness, significance, and sufficiency of evidence. On a composite of all three dimensions, a reviewing agent powered by GPT-5.2 scores above each paper's top-rated human reviewer (60.0% vs. 48.2%, p = 0.009), while all three AI reviewers (including Gemini 3.0 Pro and Claude Opus 4.5) exceed the lowest-rated human across every dimension. AI reviewers' accurate criticisms are also more often rated significant and well-evidenced, and surface a distinct 26% of issues no human raises. However, AI reviewers overlap far more than humans do (21% vs. 3% for cross-reviewer pairs), and exhibit 16 recurring weaknesses humans do not share, such as limited subfield knowledge, lack of long context management over multiple files, and overly critical stance on minor issues. Overall, our results position current AI reviewers as complements to, not substitutes for, human reviewers.

Cross-Session Threats in AI Agents: Benchmark, Evaluation, and Algorithms

AI-agent guardrails are memoryless: each message is judged in isolation, so an adversary who spreads a single attack across dozens of sessions slips past every session-bound detector because only the aggregate carries the payload. We make three contributions to cross-session threat detection. (1) Dataset. CSTM-Bench is 26 executable attack taxonomies classified by kill-chain stage and cross-session operation (accumulate, compose, launder, inject_on_reader), each bound to one of seven identity anchors that ground-truth "violation" as a policy predicate, plus matched Benign-pristine and Benign-hard confounders. Released on Hugging Face as intrinsec-ai/cstm-bench with two 54-scenario splits: dilution (compositional) and cross_session (12 isolation-invisible scenarios produced by a closed-loop rewriter that softens surface phrasing while preserving cross-session artefacts). (2) Measurement. Framing cross-session detection as an information bottleneck to a downstream correlator LLM, we find that a session-bound judge and a Full-Log Correlator concatenating every prompt into one long-context call both lose roughly half their attack recall moving from dilution to cross_session, well inside any frontier context window. Scope: 54 scenarios per shard, one correlator family (Anthropic Claude), no prompt optimisation; we release it to motivate larger, multi-provider datasets. (3) Algorithm and metric. A bounded-memory Coreset Memory Reader retaining highest-signal fragments at K=50 is the only reader whose recall survives both shards. Because ranker reshuffles break KV-cache prefix reuse, we promote CSR_prefix (ordered prefix stability, LLM-free) to a first-class metric and fuse it with detection into CSTM = 0.7 F_1(CSDA@action, precision) + 0.3 CSR_prefix, benchmarking rankers on a single Pareto of recall versus serving stability.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 21

Scaling Attention to Very Long Sequences in Linear Time with Wavelet-Enhanced Random Spectral Attention (WERSA)

Transformer models are computationally costly on long sequences since regular attention has quadratic O(n^2) time complexity. We introduce Wavelet-Enhanced Random Spectral Attention (WERSA), a novel mechanism of linear O(n) time complexity that is pivotal to enable successful long-sequence processing without the performance trade-off. WERSA merges content-adaptive random spectral features together with multi-resolution Haar wavelets and learnable parameters to selectively attend to informative scales of data while preserving linear efficiency. Large-scale comparisons on single GPU and across various benchmarks (vision, NLP, hierarchical reasoning) and various attention mechanisms (like Multiheaded Attention, Flash-Attention-2, FNet, Linformer, Performer, Waveformer), reveal uniform advantages of WERSA. It achieves best accuracy in all tests. On ArXiv classification, WERSA improves accuracy over vanilla attention by 1.2\% (86.2\% vs 85.0\%) while cutting training time by 81\% (296s vs 1554s) and FLOPS by 73.4\% (26.2G vs 98.4G). Significantly, WERSA excels where vanilla and FlashAttention-2 fail: on ArXiv-128k's extremely lengthy sequences, it achieves best accuracy (79.1\%) and AUC (0.979) among viable methods, operating on data that gives Out-Of-Memory errors to quadratic methods while being twice as fast as Waveformer, its next-best competitor. By significantly reducing computational loads without compromising accuracy, WERSA makes possible more practical, more affordable, long-context models, in particular on low-resource hardware, for more sustainable and more scalable AI development.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 11, 2025

AIM: Adaptive Inference of Multi-Modal LLMs via Token Merging and Pruning

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled the creation of multi-modal LLMs that exhibit strong comprehension of visual data such as images and videos. However, these models usually rely on extensive visual tokens from visual encoders, leading to high computational demands, which limits their applicability in resource-constrained environments and for long-context tasks. In this work, we propose a training-free adaptive inference method for multi-modal LLMs that can accommodate a broad range of efficiency requirements with a minimum performance drop. Our method consists of a) iterative token merging based on embedding similarity before LLMs, and b) progressive token pruning within LLM layers based on multi-modal importance. With a minimalist design, our method can be applied to both video and image LLMs. Extensive experiments on diverse video and image benchmarks demonstrate that, our method substantially reduces computation load (e.g., a 7-fold reduction in FLOPs) while preserving the performance of video and image LLMs. Further, under a similar computational cost, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in long video understanding (e.g., +4.6 on MLVU). Additionally, our in-depth analysis provides insights into token redundancy and LLM layer behaviors, offering guidance for future research in designing efficient multi-modal LLMs. Our code will be available at https://github.com/LaVi-Lab/AIM.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 4, 2024 2

Does AI Reviewer See the Full Picture? Attacking and Defending Multimodal Peer Review

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) into scientific peer-review workflows introduces novel and significant risks for adversarial manipulation, especially given the multimodal nature of scientific papers where figures, not just text, convey core evidence. This creates a significant gap: current robustness studies on AI peer-review are overwhelmingly text-only. Moreover, the problem is distinct from standard jailbreaking, as a peer-review attack seeks to induce a domain-specific, targeted failure (e.g., "inflate this score") rather than a general safety policy violation, for which no practical defenses exist. To address this, we introduce PaperGuard, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to systematically evaluate and defend AI-generated peer-review against these domain-specific, cross-modal attacks. Our framework is built on three pillars: (1) a new multimodal peer-review dataset spanning multiple scientific domains; (2) a unified suite of attacks, including black-box prompt injections and white-box perturbations, specifically designed to target both text (GCG) and figures (PGD); and (3) a practical defense, motivated by the long-context challenge of academic papers, that uses chunk-based embedding search to efficiently localize and mitigate harmful instructions. Our extensive experiments, conducted across state-of-the-art models, confirm that AI reviewers are pervasively vulnerable. PaperGuard establishes the foundational benchmark, protocols, and actionable defense necessary to pioneer trustworthy, attack-resilient AI-assisted scholarly reviewing.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 9 1

From Prompt Injections to Protocol Exploits: Threats in LLM-Powered AI Agents Workflows

Autonomous AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) with structured function-calling interfaces have dramatically expanded capabilities for real-time data retrieval, complex computation, and multi-step orchestration. Yet, the explosive proliferation of plugins, connectors, and inter-agent protocols has outpaced discovery mechanisms and security practices, resulting in brittle integrations vulnerable to diverse threats. In this survey, we introduce the first unified, end-to-end threat model for LLM-agent ecosystems, spanning host-to-tool and agent-to-agent communications, formalize adversary capabilities and attacker objectives, and catalog over thirty attack techniques. Specifically, we organized the threat model into four domains: Input Manipulation (e.g., prompt injections, long-context hijacks, multimodal adversarial inputs), Model Compromise (e.g., prompt- and parameter-level backdoors, composite and encrypted multi-backdoors, poisoning strategies), System and Privacy Attacks (e.g., speculative side-channels, membership inference, retrieval poisoning, social-engineering simulations), and Protocol Vulnerabilities (e.g., exploits in Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), Agent Network Protocol (ANP), and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol). For each category, we review representative scenarios, assess real-world feasibility, and evaluate existing defenses. Building on our threat taxonomy, we identify key open challenges and future research directions, such as securing MCP deployments through dynamic trust management and cryptographic provenance tracking; designing and hardening Agentic Web Interfaces; and achieving resilience in multi-agent and federated environments. Our work provides a comprehensive reference to guide the design of robust defense mechanisms and establish best practices for resilient LLM-agent workflows.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 29, 2025

The role of synthetic data in Multilingual, Multi-cultural AI systems: Lessons from Indic Languages

Developing AI systems that operate effectively across languages while remaining culturally grounded is a long-standing challenge, particularly in low-resource settings. Synthetic data provides a promising avenue, yet its effectiveness in multilingual and multicultural contexts remains underexplored. We investigate the creation and impact of synthetic, culturally contextualized datasets for Indian languages through a bottom-up generation strategy that prompts large open-source LLMs (>= 235B parameters) to ground data generation in language-specific Wikipedia content. This approach complements the dominant top-down paradigm of translating synthetic datasets from high-resource languages such as English. We introduce Updesh, a high-quality large-scale synthetic instruction-following dataset comprising 9.5M data points across 13 Indian languages, encompassing diverse reasoning and generative tasks with an emphasis on long-context, multi-turn capabilities, and alignment with Indian cultural contexts. A comprehensive evaluation incorporating both automated metrics and human annotation across 10k assessments indicates that generated data is high quality; though, human evaluation highlights areas for further improvement. Additionally, we perform downstream evaluations by fine-tuning models on our dataset and assessing the performance across 15 diverse multilingual datasets. Models trained on Updesh consistently achieve significant gains on generative tasks and remain competitive on multiple-choice style NLU tasks. Notably, relative improvements are most pronounced in low and medium-resource languages, narrowing their gap with high-resource languages. These findings provide empirical evidence that effective multilingual AI requires multi-faceted data curation and generation strategies that incorporate context-aware, culturally grounded methodologies.

microsoft Microsoft
·
Sep 25, 2025 2

6G-Bench: An Open Benchmark for Semantic Communication and Network-Level Reasoning with Foundation Models in AI-Native 6G Networks

This paper introduces 6G-Bench, an open benchmark for evaluating semantic communication and network-level reasoning in AI-native 6G networks. 6G-Bench defines a taxonomy of 30 decision-making tasks (T1--T30) extracted from ongoing 6G and AI-agent standardization activities in 3GPP, IETF, ETSI, ITU-T, and the O-RAN Alliance, and organizes them into five standardization-aligned capability categories. Starting from 113,475 scenarios, we generate a balanced pool of 10,000 very-hard multiple-choice questions using task-conditioned prompts that enforce multi-step quantitative reasoning under uncertainty and worst-case regret minimization over multi-turn horizons. After automated filtering and expert human validation, 3,722 questions are retained as a high-confidence evaluation set, while the full pool is released to support training and fine-tuning of 6G-specialized models. Using 6G-Bench, we evaluate 22 foundation models spanning dense and mixture-of-experts architectures, short- and long-context designs (up to 1M tokens), and both open-weight and proprietary systems. Across models, deterministic single-shot accuracy (pass@1) spans a wide range from 0.22 to 0.82, highlighting substantial variation in semantic reasoning capability. Leading models achieve intent and policy reasoning accuracy in the range 0.87--0.89, while selective robustness analysis on reasoning-intensive tasks shows pass@5 values ranging from 0.20 to 0.91. To support open science and reproducibility, we release the 6G-Bench dataset on GitHub: https://github.com/maferrag/6G-Bench

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 9

Capabilities of Gemini Models in Medicine

Excellence in a wide variety of medical applications poses considerable challenges for AI, requiring advanced reasoning, access to up-to-date medical knowledge and understanding of complex multimodal data. Gemini models, with strong general capabilities in multimodal and long-context reasoning, offer exciting possibilities in medicine. Building on these core strengths of Gemini, we introduce Med-Gemini, a family of highly capable multimodal models that are specialized in medicine with the ability to seamlessly use web search, and that can be efficiently tailored to novel modalities using custom encoders. We evaluate Med-Gemini on 14 medical benchmarks, establishing new state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on 10 of them, and surpass the GPT-4 model family on every benchmark where a direct comparison is viable, often by a wide margin. On the popular MedQA (USMLE) benchmark, our best-performing Med-Gemini model achieves SoTA performance of 91.1% accuracy, using a novel uncertainty-guided search strategy. On 7 multimodal benchmarks including NEJM Image Challenges and MMMU (health & medicine), Med-Gemini improves over GPT-4V by an average relative margin of 44.5%. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Med-Gemini's long-context capabilities through SoTA performance on a needle-in-a-haystack retrieval task from long de-identified health records and medical video question answering, surpassing prior bespoke methods using only in-context learning. Finally, Med-Gemini's performance suggests real-world utility by surpassing human experts on tasks such as medical text summarization, alongside demonstrations of promising potential for multimodal medical dialogue, medical research and education. Taken together, our results offer compelling evidence for Med-Gemini's potential, although further rigorous evaluation will be crucial before real-world deployment in this safety-critical domain.

  • 66 authors
·
Apr 29, 2024 3

Yi: Open Foundation Models by 01.AI

We introduce the Yi model family, a series of language and multimodal models that demonstrate strong multi-dimensional capabilities. The Yi model family is based on 6B and 34B pretrained language models, then we extend them to chat models, 200K long context models, depth-upscaled models, and vision-language models. Our base models achieve strong performance on a wide range of benchmarks like MMLU, and our finetuned chat models deliver strong human preference rate on major evaluation platforms like AlpacaEval and Chatbot Arena. Building upon our scalable super-computing infrastructure and the classical transformer architecture, we attribute the performance of Yi models primarily to its data quality resulting from our data-engineering efforts. For pretraining, we construct 3.1 trillion tokens of English and Chinese corpora using a cascaded data deduplication and quality filtering pipeline. For finetuning, we polish a small scale (less than 10K) instruction dataset over multiple iterations such that every single instance has been verified directly by our machine learning engineers. For vision-language, we combine the chat language model with a vision transformer encoder and train the model to align visual representations to the semantic space of the language model. We further extend the context length to 200K through lightweight continual pretraining and demonstrate strong needle-in-a-haystack retrieval performance. We show that extending the depth of the pretrained checkpoint through continual pretraining further improves performance. We believe that given our current results, continuing to scale up model parameters using thoroughly optimized data will lead to even stronger frontier models.

  • 31 authors
·
Mar 7, 2024 3

MiniMax-M1: Scaling Test-Time Compute Efficiently with Lightning Attention

We introduce MiniMax-M1, the world's first open-weight, large-scale hybrid-attention reasoning model. MiniMax-M1 is powered by a hybrid Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture combined with a lightning attention mechanism. The model is developed based on our previous MiniMax-Text-01 model, which contains a total of 456 billion parameters with 45.9 billion parameters activated per token. The M1 model natively supports a context length of 1 million tokens, 8x the context size of DeepSeek R1. Furthermore, the lightning attention mechanism in MiniMax-M1 enables efficient scaling of test-time compute. These properties make M1 particularly suitable for complex tasks that require processing long inputs and thinking extensively. MiniMax-M1 is trained using large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) on diverse problems including sandbox-based, real-world software engineering environments. In addition to M1's inherent efficiency advantage for RL training, we propose CISPO, a novel RL algorithm to further enhance RL efficiency. CISPO clips importance sampling weights rather than token updates, outperforming other competitive RL variants. Combining hybrid-attention and CISPO enables MiniMax-M1's full RL training on 512 H800 GPUs to complete in only three weeks, with a rental cost of just $534,700. We release two versions of MiniMax-M1 models with 40K and 80K thinking budgets respectively, where the 40K model represents an intermediate phase of the 80K training. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that our models are comparable or superior to strong open-weight models such as the original DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen3-235B, with particular strengths in complex software engineering, tool utilization, and long-context tasks. We publicly release MiniMax-M1 at https://github.com/MiniMax-AI/MiniMax-M1.

  • 127 authors
·
Jun 16, 2025 6

Unlocking Cognitive Capabilities and Analyzing the Perception-Logic Trade-off

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) pursue omni-perception capabilities, yet integrating robust sensory grounding with complex reasoning remains a challenge, particularly for underrepresented regions. In this report, we introduce the research preview of MERaLiON2-Omni (Alpha), a 10B-parameter multilingual omni-perception tailored for Southeast Asia (SEA). We present a progressive training pipeline that explicitly decouples and then integrates "System 1" (Perception) and "System 2" (Reasoning) capabilities. First, we establish a robust Perception Backbone by aligning region-specific audio-visual cues (e.g., Singlish code-switching, local cultural landmarks) with a multilingual LLM through orthogonal modality adaptation. Second, to inject cognitive capabilities without large-scale supervision, we propose a cost-effective Generate-Judge-Refine pipeline. By utilizing a Super-LLM to filter hallucinations and resolve conflicts via a consensus mechanism, we synthesize high-quality silver data that transfers textual Chain-of-Thought reasoning to multimodal scenarios. Comprehensive evaluation on our newly introduced SEA-Omni Benchmark Suite reveals an Efficiency-Stability Paradox: while reasoning acts as a non-linear amplifier for abstract tasks (boosting mathematical and instruction-following performance significantly), it introduces instability in low-level sensory processing. Specifically, we identify Temporal Drift in long-context audio, where extended reasoning desynchronizes the model from acoustic timestamps, and Visual Over-interpretation, where logic overrides pixel-level reality. This report details the architecture, the data-efficient training recipe, and a diagnostic analysis of the trade-offs between robust perception and structured reasoning.

  • 18 authors
·
Feb 26

Step-3 is Large yet Affordable: Model-system Co-design for Cost-effective Decoding

Large language models (LLMs) face low hardware efficiency during decoding, especially for long-context reasoning tasks. This paper introduces Step-3, a 321B-parameter VLM with hardware-aware model-system co-design optimized for minimizing decoding costs. Step-3 innovates in two key dimensions: (1) A novel Multi-Matrix Factorization Attention (MFA) mechanism that significantly reduces both KV cache size and computation while maintaining high attention expressiveness, and (2) Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD), a distributed inference system that decouples attention and Feed-Forward Network (FFN) layers into specialized subsystems. This co-design achieves unprecedented cost efficiency: Step-3 significantly reduces theoretical decoding costs compared with models like DeepSeek-V3 and Qwen3 MoE 235B, with the gains widening at longer context. Step-3 achieves low cost while activating 38B parameters per token (more than DeepSeek-V3 and Qwen3 MoE 235B), demonstrating that hardware-aligned attention arithmetic intensity, MoE sparsity, and AFD are critical to cost-effectiveness. We perform a head-to-head comparison with DeepSeek-V3 in its favorable scenarios. Our implementation on Hopper GPUs achieves a decoding throughput of up to 4,039 tokens per second per GPU under 50ms TPOT SLA (4K context, FP8, no MTP). It is higher than DeepSeek-V3's 2,324 in the same setup and sets a new Pareto frontier for LLM decoding.

  • 199 authors
·
Jul 25, 2025 2

Extending Puzzle for Mixture-of-Experts Reasoning Models with Application to GPT-OSS Acceleration

Reasoning-focused LLMs improve answer quality by generating longer reasoning traces, but the additional tokens dramatically increase serving cost, motivating inference optimization. We extend and apply Puzzle, a post-training neural architecture search (NAS) framework, to gpt-oss-120B to produce gpt-oss-puzzle-88B, a deployment-optimized derivative. Our approach combines heterogeneous MoE expert pruning, selective replacement of full-context attention with window attention, FP8 KV-cache quantization with calibrated scales, and post-training reinforcement learning to recover accuracy, while maintaining low generation length. In terms of per-token speeds, on an 8XH100 node we achieve 1.63X and 1.22X throughput speedups in long-context and short-context settings, respectively. gpt-oss-puzzle-88B also delivers throughput speedups of 2.82X on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU. However, because token counts can change with reasoning effort and model variants, per-token throughput (tok/s) and latency (ms/token) do not necessarily lead to end-to-end speedups: a 2X throughput gain is erased if traces grow 2X. Conversely, throughput gains can be spent on more reasoning tokens to improve accuracy; we therefore advocate request-level efficiency metrics that normalize throughput by tokens generated and trace an accuracy--speed frontier across reasoning efforts. We show that gpt-oss-puzzle-88B improves over gpt-oss-120B along the entire frontier, delivering up to 1.29X higher request-level efficiency. Across various benchmarks, gpt-oss-puzzle-88B matches or slightly exceeds the parent on suite-average accuracy across reasoning efforts, with retention ranging from 100.8% (high) to 108.2% (low), showing that post-training architecture search can substantially reduce inference costs without sacrificing quality.

  • 24 authors
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Feb 12 1

FlashRT: Towards Computationally and Memory Efficient Red-Teaming for Prompt Injection and Knowledge Corruption

Long-context large language models (LLMs)-for example, Gemini-3.1-Pro and Qwen-3.5-are widely used to empower many real-world applications, such as retrieval-augmented generation, autonomous agents, and AI assistants. However, security remains a major concern for their widespread deployment, with threats such as prompt injection and knowledge corruption. To quantify the security risks faced by LLMs under these threats, the research community has developed heuristic-based and optimization-based red-teaming methods. Optimization-based methods generally produce stronger attacks than heuristic attacks and thus provide a more rigorous assessment of LLM security risks. However, they are often resource-intensive, requiring significant computation and GPU memory, especially for long context scenarios. The resource-intensive nature poses a major obstacle for the community (especially academic researchers) to systematically evaluate the security risks of long-context LLMs and assess the effectiveness of defense strategies at scale. In this work, we propose FlashRT, the first framework to improve the efficiency (in terms of both computation and memory) for optimization-based prompt injection and knowledge corruption attacks under long-context LLMs. Through extensive evaluations, we find that FlashRT consistently delivers a 2x-7x speedup (e.g., reducing runtime from one hour to less than ten minutes) and a 2x-4x reduction in GPU memory consumption (e.g., reducing from 264.1 GB to 65.7 GB GPU memory for a 32K token context) compared to state-of-the-art baseline nanoGCG. FlashRT can be broadly applied to black-box optimization methods, such as TAP and AutoDAN. We hope FlashRT can serve as a red-teaming tool to enable systematic evaluation of long-context LLM security. The code is available at: https://github.com/Wang-Yanting/FlashRT

DrafterBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Tasks Automation in Civil Engineering

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown great potential for solving real-world problems and promise to be a solution for tasks automation in industry. However, more benchmarks are needed to systematically evaluate automation agents from an industrial perspective, for example, in Civil Engineering. Therefore, we propose DrafterBench for the comprehensive evaluation of LLM agents in the context of technical drawing revision, a representation task in civil engineering. DrafterBench contains twelve types of tasks summarized from real-world drawing files, with 46 customized functions/tools and 1920 tasks in total. DrafterBench is an open-source benchmark to rigorously test AI agents' proficiency in interpreting intricate and long-context instructions, leveraging prior knowledge, and adapting to dynamic instruction quality via implicit policy awareness. The toolkit comprehensively assesses distinct capabilities in structured data comprehension, function execution, instruction following, and critical reasoning. DrafterBench offers detailed analysis of task accuracy and error statistics, aiming to provide deeper insight into agent capabilities and identify improvement targets for integrating LLMs in engineering applications. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/Eason-Li-AIS/DrafterBench, with the test set hosted at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Eason666/DrafterBench.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 15, 2025 1

ACE: All-round Creator and Editor Following Instructions via Diffusion Transformer

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful generative technology and have been found to be applicable in various scenarios. Most existing foundational diffusion models are primarily designed for text-guided visual generation and do not support multi-modal conditions, which are essential for many visual editing tasks. This limitation prevents these foundational diffusion models from serving as a unified model in the field of visual generation, like GPT-4 in the natural language processing field. In this work, we propose ACE, an All-round Creator and Editor, which achieves comparable performance compared to those expert models in a wide range of visual generation tasks. To achieve this goal, we first introduce a unified condition format termed Long-context Condition Unit (LCU), and propose a novel Transformer-based diffusion model that uses LCU as input, aiming for joint training across various generation and editing tasks. Furthermore, we propose an efficient data collection approach to address the issue of the absence of available training data. It involves acquiring pairwise images with synthesis-based or clustering-based pipelines and supplying these pairs with accurate textual instructions by leveraging a fine-tuned multi-modal large language model. To comprehensively evaluate the performance of our model, we establish a benchmark of manually annotated pairs data across a variety of visual generation tasks. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our model in visual generation fields. Thanks to the all-in-one capabilities of our model, we can easily build a multi-modal chat system that responds to any interactive request for image creation using a single model to serve as the backend, avoiding the cumbersome pipeline typically employed in visual agents. Code and models will be available on the project page: https://ali-vilab.github.io/ace-page/.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 30, 2024 2

Cache What Lasts: Token Retention for Memory-Bounded KV Cache in LLMs

Memory and computation remain core bottlenecks in long-horizon LLM inference due to the quadratic cost of self-attention and the ever-growing key-value (KV) cache. Existing strategies for memory-bounded inference, such as quantization, offloading, or heuristic KV eviction, either incur high orchestration costs or rely on unreliable attention-based proxies of importance. We propose TRIM-KV, a novel approach that learns each token's intrinsic importance at creation time via a lightweight retention gate. Each gate predicts a scalar retention score that decays over time, reflecting the long-term utility of the token for a specific layer and head. Tokens with low scores are evicted when the memory budget is exceeded, ensuring that the cache always contains the most critical tokens. TRIM-KV is trained efficiently through distillation from a frozen LLM combined with a capacity loss, requiring only gate fine-tuning and adding negligible inference overhead. Across mathematical reasoning (GSM8K, MATH-500, AIME24), procedural generation (LongProc), conversational long-memory benchmarks (LongMemEval), and long-context understanding (LongBench and SCBench), TRIM-KV consistently outperforms strong eviction and learnable retrieval baselines, especially in low-memory regimes. Remarkably, it even surpasses full-cache models in some settings, showing that selective retention can serve as a form of regularization, suppressing noise from uninformative tokens. Qualitative analyses further reveal that learned retention scores align with human intuition, naturally recovering heuristics such as sink tokens, sliding windows, and gist compression without explicit design. Beyond efficiency, retention scores provide insights into layer- and head-specific roles, suggesting a new path toward LLM interpretability.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 2, 2025 1

DeltaLLM: A Training-Free Framework Exploiting Temporal Sparsity for Efficient Edge LLM Inference

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices remains challenging due to their quadratically increasing computations with the sequence length. Existing studies for dynamic attention pruning are designed for hardware with massively parallel computation capabilities, such as GPUs or TPUs, and aim at long context lengths (e.g., 64K), making them unsuitable for edge scenarios. We present DeltaLLM, a training-free framework that exploits temporal sparsity in attention patterns to enable efficient LLM inference across both the prefilling and decoding stages, on resource-constrained edge devices. DeltaLLM introduces an accuracy- and memory-aware delta matrix construction strategy that introduces temporal sparsity, and a context-aware hybrid attention mechanism that combines full attention in a local context window with delta approximation outside it to increase accuracy. We evaluate our framework on the edge-device-friendly BitNet-b1.58-2B-4T model and Llama3.2-1B-Instruct model across diverse language tasks. The results show that on BitNet, our framework increases the attention sparsity from 0% to 60% during the prefilling stage with slight accuracy improvement on the WG task, and 0% to 57% across both the prefilling and decoding stages, with even higher F1 score from 29.63 to 30.97 on SQuAD-v2 task. On the Llama model, it can also achieve up to 60% sparsity during the prefilling stage and around 57% across both stages with negligible accuracy drop. These results demonstrate that DeltaLLM offers a promising solution for efficient edge deployment, requiring no fine-tuning and seamlessly integrating with existing inference pipelines.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 25, 2025

LoCoNet: Long-Short Context Network for Active Speaker Detection

Active Speaker Detection (ASD) aims to identify who is speaking in each frame of a video. ASD reasons from audio and visual information from two contexts: long-term intra-speaker context and short-term inter-speaker context. Long-term intra-speaker context models the temporal dependencies of the same speaker, while short-term inter-speaker context models the interactions of speakers in the same scene. These two contexts are complementary to each other and can help infer the active speaker. Motivated by these observations, we propose LoCoNet, a simple yet effective Long-Short Context Network that models the long-term intra-speaker context and short-term inter-speaker context. We use self-attention to model long-term intra-speaker context due to its effectiveness in modeling long-range dependencies, and convolutional blocks that capture local patterns to model short-term inter-speaker context. Extensive experiments show that LoCoNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets, achieving an mAP of 95.2%(+1.1%) on AVA-ActiveSpeaker, 68.1%(+22%) on Columbia dataset, 97.2%(+2.8%) on Talkies dataset and 59.7%(+8.0%) on Ego4D dataset. Moreover, in challenging cases where multiple speakers are present, or face of active speaker is much smaller than other faces in the same scene, LoCoNet outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by 3.4% on the AVA-ActiveSpeaker dataset. The code will be released at https://github.com/SJTUwxz/LoCoNet_ASD.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 19, 2023

MEMTRACK: Evaluating Long-Term Memory and State Tracking in Multi-Platform Dynamic Agent Environments

Recent works on context and memory benchmarking have primarily focused on conversational instances but the need for evaluating memory in dynamic enterprise environments is crucial for its effective application. We introduce MEMTRACK, a benchmark designed to evaluate long-term memory and state tracking in multi-platform agent environments. MEMTRACK models realistic organizational workflows by integrating asynchronous events across multiple communication and productivity platforms such as Slack, Linear and Git. Each benchmark instance provides a chronologically platform-interleaved timeline, with noisy, conflicting, cross-referring information as well as potential codebase/file-system comprehension and exploration. Consequently, our benchmark tests memory capabilities such as acquistion, selection and conflict resolution. We curate the MEMTRACK dataset through both manual expert driven design and scalable agent based synthesis, generating ecologically valid scenarios grounded in real world software development processes. We introduce pertinent metrics for Correctness, Efficiency, and Redundancy that capture the effectiveness of memory mechanisms beyond simple QA performance. Experiments across SoTA LLMs and memory backends reveal challenges in utilizing memory across long horizons, handling cross-platform dependencies, and resolving contradictions. Notably, the best performing GPT-5 model only achieves a 60\% Correctness score on MEMTRACK. This work provides an extensible framework for advancing evaluation research for memory-augmented agents, beyond existing focus on conversational setups, and sets the stage for multi-agent, multi-platform memory benchmarking in complex organizational settings

PatronusAI Patronus AI
·
Oct 1, 2025 2

Beyond Context Limits: Subconscious Threads for Long-Horizon Reasoning

To break the context limits of large language models (LLMs) that bottleneck reasoning accuracy and efficiency, we propose the Thread Inference Model (TIM), a family of LLMs trained for recursive and decompositional problem solving, and TIMRUN, an inference runtime enabling long-horizon structured reasoning beyond context limits. Together, TIM hosted on TIMRUN supports virtually unlimited working memory and multi-hop tool calls within a single language model inference, overcoming output limits, positional-embedding constraints, and GPU-memory bottlenecks. Performance is achieved by modeling natural language as reasoning trees measured by both length and depth instead of linear sequences. The reasoning trees consist of tasks with thoughts, recursive subtasks, and conclusions based on the concept we proposed in Schroeder et al, 2025. During generation, we maintain a working memory that retains only the key-value states of the most relevant context tokens, selected by a rule-based subtask-pruning mechanism, enabling reuse of positional embeddings and GPU memory pages throughout reasoning. Experimental results show that our system sustains high inference throughput, even when manipulating up to 90% of the KV cache in GPU memory. It also delivers accurate reasoning on mathematical tasks and handles information retrieval challenges that require long-horizon reasoning and multi-hop tool use.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 22, 2025 11