Daily Papers

The advent of large language models (LLMs) revolutionized natural language processing applications, and running LLMs on edge devices has become increasingly attractive for reasons including reduced latency, data localization, and personalized user experiences. This comprehensive review examines the challenges of deploying computationally expensive LLMs on resource-constrained devices and explores innovative solutions across multiple domains. The paper investigates the development of on-device language models, their efficient architectures, including parameter sharing and modular designs, as well as state-of-the-art compression techniques like quantization, pruning, and knowledge distillation. Hardware acceleration strategies and collaborative edge-cloud deployment approaches are analyzed, highlighting the intricate balance between performance and resource utilization. Case studies of on-device language models from major mobile manufacturers demonstrate real-world applications and potential benefits. The review also addresses critical aspects such as adaptive learning, multi-modal capabilities, and personalization. By identifying key research directions and open challenges, this paper provides a roadmap for future advancements in on-device language models, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary efforts to realize the full potential of ubiquitous, intelligent computing while ensuring responsible and ethical deployment. For a comprehensive review of research work and educational resources on on-device large language models (LLMs), please visit https://github.com/NexaAI/Awesome-LLMs-on-device. To download and run on-device LLMs, visit https://www.nexaai.com/models.

Large language models (LLMs) provide robots with powerful contextual reasoning abilities and a natural human interface. Yet, current LLM-enabled robots typically depend on cloud-hosted models, limiting their usability in environments with unreliable communication infrastructure, such as outdoor or industrial settings. We present PRISM, a framework for distilling small language model (SLM)-enabled robot planners that run on-device with minimal human supervision. Starting from an existing LLM-enabled planner, PRISM automatically synthesizes diverse tasks and environments, elicits plans from the LLM, and uses this synthetic dataset to distill a compact SLM as a drop-in replacement of the source model. We apply PRISM to three LLM-enabled planners for mapping and exploration, manipulation, and household assistance, and we demonstrate that PRISM improves the performance of Llama-3.2-3B from 10-20% of GPT-4o's performance to over 93% - using only synthetic data. We further demonstrate that the distilled planners generalize across heterogeneous robotic platforms (ground and aerial) and diverse environments (indoor and outdoor). We release all software, trained models, and datasets at https://zacravichandran.github.io/PRISM.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized language processing, delivering outstanding results across multiple applications. However, deploying LLMs on edge devices poses several challenges with respect to memory, energy, and compute costs, limiting their widespread use in devices such as mobile phones. A promising solution is to reduce the number of bits used to represent weights and activations. While existing works have found partial success at quantizing LLMs to lower bitwidths, e.g. 4-bit weights, quantizing activations beyond 16 bits often leads to large computational overheads due to poor on-device quantization support, or a considerable accuracy drop. Yet, 8-bit activations are very attractive for on-device deployment as they would enable LLMs to fully exploit mobile-friendly hardware, e.g. Neural Processing Units (NPUs). In this work, we make a first attempt to facilitate the on-device deployment of LLMs using integer-only quantization. We first investigate the limitations of existing quantization methods for on-device deployment, with a special focus on activation quantization. We then address these limitations by introducing a simple post-training quantization method, named MobileQuant, that extends previous weight equivalent transformation works by jointly optimizing the weight transformation and activation range parameters in an end-to-end manner. MobileQuant demonstrates superior capabilities over existing methods by 1) achieving near-lossless quantization on a wide range of LLM benchmarks, 2) reducing latency and energy consumption by 20\%-50\% compared to current on-device quantization strategies, 3) requiring limited compute budget, 4) being compatible with mobile-friendly compute units, e.g. NPU.

Large language models have demonstrated impressive value in performing as autonomous agents when equipped with external tools and API calls. Nonetheless, effectively harnessing their potential for executing complex tasks crucially relies on enhancements in their function calling capabilities. This paper identifies a critical gap in existing function calling models, where performance varies significantly across benchmarks, often due to being misled by specific naming conventions. To address such an issue, we introduce Hammer, a novel family of foundation models specifically engineered for on-device function calling. Hammer employs an augmented dataset that enhances models' sensitivity to irrelevant functions and incorporates function masking techniques to minimize misleading. Our empirical evaluations reveal that Hammer not only outperforms larger models but also demonstrates robust generalization across diverse benchmarks, achieving sota results. Our open source contributions include a specialized dataset for irrelevance detection, a tuning framework for enhanced generalization, and the Hammer models, establishing a new standard for function calling performance.

The application of on-device language models (ODLMs) on resource-constrained edge devices is a multi-dimensional problem that strikes a fine balance between computational effectiveness, memory, power usage, and linguistic capacity across heterogeneous tasks. This holistic study conducts a thorough investigation of the trade-offs between domain-specific optimization and cross-domain robustness, culminating in the proposal of the Generalized Edge Model (GEM), a new architecture that aims to balance specialization and generalization in a harmonious manner. With a rigorous experimental approach testing 47 well-chosen benchmarks in eight domains--healthcare, law, finance, STEM, commonsense, conversational AI, multilingual, and domain-adaptive tasks--we show that conventional optimization techniques decrease target task perplexity by 18-25% but result in a precipitous decline in general-task performance with F1 scores decreasing by 12-29%, as reported by Liu et al. GEM employs a Sparse Cross-Attention Router (SCAR) to dynamically allocate computation to a variable number of computing resources with a cross-domain F1 accuracy of 0.89 on less than 100ms latency across Raspberry Pi 4, Pixel 6, iPhone 13, and bespoke custom neural processing units (NPUs). Compared to GPT-4 Lite, GEM enhances the general-task level by 7% with respect and parity in domain-specific performance. We propose three new measurement tools--Domain Specialization Index (DSI), Generalization Gap (GG), and Cross-Domain Transfer Ratio (CDTR)--which show strong correlation between model compression intensity and brittleness.

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.

We investigate an emerging setup in which a small, on-device language model (LM) with access to local data communicates with a frontier, cloud-hosted LM to solve real-world tasks involving financial, medical, and scientific reasoning over long documents. Can a local-remote collaboration reduce cloud inference costs while preserving quality? First, we consider a naive collaboration protocol where the local and remote models simply chat back and forth. Because only the local model reads the full context, this protocol achieves a 30.4x reduction in remote costs, but recovers only 87% of the performance of the frontier model. We identify two key limitations of this protocol: the local model struggles to (1) follow the remote model's multi-step instructions and (2) reason over long contexts. Motivated by these observations, we study an extension of this protocol, coined MinionS, in which the remote model decomposes the task into easier subtasks over shorter chunks of the document, that are executed locally in parallel. MinionS reduces costs by 5.7x on average while recovering 97.9% of the performance of the remote model alone. Our analysis reveals several key design choices that influence the trade-off between cost and performance in local-remote systems.

In the rapidly evolving domain of artificial intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) play a crucial role due to their advanced text processing and generation abilities. This study introduces a new strategy aimed at harnessing on-device LLMs in invoking software APIs. We meticulously compile a dataset derived from software API documentation and apply fine-tuning to LLMs with capacities of 2B, 3B and 7B parameters, specifically to enhance their proficiency in software API interactions. Our approach concentrates on refining the models' grasp of API structures and syntax, significantly enhancing the accuracy of API function calls. Additionally, we propose conditional masking techniques to ensure outputs in the desired formats and reduce error rates while maintaining inference speeds. We also propose a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the effectiveness of LLMs in API interactions, establishing a foundation for subsequent research. Octopus, the fine-tuned model, is proved to have better performance than GPT-4 for the software APIs calling. This research aims to advance automated software development and API integration, representing substantial progress in aligning LLM capabilities with the demands of practical software engineering applications.

Language models have shown effectiveness in a variety of software applications, particularly in tasks related to automatic workflow. These models possess the crucial ability to call functions, which is essential in creating AI agents. Despite the high performance of large-scale language models in cloud environments, they are often associated with concerns over privacy and cost. Current on-device models for function calling face issues with latency and accuracy. Our research presents a new method that empowers an on-device model with 2 billion parameters to surpass the performance of GPT-4 in both accuracy and latency, and decrease the context length by 95\%. When compared to Llama-7B with a RAG-based function calling mechanism, our method enhances latency by 35-fold. This method reduces the latency to levels deemed suitable for deployment across a variety of edge devices in production environments, aligning with the performance requisites for real-world applications.

While small language models (SLMs) show promises for mobile deployment, their real-world performance and applications on smartphones remains underexplored. We present SlimLM, a series of SLMs optimized for document assistance tasks on mobile devices. Through extensive experiments on a Samsung Galaxy S24, we identify the optimal trade-offs between model size (ranging from 125M to 7B parameters), context length, and inference time for efficient on-device processing. SlimLM is pre-trained on SlimPajama-627B and fine-tuned on DocAssist, our constructed dataset for summarization, question answering and suggestion tasks. Our smallest model demonstrates efficient performance on S24, while larger variants offer enhanced capabilities within mobile constraints. We evaluate SlimLM against existing SLMs, showing comparable or superior performance and offering a benchmark for future research in on-device language models. We also provide an Android application, offering practical insights into SLM deployment. Our findings provide valuable insights and illuminate the capabilities of running advanced language models on high-end smartphones, potentially reducing server costs and enhancing privacy through on-device processing.

While server-side Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate proficiency in function calling and complex reasoning, deploying Small Language Models (SLMs) directly on devices brings opportunities to improve latency and privacy but also introduces unique challenges for accuracy and memory. We introduce CAMPHOR, an innovative on-device SLM multi-agent framework designed to handle multiple user inputs and reason over personal context locally, ensuring privacy is maintained. CAMPHOR employs a hierarchical architecture where a high-order reasoning agent decomposes complex tasks and coordinates expert agents responsible for personal context retrieval, tool interaction, and dynamic plan generation. By implementing parameter sharing across agents and leveraging prompt compression, we significantly reduce model size, latency, and memory usage. To validate our approach, we present a novel dataset capturing multi-agent task trajectories centered on personalized mobile assistant use-cases. Our experiments reveal that fine-tuned SLM agents not only surpass closed-source LLMs in task completion F1 by~35\% but also eliminate the need for server-device communication, all while enhancing privacy.

Efficient on-device language models around 1 billion parameters are essential for powering low-latency AI applications on mobile and wearable devices. However, achieving strong performance in this model class, while supporting long context windows and practical deployment remains a significant challenge. We introduce MobileLLM-Pro, a 1-billion-parameter language model optimized for on-device deployment. MobileLLM-Pro achieves state-of-the-art results across 11 standard benchmarks, significantly outperforming both Gemma 3-1B and Llama 3.2-1B, while supporting context windows of up to 128,000 tokens and showing only minor performance regressions at 4-bit quantization. These improvements are enabled by four core innovations: (1) implicit positional distillation, a novel technique that effectively instills long-context capabilities through knowledge distillation; (2) a specialist model merging framework that fuses multiple domain experts into a compact model without parameter growth; (3) simulation-driven data mixing using utility estimation; and (4) 4-bit quantization-aware training with self-distillation. We release our model weights and code to support future research in efficient on-device language models.

On-device deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently leverages Low-Rank Adapters (LoRAs) to support diverse downstream tasks under tight resource constraints. To address the limited storage capacity of mobile devices, recent works have explored model merging techniques to fuse multiple LoRAs into a single one. In practice, however, LoRAs are often delivered incrementally, as users request support for new tasks (e.g., novel problem types or languages). This scenario introduces a new challenge: on-device online continual merging, where the objective is to incorporate new LoRAs while preserving the performance on previously supported tasks. In this paper, we propose a data-free and computationally efficient strategy for selecting and merging LoRAs when a new one becomes available, assuming the device can store only a limited number of adapters. Extensive experiments across real-world tasks demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to alternative strategies while adhering to the storage budget and compute limitations of on-device settings.

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed on mobile devices offer benefits like user privacy and reduced network latency, but introduce a significant security risk: the leakage of proprietary models to end users. To mitigate this risk, we propose a system design for protecting on-device LLMs using Arm Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), TrustZone. Our system addresses two primary challenges: (1) The dilemma between memory efficiency and fast inference (caching model parameters within TEE memory). (2) The lack of efficient and secure Neural Processing Unit (NPU) time-sharing between Rich Execution Environment (REE) and TEE. Our approach incorporates two key innovations. First, we employ pipelined restoration, leveraging the deterministic memory access patterns of LLM inference to prefetch parameters on demand, hiding memory allocation, I/O and decryption latency under computation time. Second, we introduce a co-driver design, creating a minimal data plane NPU driver in the TEE that collaborates with the full-fledged REE driver. This reduces the TEE TCB size and eliminates control plane reinitialization overhead during NPU world switches. We implemented our system on the emerging OpenHarmony OS and the llama.cpp inference framework, and evaluated it with various LLMs on an Arm Rockchip device. Compared to a strawman TEE baseline lacking our optimizations, our system reduces TTFT by up to 90.9% and increases decoding speed by up to 23.2%.

As on-device large language model (LLM) systems become increasingly prevalent, federated fine-tuning enables advanced language understanding and generation directly on edge devices; however, it also involves processing sensitive, user-specific data, raising significant privacy concerns within the federated learning framework. To address these challenges, we propose DP-FedLoRA, a privacy-enhanced federated fine-tuning framework that integrates LoRA-based adaptation with differential privacy in a communication-efficient setting. Each client locally clips and perturbs its LoRA matrices using Gaussian noise to satisfy (epsilon, delta)-differential privacy. We further provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating the unbiased nature of the updates and deriving bounds on the variance introduced by noise, offering practical guidance for privacy-budget calibration. Experimental results across mainstream benchmarks show that DP-FedLoRA delivers competitive performance while offering strong privacy guarantees, paving the way for scalable and privacy-preserving LLM deployment in on-device environments.

Test-time Reinforcement Learning (TTRL) has shown promise in adapting foundation models for complex tasks at test-time, resulting in large performance improvements. TTRL leverages an elegant two-phase sampling strategy: first, multi-sampling derives a pseudo-label via majority voting, while subsequent downsampling and reward-based fine-tuning encourages the model to explore and learn diverse valid solutions, with the pseudo-label modulating the reward signal. Meanwhile, in-context learning has been widely explored at inference time and demonstrated the ability to enhance model performance without weight updates. However, TTRL's two-phase sampling strategy under-utilizes contextual guidance, which can potentially improve pseudo-label accuracy in the initial exploitation phase while regulating exploration in the second. To address this, we propose context-guided TTRL (CG-TTRL), integrating context dynamically into both sampling phases and propose a method for efficient context selection for on-device applications. Our evaluations on mathematical and scientific QA benchmarks show CG-TTRL outperforms TTRL (e.g. additional 7% relative accuracy improvement over TTRL), while boosting efficiency by obtaining strong performance after only a few steps of test-time training (e.g. 8% relative improvement rather than 1% over TTRL after 3 steps).

Generative tasks, such as text generation and question answering, hold a crucial position in the realm of mobile applications. Due to their sensitivity to privacy concerns, there is a growing demand for their execution directly on mobile devices. Currently, the execution of these generative tasks heavily depends on Large Language Models (LLMs). Nevertheless, the limited memory capacity of these devices presents a formidable challenge to the scalability of such models. In our research, we introduce LLMCad, an innovative on-device inference engine specifically designed for efficient generative Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The core idea behind LLMCad revolves around model collaboration: a compact LLM, residing in memory, takes charge of generating the most straightforward tokens, while a high-precision LLM steps in to validate these tokens and rectify any identified errors. LLMCad incorporates three novel techniques: (1) Instead of generating candidate tokens in a sequential manner, LLMCad employs the smaller LLM to construct a token tree, encompassing a wider range of plausible token pathways. Subsequently, the larger LLM can efficiently validate all of these pathways simultaneously. (2) It employs a self-adjusting fallback strategy, swiftly initiating the verification process whenever the smaller LLM generates an erroneous token. (3) To ensure a continuous flow of token generation, LLMCad speculatively generates tokens during the verification process by implementing a compute-IO pipeline. Through an extensive series of experiments, LLMCad showcases an impressive token generation speed, achieving rates up to 9.3x faster than existing inference engines.

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLM) on mobile devices offers significant potential for medical applications, enhancing privacy, security, and cost-efficiency by eliminating reliance on cloud-based services and keeping sensitive health data local. However, the performance and accuracy of on-device LLMs in real-world medical contexts remain underexplored. In this study, we benchmark publicly available on-device LLMs using the AMEGA dataset, evaluating accuracy, computational efficiency, and thermal limitation across various mobile devices. Our results indicate that compact general-purpose models like Phi-3 Mini achieve a strong balance between speed and accuracy, while medically fine-tuned models such as Med42 and Aloe attain the highest accuracy. Notably, deploying LLMs on older devices remains feasible, with memory constraints posing a greater challenge than raw processing power. Our study underscores the potential of on-device LLMs for healthcare while emphasizing the need for more efficient inference and models tailored to real-world clinical reasoning.

On-device large language models (LLMs) are catalyzing novel mobile applications such as UI task automation and personalized email auto-reply, without giving away users' private data. However, on-device LLMs still suffer from unacceptably long inference latency, especially the time to first token (prefill stage) due to the need of long context for accurate, personalized content generation, as well as the lack of parallel computing capacity of mobile CPU/GPU. To enable practical on-device LLM, we present mllm-NPU, the first-of-its-kind LLM inference system that efficiently leverages on-device Neural Processing Unit (NPU) offloading. Essentially, mllm-NPU is an algorithm-system co-design that tackles a few semantic gaps between the LLM architecture and contemporary NPU design. Specifically, it re-constructs the prompt and model in three levels: (1) At prompt level, it divides variable-length prompts into multiple fixed-sized chunks while maintaining data dependencies; (2) At tensor level, it identifies and extracts significant outliers to run on the CPU/GPU in parallel with minimal overhead; (3) At block level, it schedules Transformer blocks in an out-of-order manner to the CPU/GPU and NPU based on their hardware affinity and sensitivity to accuracy. Compared to competitive baselines, mllm-NPU achieves 22.4x faster prefill speed and 30.7x energy savings on average, and up to 32.8x speedup in an end-to-end real-world application. For the first time, mllm-NPU achieves more than 1,000 tokens/sec prefilling for a billion-sized model (Qwen1.5-1.8B), paving the way towards practical on-device LLM.

Efficient inference for on-device Large Language Models (LLMs) remains challenging due to limited hardware resources and the high cost of the prefill stage, which processes the full input context to construct Key-Value (KV) caches. We present SparKV, an adaptive KV loading framework that combines cloud-based KV streaming with on-device computation. SparKV models the cost of individual KV chunks and decides whether each chunk should be streamed or computed locally, while overlapping the two execution paths to reduce latency. To handle fluctuations in wireless connectivity and edge resource availability, SparKV further refines offline-generated schedules at runtime to rebalance communication and computation costs. Experiments across diverse datasets, LLMs, and edge devices show that SparKV reduces Time-to-First-Token by 1.3$x-5.1x with negligible impact on response quality, while lowering per-request energy consumption by 1.5x to 3.3x, demonstrating its robustness and practicality for real-world on-device deployment.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become the de facto architecture for hundred-billion-parameter language models, yet its advantages at sub-billion scales for on-device deployment remain largely unexplored. To close this gap, we present MobileMoE, a family of on-device MoE language models with sub-billion active parameters (0.3-0.9B active and 1.3-5.3B total) that establish a new Pareto frontier for on-device LLMs. We first formulate an on-device MoE scaling law that jointly optimizes MoE architecture under mobile memory and compute constraints, identifying an on-device sweet spot - moderate sparsity with fine-grained and shared experts - that is simultaneously memory and compute-optimal. Building on the derived architectures, we train MobileMoE with a four-stage recipe covering pre-training, mid-training, instruction fine-tuning, and quantization-aware training, all on open-source datasets. Across 14 benchmarks, MobileMoE matches or exceeds leading on-device dense LLMs with 2-4times fewer inference FLOPs, and matches or surpasses the state-of-the-art MoE OLMoE-1B-7B with up to 60% fewer parameters. To bridge the last mile to mobile deployment, we provide the first efficient MoE inference on commodity smartphones with comprehensive on-device profiling. At comparable INT4 weight memory, MobileMoE-S delivers 1.8-3.8times faster prefill and 2.2-3.4times faster decode than the dense baseline MobileLLM-Pro.

We introduce Opt.Gear, a foundation model designed for efficient on-device deployment, real-tim inference, and strong task capability. It includes a dense model (1M, 270M, and 1B) with a context length of 64K. We designed a new hybrid architecture that combines a convolutional key-value gated mixer with local-global attention to reduce the KV-cache memory that tends to increase exponentially with long context. This architecture delivers up to X4.9 faster prefill and decoding speeds on the NPUs compared to models of a similar scale models. From a 2T tokens candidate corpus, Opt.Gear is trained on a curated 0.5T tokens subset without knowledge distillation. This is the most data-efficient of the existing foundation models. All models are released with open weights and deployment binaries for ONNX, Qualcomm NPU, and Apple ANE making Opt.Gear a practical base for edge applications that need fast, memory-efficient inference and strong task capabilities. Furthermore, to expand the ecosystem of on-device generative language models, we are introducing the Opt.Gear-1M that can be deployed on Micro-Controller Units (MCUs), a Tiny Language Model (TLM). Opt.Gear-1M is the first generative language model to achieve 20 TPS with W4A32 quantization on the ARM Cortex-M7 CPU of the STM32H747I-DISCO.

Despite their ubiquity, wireless earbuds remain audio-centric due to size and power constraints. We present VueBuds, the first camera-integrated wireless earbuds for egocentric vision, capable of operating within stringent power and form-factor limits. Each VueBud embeds a camera into a Sony WF-1000XM3 to stream visual data over Bluetooth to a host device for on-device vision language model (VLM) processing. We show analytically and empirically that while each camera's field of view is partially occluded by the face, the combined binocular perspective provides comprehensive forward coverage. By integrating VueBuds with VLMs, we build an end-to-end system for real-time scene understanding, translation, visual reasoning, and text reading; all from low-resolution monochrome cameras drawing under 5mW through on-demand activation. Through online and in-person user studies with 90 participants, we compare VueBuds against smart glasses across 17 visual question-answering tasks, and show that our system achieves response quality on par with Ray-Ban Meta. Our work establishes low-power camera-equipped earbuds as a compelling platform for visual intelligence, bringing rapidly advancing VLM capabilities to one of the most ubiquitous wearable form factors.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remain bottlenecked by massive computational footprints, precluding their deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. While efforts to compress LVLMs focus heavily on vision token reduction or smaller language models, the vision encoder is largely overlooked, typically deployed as a monolithic, computationally heavy feature extractor. Moreover, there is no previous effort that designs a vision encoder for LVLMs directly optimized for on-device latency. In this paper, we present UltraViT, a vision encoder for LVLMs, explicitly designed and optimized for on-device performance. Specifically, by taking into account real on-device latencies, we systematically design a pyramidal architecture that strategically integrates and adapts heterogeneous spatial mixers at the macro-block level. Furthermore, to pre-train UltraViT, we propose a novel two-stage generative pre-training strategy: cultivating rich spatial features via dense distillation, followed by direct generative supervision from a capacity-mixed frozen LLM. Compared to standard contrastive and SSL, we show that our pre-training is much more effective for achieving high-level semantic grounding for UltraViT needed for the subsequent generative multimodal alignment of LVLM training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our on-device latency-informed design combined with our tailored training strategy establishes a new state-of-the-art for efficient LVLM encoding, significantly outperforming existing encoder-centric baselines while operating on-device at nearly 1.7xthe speed.

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on devices is attracting increasing interest. Recent works have fused low-rank adaptation (LoRA) techniques with federated fine-tuning to mitigate challenges associated with device model sizes and data scarcity. Still, the heterogeneity of computational resources remains a critical bottleneck: while higher-rank modules generally enhance performance, varying device capabilities constrain LoRA's feasible rank range. Existing approaches attempting to resolve this issue either lack analytical justification or impose additional computational overhead, leaving a wide gap for an efficient and theoretically-grounded solution. To address these challenges, we propose federated sketching LoRA (FSLoRA), which leverages a sketching mechanism to enable devices to selectively update submatrices of global LoRA modules maintained by the server. By adjusting the sketching ratios, which determine the ranks of the submatrices on the devices, FSLoRA flexibly adapts to device-specific communication and computational constraints. We provide a rigorous convergence analysis of FSLoRA that characterizes how the sketching ratios affect the convergence rate. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple datasets and LLM models, we demonstrate FSLoRA's superior performance compared to various baselines.

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPTs and LLaMa have ushered in a revolution in machine intelligence, owing to their exceptional capabilities in a wide range of machine learning tasks. However, the transition of LLMs from data centers to edge devices presents a set of challenges and opportunities. While this shift can enhance privacy and availability, it is hampered by the enormous parameter sizes of these models, leading to impractical runtime costs. In light of these considerations, we introduce EdgeMoE, the first on-device inference engine tailored for mixture-of-expert (MoE) LLMs, a popular variant of sparse LLMs that exhibit nearly constant computational complexity as their parameter size scales. EdgeMoE achieves both memory and computational efficiency by strategically partitioning the model across the storage hierarchy. Specifically, non-expert weights are stored in the device's memory, while expert weights are kept in external storage and are fetched into memory only when they are activated. This design is underpinned by a crucial insight that expert weights, though voluminous, are infrequently accessed due to sparse activation patterns. To further mitigate the overhead associated with expert I/O swapping, EdgeMoE incorporates two innovative techniques: (1) Expert-wise bitwidth adaptation: This method reduces the size of expert weights with an acceptable level of accuracy loss. (2) Expert management: It predicts the experts that will be activated in advance and preloads them into the compute-I/O pipeline, thus further optimizing the process. In empirical evaluations conducted on well-established MoE LLMs and various edge devices, EdgeMoE demonstrates substantial memory savings and performance improvements when compared to competitive baseline solutions.

The growing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has influenced the development of their lighter counterparts-Small Language Models (SLMs)-to enable on-device deployment across smartphones and edge devices. These SLMs offer enhanced privacy, reduced latency, server-free functionality, and improved user experience. However, due to resource constraints of on-device environment, SLMs undergo size optimization through compression techniques like quantization, which can inadvertently introduce fairness, ethical and privacy risks. Critically, quantized SLMs may respond to harmful queries directly, without requiring adversarial manipulation, raising significant safety and trust concerns. To address this, we propose LiteLMGuard (LLMG), an on-device prompt guard that provides real-time, prompt-level defense for quantized SLMs. Additionally, our prompt guard is designed to be model-agnostic such that it can be seamlessly integrated with any SLM, operating independently of underlying architectures. Our LLMG formalizes prompt filtering as a deep learning (DL)-based prompt answerability classification task, leveraging semantic understanding to determine whether a query should be answered by any SLM. Using our curated dataset, Answerable-or-Not, we trained and fine-tuned several DL models and selected ELECTRA as the candidate, with 97.75% answerability classification accuracy. Our safety effectiveness evaluations demonstrate that LLMG defends against over 87% of harmful prompts, including both direct instruction and jailbreak attack strategies. We further showcase its ability to mitigate the Open Knowledge Attacks, where compromised SLMs provide unsafe responses without adversarial prompting. In terms of prompt filtering effectiveness, LLMG achieves near state-of-the-art filtering accuracy of 94%, with an average latency of 135 ms, incurring negligible overhead for users.

This paper addresses the growing need for efficient large language models (LLMs) on mobile devices, driven by increasing cloud costs and latency concerns. We focus on designing top-quality LLMs with fewer than a billion parameters, a practical choice for mobile deployment. Contrary to prevailing belief emphasizing the pivotal role of data and parameter quantity in determining model quality, our investigation underscores the significance of model architecture for sub-billion scale LLMs. Leveraging deep and thin architectures, coupled with embedding sharing and grouped-query attention mechanisms, we establish a strong baseline network denoted as MobileLLM, which attains a remarkable 2.7%/4.3% accuracy boost over preceding 125M/350M state-of-the-art models. Additionally, we propose an immediate block-wise weight sharing approach with no increase in model size and only marginal latency overhead. The resultant models, denoted as MobileLLM-LS, demonstrate a further accuracy enhancement of 0.7%/0.8% than MobileLLM 125M/350M. Moreover, MobileLLM model family shows significant improvements compared to previous sub-billion models on chat benchmarks, and demonstrates close correctness to LLaMA-v2 7B in API calling tasks, highlighting the capability of small models for common on-device use cases.

Neural Network Language Models (NNLMs) for Virtual Assistants (VAs) are generally language-, region-, and in some cases, device-dependent, which increases the effort to scale and maintain them. Combining NNLMs for one or more of the categories is one way to improve scalability. In this work, we combine regional variants of English to build a ``World English'' NNLM for on-device VAs. In particular, we investigate the application of adapter bottlenecks to model dialect-specific characteristics in our existing production NNLMs {and enhance the multi-dialect baselines}. We find that adapter modules are more effective in modeling dialects than specializing entire sub-networks. Based on this insight and leveraging the design of our production models, we introduce a new architecture for World English NNLM that meets the accuracy, latency, and memory constraints of our single-dialect models.

Mental health conditions affect hundreds of millions globally, yet early detection remains limited. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in mental health applications, their size and computational demands hinder practical deployment. Small language models (SLMs) offer a lightweight alternative, but their use for social media--based mental health prediction remains largely underexplored. In this study, we introduce Menta, the first optimized SLM fine-tuned specifically for multi-task mental health prediction from social media data. Menta is jointly trained across six classification tasks using a LoRA-based framework, a cross-dataset strategy, and a balanced accuracy--oriented loss. Evaluated against nine state-of-the-art SLM baselines, Menta achieves an average improvement of 15.2\% across tasks covering depression, stress, and suicidality compared with the best-performing non--fine-tuned SLMs. It also achieves higher accuracy on depression and stress classification tasks compared to 13B-parameter LLMs, while being approximately 3.25x smaller. Moreover, we demonstrate real-time, on-device deployment of Menta on an iPhone 15 Pro Max, requiring only approximately 3GB RAM. Supported by a comprehensive benchmark against existing SLMs and LLMs, Menta highlights the potential for scalable, privacy-preserving mental health monitoring. Code is available at: https://xxue752-nz.github.io/menta-project/

Large language models (LLMs) represent a significant advancement in integrating physical robots with AI-driven systems. We showcase the capabilities of our framework within the context of the real-world household competition. This research introduces a framework that utilizes RDMM (Robotics Decision-Making Models), which possess the capacity for decision-making within domain-specific contexts, as well as an awareness of their personal knowledge and capabilities. The framework leverages information to enhance the autonomous decision-making of the system. In contrast to other approaches, our focus is on real-time, on-device solutions, successfully operating on hardware with as little as 8GB of memory. Our framework incorporates visual perception models equipping robots with understanding of their environment. Additionally, the framework has integrated real-time speech recognition capabilities, thus enhancing the human-robot interaction experience. Experimental results demonstrate that the RDMM framework can plan with an 93\% accuracy. Furthermore, we introduce a new dataset consisting of 27k planning instances, as well as 1.3k text-image annotated samples derived from the competition. The framework, benchmarks, datasets, and models developed in this work are publicly available on our GitHub repository at https://github.com/shadynasrat/RDMM.

Software engineers mainly write code by editing existing programs. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) autoregressively synthesize programs in a single pass. One explanation for this is the scarcity of open-sourced edit data. While high-quality instruction data for code synthesis is already scarce, high-quality edit data is even scarcer. To fill this gap, we develop a synthetic data generation algorithm called LintSeq. This algorithm refactors existing code into a sequence of code edits by using a linter to procedurally sample across the error-free insertions that can be used to sequentially write programs. It outputs edit sequences as text strings consisting of consecutive program diffs. To test LintSeq, we use it to refactor a dataset of instruction + program pairs into instruction + program-diff-sequence tuples. Then, we instruction finetune a series of smaller LLMs ranging from 2.6B to 14B parameters on both the re-factored and original versions of this dataset, comparing zero-shot performance on code synthesis benchmarks. We show that during repeated sampling, edit sequence finetuned models produce more diverse programs than baselines. This results in better inference-time scaling for benchmark coverage as a function of samples, i.e. the fraction of problems "pass@k" solved by any attempt given "k" tries. For example, on HumanEval pass@50, small LLMs finetuned on synthetic edit sequences are competitive with GPT-4 and outperform models finetuned on the baseline dataset by +20% (+/-3%) in absolute score. Finally, we also pretrain our own tiny LMs for code understanding. We show that finetuning tiny models on synthetic code edits results in state-of-the-art code synthesis for the on-device model class. Our 150M parameter edit sequence LM matches or outperforms code models with twice as many parameters, both with and without repeated sampling, including Codex and AlphaCode.

On-device automatic speech recognition systems face several challenges compared to server-based systems. They have to meet stricter constraints in terms of speed, disk size and memory while maintaining the same accuracy. Often they have to serve several applications with different distributions at once, such as communicating with a virtual assistant and speech-to-text. The simplest solution to serve multiple applications is to build application-specific (language) models, but this leads to an increase in memory. Therefore, we explore different data- and architecture-driven language modeling approaches to build a single application-agnostic model. We propose two novel feed-forward architectures that find an optimal trade off between different on-device constraints. In comparison to the application-specific solution, one of our novel approaches reduces the disk size by half, while maintaining speed and accuracy of the original model.

This paper introduces a novel dataset and evaluation benchmark designed to assess and improve small language models deployable on edge devices, with a focus on user profiling from multi-session natural language interactions in smart home environments. At the core of the dataset are structured user profiles, each defined by a set of routines - context-triggered, repeatable patterns of behavior that govern how users interact with their home systems. Using these profiles as input, a large language model (LLM) generates corresponding interaction sessions that simulate realistic, diverse, and context-aware dialogues between users and their devices. The primary task supported by this dataset is profile reconstruction: inferring user routines and preferences solely from interactions history. To assess how well current models can perform this task under realistic conditions, we benchmarked several state-of-the-art compact language models and compared their performance against large foundation models. Our results show that while small models demonstrate some capability in reconstructing profiles, they still fall significantly short of large models in accurately capturing user behavior. This performance gap poses a major challenge - particularly because on-device processing offers critical advantages, such as preserving user privacy, minimizing latency, and enabling personalized experiences without reliance on the cloud. By providing a realistic, structured testbed for developing and evaluating behavioral modeling under these constraints, our dataset represents a key step toward enabling intelligent, privacy-respecting AI systems that learn and adapt directly on user-owned devices.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing with their exceptional capabilities. However, deploying LLMs on resource-constrained edge devices presents significant challenges due to computational limitations, memory constraints, and edge hardware heterogeneity. This survey summarizes recent developments in edge LLMs across their lifecycle, examining resource-efficient designs from pre-deployment techniques to runtime optimizations. Additionally, it explores on-device LLM applications in personal, enterprise, and industrial scenarios. By synthesizing advancements and identifying future directions, this survey aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of state-of-the-art methods for deploying LLMs on edge devices, bridging the gap between their immense potential and edge computing limitations.

The Large Language Model (LLM) is widely employed for tasks such as intelligent assistants, text summarization, translation, and multi-modality on mobile phones. However, the current methods for on-device LLM deployment maintain slow inference speed, which causes poor user experience. To facilitate high-efficiency LLM deployment on device GPUs, we propose four optimization techniques: (a) a symbolic expression-based approach to support dynamic shape model inference; (b) operator optimizations and execution priority setting to enhance inference speed and reduce phone lagging; (c) an FP4 quantization method termed M0E4 to reduce dequantization overhead; (d) a sub-tensor-based technique to eliminate the need for copying KV cache after LLM inference. Furthermore, we implement these methods in our mobile inference engine, Transformer-Lite, which is compatible with both Qualcomm and MTK processors. We evaluated Transformer-Lite's performance using LLMs with varied architectures and parameters ranging from 2B to 14B. Specifically, we achieved prefill and decoding speeds of 121 token/s and 14 token/s for ChatGLM2 6B, and 330 token/s and 30 token/s for smaller Gemma 2B, respectively. Compared with CPU-based FastLLM and GPU-based MLC-LLM, our engine attains over 10x speedup for the prefill speed and 2~3x speedup for the decoding speed.

Small language models (SLMs) are increasingly valued for their efficiency and deployability in resource-constrained environments, making them useful for on-device, privacy-sensitive, and edge computing applications. On the other hand, membership inference attacks (MIAs), which aim to determine whether a given sample was used in a model's training, are an important threat with serious privacy and intellectual property implications. In this paper, we study MIAs on SLMs. Although MIAs were shown to be effective on large language models (LLMs), they are relatively less studied on emerging SLMs, and furthermore, their effectiveness decreases as models get smaller. Motivated by this finding, we propose a new MIA called win-k, which builds on top of a state-of-the-art attack (min-k). We experimentally evaluate win-k by comparing it with five existing MIAs using three datasets and eight SLMs. Results show that win-k outperforms existing MIAs in terms of AUROC, TPR @ 1% FPR, and FPR @ 99% TPR metrics, especially on smaller models.

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on resource-constrained (or weak) devices presents significant challenges due to limited resources and heterogeneous data distribution. To address the data concern, it is necessary to fine-tune LLMs using on-device private data for various downstream tasks. While Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising privacy-preserving solution, existing fine-tuning methods retain the original LLM size, leaving issues of high inference latency and excessive memory demands unresolved. Hence, we design FedSpine, an FL framework that combines Parameter- Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) with structured pruning for efficient deployment of LLMs on resource-constrained devices. Specifically, FedSpine introduces an iterative process to prune and tune the parameters of LLMs. To mitigate the impact of device heterogeneity, an online Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithm is employed to adaptively determine different pruning ratios and LoRA ranks for heterogeneous devices without any prior knowledge of their computing and communication capabilities. As a result, FedSpine maintains higher inference accuracy while improving fine-tuning efficiency. Experimental results conducted on a physical platform with 80 devices demonstrate that FedSpine can speed up fine-tuning by 1.4times-6.9times and improve final accuracy by 0.4%-4.5% under the same sparsity level compared to other baselines.

Considering the hardware-friendly characteristics and broad applicability, structured pruning has emerged as an efficient solution to reduce the resource demands of large language models (LLMs) on resource-constrained devices. Traditional structured pruning methods often need fine-tuning to recover performance loss, which incurs high memory overhead and substantial data requirements, rendering them unsuitable for on-device applications. Additionally, post-training structured pruning techniques typically necessitate specific activation functions or architectural modifications, thereby limiting their scope of applications. Herein, we introduce COMP, a lightweight post-training structured pruning method that employs a hybrid-granularity pruning strategy. COMP initially prunes selected model layers based on their importance at a coarse granularity, followed by fine-grained neuron pruning within the dense layers of each remaining model layer. To more accurately evaluate neuron importance, COMP introduces a new matrix condition-based metric. Subsequently, COMP utilizes mask tuning to recover accuracy without the need for fine-tuning, significantly reducing memory consumption. Experimental results demonstrate that COMP improves performance by 6.13\% on the LLaMA-2-7B model with a 20\% pruning ratio compared to LLM-Pruner, while simultaneously reducing memory overhead by 80\%.

Large language models (LLMs) are transforming society, powering applications from smartphone assistants to autonomous driving. Yet cloud-based LLM services alone cannot serve a growing class of applications, including those operating under intermittent connectivity, sub-second latency budgets, data-residency constraints, or sustained high-volume inference. On-device deployment is in turn constrained by limited computation and memory. No single endpoint can deliver high-quality service across this spectrum. This article focuses on collaborative intelligence, a paradigm in which multiple independent LLMs distributed across device and cloud endpoints collaborate at the task level through natural language or structured messages. Such collaboration strives for superior response quality under heterogeneous resource constraints spanning computation, memory, communication, and cost across network tiers. We present collaborative inference along two complementary and composable dimensions: vertical device-cloud collaboration and horizontal multi-agent collaboration, which can be combined into hybrid topologies in practice. We then examine learning to collaborate, addressing the training of routing policies and the development of cooperative capabilities among LLMs. Finally, we identify open research challenges including scaling under resource heterogeneity and trustworthy collaborative intelligence.

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced AI capabilities but pose considerable challenges for deployment on edge devices due to high computational demands, memory bandwidth constraints, and energy consumption. This paper addresses these challenges by presenting an efficient framework for deploying the Qwen2.5-0.5B model on the Xilinx Kria KV260 edge platform, a heterogeneous system integrating an ARM Cortex-A53 CPU with reconfigurable FPGA logic. Leveraging Activation-aware Weight Quantization (AWQ) with FPGA-accelerated execution pipelines, the proposed approach enhances both model compression rate and system throughput. Additionally, we propose a hybrid execution strategy that intelligently offloads compute-intensive operations to the FPGA while utilizing the CPU for lighter tasks, effectively balancing the computational workload and maximizing overall performance. Our framework achieves a model compression rate of 55.08% compared to the original model and produces output at a rate of 5.1 tokens per second, outperforming the baseline performance of 2.8 tokens per second.

This paper investigates whether Large Language Models (LLMs), fine-tuned on synthetic but domain-representative data, can perform the twofold task of (i) slot and intent detection and (ii) natural language response generation for a smart home assistant, while running solely on resource-limited, CPU-only edge hardware. We fine-tune LLMs to produce both JSON action calls and text responses. Our experiments show that 16-bit and 8-bit quantized variants preserve high accuracy on slot and intent detection and maintain strong semantic coherence in generated text, while the 4-bit model, while retaining generative fluency, suffers a noticeable drop in device-service classification accuracy. Further evaluations on noisy human (non-synthetic) prompts and out-of-domain intents confirm the models' generalization ability, obtaining around 80--86\% accuracy. While the average inference time is 5--6 seconds per query -- acceptable for one-shot commands but suboptimal for multi-turn dialogue -- our results affirm that an on-device LLM can effectively unify command interpretation and flexible response generation for home automation without relying on specialized hardware.

The recent widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) and machine learning in general has sparked research interest in exploring the possibilities of deploying these models on smaller devices such as laptops and mobile phones. This creates a need for frameworks and approaches that are capable of taking advantage of on-device hardware. The MLX framework was created to address this need. It is a framework optimized for machine learning (ML) computations on Apple silicon devices, facilitating easier research, experimentation, and prototyping. This paper presents a performance evaluation of MLX, focusing on inference latency of transformer models. We compare the performance of different transformer architecture implementations in MLX with their Pytorch counterparts. For this research we create a framework called MLX-transformers which includes different transformer implementations in MLX and downloads the model checkpoints in pytorch and converts it to the MLX format. By leveraging the advanced architecture and capabilities of Apple Silicon, MLX-Transformers enables seamless execution of transformer models directly sourced from Hugging Face, eliminating the need for checkpoint conversion often required when porting models between frameworks. Our study benchmarks different transformer models on two Apple Silicon macbook devices against an NVIDIA CUDA GPU. Specifically, we compare the inference latency performance of models with the same parameter sizes and checkpoints. We evaluate the performance of BERT, RoBERTa, and XLM-RoBERTa models, with the intention of extending future work to include models of different modalities, thus providing a more comprehensive assessment of MLX's capabilities. The results highlight MLX's potential in enabling efficient and more accessible on-device ML applications within Apple's ecosystem.

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) models are a core component of voice assistants (VA), such as Alexa, Bixby, and Google Assistant. In this paper, we introduce a pipeline designed to extend SLU systems to new languages, utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) that we fine-tune for machine translation of slot-annotated SLU training data. Our approach improved on the MultiATIS++ benchmark, a primary multi-language SLU dataset, in the cloud scenario using an mBERT model. Specifically, we saw an improvement in the Overall Accuracy metric: from 53% to 62.18%, compared to the existing state-of-the-art method, Fine and Coarse-grained Multi-Task Learning Framework (FC-MTLF). In the on-device scenario (tiny and not pretrained SLU), our method improved the Overall Accuracy from 5.31% to 22.06% over the baseline Global-Local Contrastive Learning Framework (GL-CLeF) method. Contrary to both FC-MTLF and GL-CLeF, our LLM-based machine translation does not require changes in the production architecture of SLU. Additionally, our pipeline is slot-type independent: it does not require any slot definitions or examples.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities for text rewriting. Nonetheless, the large sizes of these models make them impractical for on-device inference, which would otherwise allow for enhanced privacy and economical inference. Creating a smaller yet potent language model for text rewriting presents a formidable challenge because it requires balancing the need for a small size with the need to retain the emergent capabilities of the LLM, that requires costly data collection. To address the above challenge, we introduce a new instruction tuning approach for building a mobile-centric text rewriting model. Our strategies enable the generation of high quality training data without any human labeling. In addition, we propose a heuristic reinforcement learning framework which substantially enhances performance without requiring preference data. To further bridge the performance gap with the larger server-side model, we propose an effective approach that combines the mobile rewrite agent with the server model using a cascade. To tailor the text rewriting tasks to mobile scenarios, we introduce MessageRewriteEval, a benchmark that focuses on text rewriting for messages through natural language instructions. Through empirical experiments, we demonstrate that our on-device model surpasses the current state-of-the-art LLMs in text rewriting while maintaining a significantly reduced model size. Notably, we show that our proposed cascading approach improves model performance.

Memory-augmented Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable consistency during prolonged dialogues by storing relevant memories and incorporating them as context. Such memory-based personalization is also key in on-device settings that allow users to keep their conversations and data private. However, memory-augmented systems typically rely on LLMs that are too costly for local on-device deployment. Even though Small Language Models (SLMs) are more suitable for on-device inference than LLMs, they cannot achieve sufficient performance. Additionally, these LLM-based systems lack native visual capabilities, limiting their applicability in multimodal contexts. In this paper, we introduce (i) MemLoRA, a novel memory system that enables local deployment by equipping SLMs with specialized memory adapters, and (ii) its vision extension MemLoRA-V, which integrates small Vision-Language Models (SVLMs) to memory systems, enabling native visual understanding. Following knowledge distillation principles, each adapter is trained separately for specific memory operationsx2013knowledge extraction, memory update, and memory-augmented generation. Equipped with memory adapters, small models enable accurate on-device memory operations without cloud dependency. On text-only operations, MemLoRA outperforms 10times larger baseline models (e.g., Gemma2-27B) and achieves performance comparable to 60times larger models (e.g., GPT-OSS-120B) on the LoCoMo benchmark. To evaluate visual understanding operations instead, we extend LoCoMo with challenging Visual Question Answering tasks that require direct visual reasoning. On this, our VLM-integrated MemLoRA-V shows massive improvements over caption-based approaches (81.3 vs. 23.7 accuracy) while keeping strong performance in text-based tasks, demonstrating the efficacy of our method in multimodal contexts.

Edge devices such as smartwatches and smart glasses cannot continuously run even the smallest 100M-1B parameter language models due to power and compute constraints, yet cloud inference introduces multi-second latencies that break the illusion of a responsive assistant. We introduce micro language models (μLMs): ultra-compact models (8M-30M parameters) that instantly generate the first 4-8 words of a contextually grounded response on-device, while a cloud model completes it; thus, masking the cloud latency. We show that useful language generation survives at this extreme scale with our models matching several 70M-256M-class existing models. We design a collaborative generation framework that reframes the cloud model as a continuator rather than a respondent, achieving seamless mid-sentence handoffs and structured graceful recovery via three error correction methods when the local opener goes wrong. Empirical results show that μLMs can initiate responses that larger models complete seamlessly, demonstrating that orders-of-magnitude asymmetric collaboration is achievable and unlocking responsive AI for extremely resource-constrained devices. The model checkpoint and demo are available at https://github.com/Sensente/micro_language_model_swen_project.

Small language models (SLMs), despite their widespread adoption in modern smart devices, have received significantly less academic attention compared to their large language model (LLM) counterparts, which are predominantly deployed in data centers and cloud environments. While researchers continue to improve the capabilities of LLMs in the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, SLM research aims to make machine intelligence more accessible, affordable, and efficient for everyday tasks. Focusing on transformer-based, decoder-only language models with 100M-5B parameters, we survey 59 state-of-the-art open-source SLMs, analyzing their technical innovations across three axes: architectures, training datasets, and training algorithms. In addition, we evaluate their capabilities in various domains, including commonsense reasoning, in-context learning, mathematics, and coding. To gain further insight into their on-device runtime costs, we benchmark their inference latency and memory footprints. Through in-depth analysis of our benchmarking data, we offer valuable insights to advance research in this field.

Modern key-value storage engines built on Log-Structured Merge-trees (LSM-trees), such as RocksDB and LevelDB, rely heavily on the performance of their compaction operations, which are impacted by a complex set of interdependent configuration parameters. Manually tuning these parameters for optimal performance demands considerable expertise, while traditional auto-tuning approaches struggle with the enormous search space and low sample efficiency inherent to this domain. In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in code generation and logical reasoning, offering new possibilities for system optimization. However, applying LLMs to real-time compaction tuning in such latency-sensitive environments is a double-edged sword. While large-scale LLMs can offer superior reasoning for strategy generation, their high inference latency and computational cost make them impractical for interactive, low-latency tuning. In contrast, small-scale LLMs achieve low latency but often at the expense of reasoning accuracy and tuning effectiveness. In this paper, we first evaluate this trade-off by analyzing the compaction-tuning performance and inference latency of LLMs at different scales in an LSM-tree-based tuning case. We then characterize the performance of LSM-tree on RocksDB v8.8.1, with a focus on adjusting the key compaction-related parameters under db_bench workloads. Our experimental results show a clear positive correlation between model capability and tuning effectiveness.

Large Language Models (LLMs) face challenges for on-device inference due to high memory demands. Traditional methods to reduce memory usage often compromise performance and lack adaptability. We propose FlexInfer, an optimized offloading framework for on-device inference, addressing these issues with techniques like asynchronous prefetching, balanced memory locking, and flexible tensor preservation. These strategies enhance memory efficiency and mitigate I/O bottlenecks, ensuring high performance within user-specified resource constraints. Experiments demonstrate that FlexInfer significantly improves throughput under limited resources, achieving up to 12.5 times better performance than existing methods and facilitating the deployment of large models on resource-constrained devices.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed and democratized on edge devices. To improve the efficiency of on-device deployment, small language models (SLMs) are often adopted due to their efficient decoding latency and reduced energy consumption. However, these SLMs often generate inaccurate responses when handling complex queries. One promising solution is uncertainty-based SLM routing, offloading high-stakes queries to stronger LLMs when resulting in low-confidence responses on SLM. This follows the principle of "If you lack confidence, seek stronger support" to enhance reliability. Relying on more powerful LLMs is yet effective but increases invocation costs. Therefore, striking a routing balance between efficiency and efficacy remains a critical challenge. Additionally, efficiently generalizing the routing strategy to new datasets remains under-explored. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive investigation into benchmarking and generalization of uncertainty-driven routing strategies from SLMs to LLMs over 1500+ settings. Our findings highlight: First, uncertainty-correctness alignment in different uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods significantly impacts routing performance. Second, uncertainty distributions depend more on both the specific SLM and the chosen UQ method, rather than downstream data. Building on the insight, we propose a calibration data construction instruction pipeline and open-source a constructed hold-out set to enhance routing generalization on new downstream scenarios. The experimental results indicate calibration data effectively bootstraps routing performance without any new data.

The customization of large language models (LLMs) for user-specified tasks gets important. However, maintaining all the customized LLMs on cloud servers incurs substantial memory and computational overheads, and uploading user data can also lead to privacy concerns. On-device LLMs can offer a promising solution by mitigating these issues. Yet, the performance of on-device LLMs is inherently constrained by the limitations of small-scaled models. To overcome these restrictions, we first propose Crayon, a novel approach for on-device LLM customization. Crayon begins by constructing a pool of diverse base adapters, and then we instantly blend them into a customized adapter without extra training. In addition, we develop a device-server hybrid inference strategy, which deftly allocates more demanding queries or non-customized tasks to a larger, more capable LLM on a server. This ensures optimal performance without sacrificing the benefits of on-device customization. We carefully craft a novel benchmark from multiple question-answer datasets, and show the efficacy of our method in the LLM customization.

Deploying advanced large language models on edge devices, such as smartphones and robotics, is a growing trend that enhances user data privacy and network connectivity resilience while preserving intelligent capabilities. However, such a task exhibits single-batch computing with incredibly low arithmetic intensity, which poses the significant challenges of huge memory footprint and bandwidth demands on limited edge resources. To address these issues, we introduce Cambricon-LLM, a chiplet-based hybrid architecture with NPU and a dedicated NAND flash chip to enable efficient on-device inference of 70B LLMs. Such a hybrid architecture utilizes both the high computing capability of NPU and the data capacity of the NAND flash chip, with the proposed hardware-tiling strategy that minimizes the data movement overhead between NPU and NAND flash chip. Specifically, the NAND flash chip, enhanced by our innovative in-flash computing and on-die ECC techniques, excels at performing precise lightweight on-die processing. Simultaneously, the NPU collaborates with the flash chip for matrix operations and handles special function computations beyond the flash's on-die processing capabilities. Overall, Cambricon-LLM enables the on-device inference of 70B LLMs at a speed of 3.44 token/s, and 7B LLMs at a speed of 36.34 token/s, which is over 22X to 45X faster than existing flash-offloading technologies, showing the potentiality of deploying powerful LLMs in edge devices.

While large language models have been dominating the research landscape recently, small language models remain highly relevant across various domains; yet, they receive far less attention. In this study, we investigate how smaller language models perform during the generation stage within a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system. To benchmark these models effectively, we utilised both open-source and proprietary datasets covering diverse subject areas and question types. Our findings demonstrate that a RAG system with small language models can be executed directly on-device without requiring any GPU hardware within a reasonable time. The experimental code and links to the supplementary materials can be accessed through the GitHub repository: https://github.com/SibNN/SLM-RAG-EVAL.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced generative query recommendation. However, while alignment is crucial for tailoring LLMs to human preferences, existing alignment methods primarily focus on standard chatbot scenarios, falling short in on-device intelligent assistants where users predominantly expect the rapid invocation of system-level tools. Moreover, directly aligning LLMs with real-world click logs introduces severe noise due to varying user activity levels and the failure to emphasize execution-oriented queries. To address these challenges, we propose ToolRec, a calibrated preference alignment framework tailored for on-device query recommendation. To ground query recommendation with executable tools, we first construct SysToolKit, a comprehensive repository of 708 system tools, paired with a context-aware tool retrieval mechanism to ensure that the extracted tools closely match the user's intent. A dual-level calibration mechanism is then proposed to refine raw click data, effectively mitigating user behavioral noise by calibrating signals based on user activity (user-level), while simultaneously up-weighting click signals on tool-invoking queries (system-level). Guided by these refined preference signals, we then align the model using a sample-level weighted Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO). Extensive online A/B tests on our mobile assistant platform OPPO Xiaobu, which has over 150 million monthly active users, demonstrate that ToolRec can significantly improve Click-Through Rate (CTR) and total click volume over strong baselines while maintaining high query relevance.

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) as agentic orchestrators has revolutionized task automation, but the need for privacy-preserving, cost-effective solutions demands on-device inference capabilities. However, local LLMs consistently underperform compared to frontier models in tool calling scenarios, struggling with both tool selection from large tool sets and accurate argument generation for complex parameter structures. We introduce a methodology that disaggregates a tool-calling task into two distinct subtasks: tool selection and argument generation. We propose "decoupled fine-tuning", a novel post-training approach that employs LoRA fine-tuning to create dedicated LoRA adapters for tool selection and tool-specific argument generation using separate loss masking for each of the subtasks. Furthermore, we present DualTune, an inference framework that leverages the LoRA adapters created using decoupled fine-tuning to perform efficient agent orchestration with the help of local models on end-user devices. DualTune decomposes the tool-call generation step into tool selection and argument generation, and dynamically loads the corresponding LoRA adapters to generate tool calls. Additionally, DualTune implements hierarchical orchestration to restrict the number of tools required for tool selection. Our experiments on the MCP-Bench benchmark demonstrate that the Qwen-2.5-7B model trained using decoupled fine-tuning improves the tool calling accuracy of the base model by 46%, and outperforms other local reasoning, non-reasoning and fine-tuned models of similar size in all cases, and models that are 2x larger, in most cases.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have emerged in the robotic domain as a powerful tool that enables environmental perception with language context, serving as a catalyst for open-vocabulary tasks like ObjectNav. Yet, their computational footprint typically confines them to cloud execution, hindering low-latency inference with local deployment on resource-constrained robots. To address this challenge, we present a distillation strategy that transfers complex spatial-semantic reasoning from large frontier models into a lightweight, 4B-parameter local VLM for edge execution on embedded GPU devices (e.g., Jetson Orin). We first establish a State of the Art (SotA), Scene Graph (SG)-based pipeline using Claude Sonnet 4.6, achieving a 39.7% Success Rate (SR) on the HM3D OVON benchmark. We then demonstrate that fine-tuning Qwen3.5-4B on just 500 frontier reasoning traces effectively enables navigation capabilities, yielding a SR of 34.5%, narrowing the gap to the performance of large cloud models. Finally, we introduce E-RLVR with Token Generation (TG) regularization to compress output sequence lengths for physical deployment while grounding the agent in its task. This downstream optimization reduces TG overhead by 72.1% and latency by 71.8%. Combined with quantization, this joint strategy yields a cumulative 82.8% reduction in overall inference latency without significantly sacrificing performance, presenting a viable paradigm for local, low-latency VLM execution on mobile robots.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents to navigate mobile graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Operating in dynamic on-device ecosystems, which include notifications, pop-ups, and inter-app interactions, exposes them to a unique and underexplored threat vector: environmental injection. Unlike prompt-based attacks that manipulate textual instructions, environmental injection corrupts an agent's visual perception by inserting adversarial UI elements (for example, deceptive overlays or spoofed notifications) directly into the GUI. This bypasses textual safeguards and can derail execution, causing privacy leakage, financial loss, or irreversible device compromise. To systematically evaluate this threat, we introduce GhostEI-Bench, the first benchmark for assessing mobile agents under environmental injection attacks within dynamic, executable environments. Moving beyond static image-based assessments, GhostEI-Bench injects adversarial events into realistic application workflows inside fully operational Android emulators and evaluates performance across critical risk scenarios. We further propose a judge-LLM protocol that conducts fine-grained failure analysis by reviewing the agent's action trajectory alongside the corresponding screenshot sequence, pinpointing failure in perception, recognition, or reasoning. Comprehensive experiments on state-of-the-art agents reveal pronounced vulnerability to deceptive environmental cues: current models systematically fail to perceive and reason about manipulated UIs. GhostEI-Bench provides a framework for quantifying and mitigating this emerging threat, paving the way toward more robust and secure embodied agents.

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on mobile devices has gained significant attention due to the benefits of enhanced privacy, stability, and personalization. However, the hardware constraints of mobile devices necessitate the use of models with fewer parameters and model compression techniques like quantization. Currently, there is limited understanding of quantization's impact on various task performances, including LLM tasks, LMM tasks, and, critically, trust and safety. There is a lack of adequate tools for systematically testing these models on mobile devices. To address these gaps, we introduce MobileAIBench, a comprehensive benchmarking framework for evaluating mobile-optimized LLMs and LMMs. MobileAIBench assesses models across different sizes, quantization levels, and tasks, measuring latency and resource consumption on real devices. Our two-part open-source framework includes a library for running evaluations on desktops and an iOS app for on-device latency and hardware utilization measurements. Our thorough analysis aims to accelerate mobile AI research and deployment by providing insights into the performance and feasibility of deploying LLMs and LMMs on mobile platforms.

A multimodal AI agent is characterized by its ability to process and learn from various types of data, including natural language, visual, and audio inputs, to inform its actions. Despite advancements in large language models that incorporate visual data, such as GPT-4V, effectively translating image-based data into actionable outcomes for AI agents continues to be challenging. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal model that incorporates the concept of functional token specifically designed for AI agent applications. To ensure compatibility with edge devices, our model is optimized to a compact size of less than 1B parameters. Like GPT-4, our model can process both English and Chinese. We demonstrate that this model is capable of operating efficiently on a wide range of edge devices, including as constrained as a Raspberry Pi.

Smaller vision-language models (VLMs) are becoming increasingly important for privacy-focused, on-device applications due to their ability to run efficiently on consumer hardware for processing enterprise commercial documents and images. These models require strong language understanding and visual capabilities to enhance human-machine interaction. To address this need, we present H2OVL-Mississippi, a pair of small VLMs trained on 37 million image-text pairs using 240 hours of compute on 8 x H100 GPUs. H2OVL-Mississippi-0.8B is a tiny model with 0.8 billion parameters that specializes in text recognition, achieving state of the art performance on the Text Recognition portion of OCRBench and surpassing much larger models in this area. Additionally, we are releasing H2OVL-Mississippi-2B, a 2 billion parameter model for general use cases, exhibiting highly competitive metrics across various academic benchmarks. Both models build upon our prior work with H2O-Danube language models, extending their capabilities into the visual domain. We release them under the Apache 2.0 license, making VLMs accessible to everyone, democratizing document AI and visual LLMs.

Quantization is an effective technique to reduce the deployment cost of large language models (LLMs), and post-training quantization (PTQ) has been widely studied due to its efficiency. However, existing PTQ methods are limited by their inability to fine-tune model parameters and often suffer significant accuracy loss in low-bit scenarios. Quantization-aware training (QAT) provides a more principled solution, but its reliance on backpropagation incurs prohibitive memory costs, limiting its practicality for LLM deployment. To address these challenges, we propose ZeroQAT, a zeroth-order optimization-based QAT framework that supports both weight and activation quantization. ZeroQAT leverages forward-only gradient estimation to eliminate backpropagation, substantially reducing computational and memory overhead while retaining the benefits of end-to-end optimization. We further introduce a lightweight variant of ZeroQAT for quantized fine-tuning, which freezes and pre-quantizes most parameters to further cut memory usage. Experiments show that ZeroQAT consistently outperforms representative PTQ and QAT baselines while requiring significantly less memory. For example, ZeroQAT enables fine-tuning of a 13B model at extremely low bit-widths (e.g., 2-4 bits) on a single 8GB GPU, and even allows fine-tuning a 6.7B model on a OnePlus 12 smartphone, demonstrating its practicality for end-to-end QAT on resource-limited edge devices.

Large language models of code have shown remarkable effectiveness across various software engineering tasks. Despite the availability of many cloud services built upon these powerful models, there remain several scenarios where developers cannot take full advantage of them, stemming from factors such as restricted or unreliable internet access, institutional privacy policies that prohibit external transmission of code to third-party vendors, and more. Therefore, developing a compact, efficient, and yet energy-saving model for deployment on developers' devices becomes essential. To this aim, we propose Avatar, a novel approach that crafts a deployable model from a large language model of code by optimizing it in terms of model size, inference latency, energy consumption, and carbon footprint while maintaining a comparable level of effectiveness. The key idea of Avatar is to formulate the optimization of language models as a multi-objective configuration tuning problem and solve it with the help of a Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver and a tailored optimization algorithm. The SMT solver is used to form an appropriate configuration space, while the optimization algorithm identifies the Pareto-optimal set of configurations for training the optimized models using knowledge distillation. We evaluate Avatar with two popular language models of code, i.e., CodeBERT and GraphCodeBERT, on two popular tasks, i.e., vulnerability prediction and clone detection. We use Avatar to produce optimized models with a small size (3 MB), which is 160times smaller than the original large models. On the two tasks, the optimized models significantly reduce the energy consumption (up to 184times less), carbon footprint (up to 157times less), and inference latency (up to 76times faster), with only a negligible loss in effectiveness (1.67\% on average).

Environment setup-the process of configuring the system to work with a specific software project-represents a persistent challenge in Software Engineering (SE). Automated environment setup methods could assist developers by providing fully configured environments for arbitrary repositories without manual effort. This also helps SE researchers to scale execution-based benchmarks. However, recent studies reveal that even state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve limited success in automating this task. To address this limitation, we tune a specialized model for environment setup. We combine supervised fine-tuning for generating correct Bash scripts and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to adapt it to the task of environment setup. On EnvBench-Python, our method enables Qwen3-8B (a model runnable on consumer hardware) to perform on par with larger models-Qwen3-32B and GPT-4o. The training code and model checkpoints are available online: https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/PIPer.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents can solve complex procedural tasks by interacting with environments over multiple turns, but this ability typically depends on large models, long contexts, and repeated inference calls. This makes advanced memory-augmented agents difficult to deploy on resource-constrained devices. We introduce DuoMem, a dual-space distillation framework that transfers procedural problem-solving ability from a large teacher model to compact student models. DuoMem distils in two complementary spaces: (1)context-space distillation, which replaces student-generated memories with higher-quality teacher-generated procedural memories prepended to the student's input, and (2)parameter-space distillation, which fine-tunes lightweight LoRA adapters on successful teacher trajectories. Evaluated on ALFWorld, a challenging embodied decision-making benchmark, DuoMem boosts a 4B-parameter model from 4.3% to 77.9% task success rate, closing most of the gap to a 72B teacher model (87.1%), while adding fewer than 10M trainable parameters and only a few megabytes of pre-computed teacher memories. Moreover, the DuoMem-enhanced 4B model completes tasks over 3x faster than the 72B teacher in wall-clock time, making it viable for real-time edge deployment, which would be challenging for the teacher.Extensive ablations across eight models spanning 2B-72B parameters reveal that both distillation axes contribute complementary

Post training quantization is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) on resource constrained hardware, yet state of the art methods enforce uniform bit widths across layers, yielding suboptimal accuracy efficiency trade offs. We present RAMP (Reinforcement Adaptive Mixed Precision), an off policy Soft Actor Critic framework that learns per layer bit width assignments to minimize perplexity under a global bit budget. The policy conditions on an 11 dimensional embedding of activation statistics, weight properties, and structural descriptors, enabling zero shot transfer across model families and scales. To enable stable sub 4 bit quantization, we introduce Scale Folding, a preconditioning technique that migrates activation outliers into weights via per channel scaling and normalization layer compensation. A quality prioritized reward with asymmetric penalties and budget cliffs drives rapid convergence. On Llama 2 7B, RAMP achieves 5.54 perplexity at 3.68GB (3.65 effective bits), outperforming uniform 4 bit AWQ (5.60 at 3.90 GB) and GPTQ by 6% in size and 1% to3% in quality. Critically, a policy trained only on Llama 2 7B generalizes zero shot to Llama 2 13B and Mistral 7B, often surpassing target specific training, supporting the hypothesis that quantization sensitivity is primarily architectural. The HALO pipeline exports allocations to GGUF format for kernel free inference on CPUs, GPUs, and edge devices, retaining 99.5% of FP16 commonsense reasoning performance.

GPU kernels are the workhorse of modern deep learning, and optimizing them (via evolutionary search or coding agents) usually requires repeated measurement on target hardware. While these measurements provide the ground-truth signal necessary for kernel search, they are costly, because each evaluation of a kernel requires compilation and repeated execution on a GPU. As improvements in LLM inference reduce the cost of writing novel kernels and LLM-driven searches scale to large search budgets, on-device evaluation becomes a bottleneck. To address this, we study how LLMs can serve as selective GPU surrogates for kernel evaluation, by forecasting the performance of proposed kernels. A useful surrogate should be accurate, and it should be selective, by knowing when it could be wrong, and deferring to the GPU. To evaluate surrogates, we measure whether their forecasts are accurate, calibrated, and practically useful for recovering fast kernels under limited GPU-measurement budgets. Next, we study whether reinforcement learning can improve forecast accuracy and confidence calibration. Our experiments demonstrate that LLMs can accurately forecast relative kernel performance, that their utility can be improved through reinforcement learning. Used inside a kernel search, the surrogate lets the search consider several times as many candidates under the same GPU evaluation budget, and that leads to finding faster kernels than an equal-budget baseline. These results suggest that LLMs can play a broader role in kernel optimization, by acting as virtual models of a GPU rather than solely as kernel generators for search.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across reasoning, generation, and decision-making tasks, yet deploying them on mobile, embedded, and edge devices remains particularly challenging. On-device LLM inference is heavily constrained by the memory and bandwidth overhead of the key-value (KV) cache, which grows linearly with context length and often dominates decoding cost. Existing KV-cache quantization schemes typically rely on fixed precision or hand-crafted heuristics, thereby wasting bits on low-impact tokens while over-compressing informative ones, leading to avoidable accuracy degradation. Inspired by Huffman coding's principle of variable-length allocation, we propose adaptive KV-cache quantization, a learned policy that assigns bit-width proportional to token importance, minimizing expected memory and latency without sacrificing competitive accuracy. Our framework extracts lightweight token-level features, including token frequency, quality score, attention variance, and entropy-based uncertainty, and feeds them into a compact data-driven controller that dynamically selects KV precision from {2-bit, 4-bit, 8-bit, FP16} during decoding. This adaptive precision policy reduces KV memory footprint and latency while improving accuracy compared to static KV quantization and rule-based baselines, and maintaining competitive accuracy close to FP16 inference across standard LLM benchmarks. Extensive experiments across multiple commonsense reasoning benchmarks using SmolLM-135M, SmolLM-360M, and SmolLM-1.7B demonstrate that our controller consistently improves the accuracy-latency trade-off. For instance, with SmolLM-360M on HellaSwag, our method reduces decoding latency (ms/token) by 17.75% relative to static KV quantization, improves accuracy by 7.60 points, and remains within only 0.30 points of FP16 inference.

We propose a holistic approach for deploying Small Language Models (SLMs) as function-calling agents within vehicles as edge devices, offering a more flexible and robust alternative to traditional rule-based systems. By leveraging SLMs, we simplify vehicle control mechanisms and enhance the user experience. Given the in-vehicle hardware constraints, we apply state-of-the-art model compression techniques, including structured pruning, healing, and quantization, ensuring that the model fits within the resource limitations while maintaining acceptable performance. Our work focuses on optimizing a representative SLM, Microsoft's Phi-3 mini, and outlines best practices for enabling embedded models, including compression, task-specific fine-tuning, and vehicle integration. We demonstrate that, despite significant reduction in model size which removes up to 2 billion parameters from the original model, our approach preserves the model's ability to handle complex in-vehicle tasks accurately and efficiently. Furthermore, by executing the model in a lightweight runtime environment, we achieve a generation speed of 11 tokens per second, making real-time, on-device inference feasible without hardware acceleration. Our results demonstrate the potential of SLMs to transform vehicle control systems, enabling more intuitive interactions between users and their vehicles for an enhanced driving experience.

The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) has advanced numerous applications, yet efficient single-batch inference remains vital for on-device intelligence. While FPGAs offer fine-grained data control and high energy efficiency, recent GPU optimizations have narrowed their advantage, especially under arithmetic-based computation. To overcome this, we leverage FPGAs' abundant on-chip memory to shift LLM inference from arithmetic- to memory-based computation through table lookups. We present LUT-LLM, the first FPGA accelerator enabling 1B+ LLM inference via vector-quantized memory operations. Our analysis identifies activation-weight co-quantization as the most effective scheme, supported by (1) bandwidth-aware parallel centroid search, (2) efficient 2D table lookups, and (3) a spatial-temporal hybrid design minimizing data caching. Implemented on an AMD V80 FPGA for a customized Qwen 3 1.7B model, LUT-LLM achieves 1.66x lower latency than AMD MI210 and 1.72x higher energy efficiency than NVIDIA A100, scaling to 32B models with 2.16x efficiency gain over A100.

Small Language Models (SLMs) have become increasingly important due to their efficiency and performance to perform various language tasks with minimal computational resources, making them ideal for various settings including on-device, mobile, edge devices, among many others. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on SLMs, focusing on their architectures, training techniques, and model compression techniques. We propose a novel taxonomy for categorizing the methods used to optimize SLMs, including model compression, pruning, and quantization techniques. We summarize the benchmark datasets that are useful for benchmarking SLMs along with the evaluation metrics commonly used. Additionally, we highlight key open challenges that remain to be addressed. Our survey aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners interested in developing and deploying small yet efficient language models.

Extreme activation outliers in Large Language Models (LLMs) critically degrade quantization performance, hindering efficient on-device deployment. While channel-wise operations and adaptive gradient scaling are recognized causes, practical mitigation remains challenging. We introduce Outlier-Safe Pre-Training (OSP), a practical guideline that proactively prevents outlier formation rather than relying on post-hoc mitigation. OSP combines three key innovations: (1) the Muon optimizer, eliminating privileged bases while maintaining training efficiency; (2) Single-Scale RMSNorm, preventing channel-wise amplification; and (3) a learnable embedding projection, redistributing activation magnitudes originating from embedding matrices. We validate OSP by training a 1.4B-parameter model on 1 trillion tokens, which is the first production-scale LLM trained without such outliers. Under aggressive 4-bit quantization, our OSP model achieves a 35.7 average score across 10 benchmarks (compared to 26.5 for an Adam-trained model), with only a 2% training overhead. Remarkably, OSP models exhibit near-zero excess kurtosis (0.04) compared to extreme values (1818.56) in standard models, fundamentally altering LLM quantization behavior. Our work demonstrates that outliers are not inherent to LLMs but are consequences of training strategies, paving the way for more efficient LLM deployment. The source code and pretrained checkpoints are available at https://github.com/dmis-lab/Outlier-Safe-Pre-Training.

Deploying large scale language models on edge devices faces inherent challenges such as high computational demands, energy consumption, and potential data privacy risks. This paper introduces the Shakti Small Language Models (SLMs) Shakti-100M, Shakti-250M, and Shakti-500M which target these constraints headon. By combining efficient architectures, quantization techniques, and responsible AI principles, the Shakti series enables on-device intelligence for smartphones, smart appliances, IoT systems, and beyond. We provide comprehensive insights into their design philosophy, training pipelines, and benchmark performance on both general tasks (e.g., MMLU, Hellaswag) and specialized domains (healthcare, finance, and legal). Our findings illustrate that compact models, when carefully engineered and fine-tuned, can meet and often exceed expectations in real-world edge-AI scenarios.

Background: Clinical documentation represents a significant burden for healthcare providers, with physicians spending up to 2 hours daily on administrative tasks. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer promising solutions, but privacy concerns and computational requirements limit their adoption in healthcare settings. Objective: To develop and evaluate a privacy-preserving, on-device medical transcription system using a fine-tuned Llama 3.2 1B model capable of generating structured medical notes from medical transcriptions while maintaining complete data sovereignty entirely in the browser. Methods: We fine-tuned a Llama 3.2 1B model using Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) with LoRA on 1,500 synthetic medical transcription-to-structured note pairs. The model was evaluated against the base Llama 3.2 1B on two datasets: 100 endocrinology transcripts and 140 modified ACI benchmark cases. Evaluation employed both statistical metrics (ROUGE, BERTScore, BLEURT) and LLM-as-judge assessments across multiple clinical quality dimensions. Results: The fine-tuned OnDevice model demonstrated substantial improvements over the base model. On the ACI benchmark, ROUGE-1 scores increased from 0.346 to 0.496, while BERTScore F1 improved from 0.832 to 0.866. Clinical quality assessments showed marked reduction in major hallucinations (from 85 to 35 cases) and enhanced factual correctness (2.81 to 3.54 on 5-point scale). Similar improvements were observed on the internal evaluation dataset, with composite scores increasing from 3.13 to 4.43 (+41.5%). Conclusions: Fine-tuning compact LLMs for medical transcription yields clinically meaningful improvements while enabling complete on-device browser deployment. This approach addresses key barriers to AI adoption in healthcare: privacy preservation, cost reduction, and accessibility for resource-constrained environments.

Small Language Models (SLMs) have gained substantial attention due to their ability to execute diverse language tasks successfully while using fewer computer resources. These models are particularly ideal for deployment in limited environments, such as mobile devices, on-device processing, and edge systems. In this study, we present a complete assessment of SLMs, focussing on their design frameworks, training approaches, and techniques for lowering model size and complexity. We offer a novel classification system to organize the optimization approaches applied for SLMs, encompassing strategies like pruning, quantization, and model compression. Furthermore, we assemble SLM's studies of evaluation suite with some existing datasets, establishing a rigorous platform for measuring SLM capabilities. Alongside this, we discuss the important difficulties that remain unresolved in this sector, including trade-offs between efficiency and performance, and we suggest directions for future study. We anticipate this study to serve as a beneficial guide for researchers and practitioners who aim to construct compact, efficient, and high-performing language models.

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has become the standard for adapting large language models (LLMs). In this work we challenge the wide-spread assumption that parameter efficiency equates memory efficiency and on-device adaptability. We show that this is not true - while methods like LoRA and IA3 significantly reduce trainable parameters, they remain bound by intermediate tensors that scale linearly with sequence length, often triggering out-of-memory errors on-device. In this work, we introduce LARS (Low-memory Activation-Rank Subspace), a novel adaptation framework that decouples memory consumption from sequence length. While prior PEFT methods apply low-rank constraints to model parameters, LARS instead constrains the activation subspace used during training, directly targeting the dominant source of memory consumption and fundamentally flattening the memory growth rate. LARS reduces the memory footprint by an average of 33.54% on GPUs and 51.95% on CPUs in comparison to LoRA across reasoning, understanding and long-context datasets using different models while maintaining competitive accuracy and throughput. Besides GPUs, we deploy on Raspberry Pi and consumer-grade CPUs to demonstrate that LARS provides a scalable path for sophisticated LLM personalization on resource-constrained hardware and edge devices.

Small language models (SLMs; 1-12B params, sometimes up to 20B) are sufficient and often superior for agentic workloads where the objective is schema- and API-constrained accuracy rather than open-ended generation. We synthesize recent evidence across open and proprietary SLMs (Phi-4-Mini, Qwen-2.5-7B, Gemma-2-9B, Llama-3.2-1B/3B, Ministral-3B/8B, Apple on-device 3B, DeepSeek-R1-Distill) and connect it to modern evaluations (BFCL v3/v4, StableToolBench) and serving stacks (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM) paired with guided decoding libraries (XGrammar, Outlines). We formalize SLM-default, LLM-fallback systems with uncertainty-aware routing and verifier cascades, and propose engineering metrics that reflect real production goals: cost per successful task (CPS), schema validity rate, executable call rate, p50/p95 latency, and energy per request. Guided decoding, strict JSON Schema outputs, and validator-first tool execution close much of the capability gap with larger models and often let SLMs match or surpass LLMs on tool use, function calling, and RAG at 10x-100x lower token cost with materially better latency and energy. We provide design patterns for agent stacks that prioritize SLMs: schema-first prompting, type-safe function registries, confidence scoring with verifier rollups, and lightweight adaptation via LoRA/QLoRA. We also delineate limits where fallback remains valuable (open-domain reasoning and some long-horizon planning). The result is a practical blueprint for building fast, inexpensive, and reliable agents that default to SLMs while preserving headroom with targeted LLM assistance. Keywords: small language models, agents, function calling, structured outputs, JSON Schema, guided decoding, LoRA/QLoRA, routing, energy efficiency, edge inference

The mixture of experts (MoE) model is a sparse variant of large language models (LLMs), designed to hold a better balance between intelligent capability and computational overhead. Despite its benefits, MoE is still too expensive to deploy on resource-constrained edge devices, especially with the demands of on-device inference services. Recent research efforts often apply model compression techniques, such as quantization, pruning and merging, to restrict MoE complexity. Unfortunately, due to their predefined static model optimization strategies, they cannot always achieve the desired quality-overhead trade-off when handling multiple requests, finally degrading the on-device quality of service. These limitations motivate us to propose the D^2MoE, an algorithm-system co-design framework that matches diverse task requirements by dynamically allocating the most proper bit-width to each expert. Specifically, inspired by the nested structure of matryoshka dolls, we propose the matryoshka weight quantization (MWQ) to progressively compress expert weights in a bit-nested manner and reduce the required runtime memory. On top of it, we further optimize the I/O-computation pipeline and design a heuristic scheduling algorithm following our hottest-expert-bit-first (HEBF) principle, which maximizes the expert parallelism between I/O and computation queue under constrained memory budgets, thus significantly reducing the idle temporal bubbles waiting for the experts to load. Evaluations on real edge devices show that D^2MoE improves the overall inference throughput by up to 1.39times and reduces the peak memory footprint by up to 53% over the latest on-device inference frameworks, while still preserving comparable serving accuracy as its INT8 counterparts.

This technical report introduces EXAONE 4.0, which integrates a Non-reasoning mode and a Reasoning mode to achieve both the excellent usability of EXAONE 3.5 and the advanced reasoning abilities of EXAONE Deep. To pave the way for the agentic AI era, EXAONE 4.0 incorporates essential features such as agentic tool use, and its multilingual capabilities are extended to support Spanish in addition to English and Korean. The EXAONE 4.0 model series consists of two sizes: a mid-size 32B model optimized for high performance, and a small-size 1.2B model designed for on-device applications. The EXAONE 4.0 demonstrates superior performance compared to open-weight models in its class and remains competitive even against frontier-class models. The models are publicly available for research purposes and can be easily downloaded via https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE.

While frontier large language models (LLMs) continue to push capability boundaries, their deployment remains confined to GPU-powered cloud infrastructure. We challenge this paradigm with SmallThinker, a family of LLMs natively designed - not adapted - for the unique constraints of local devices: weak computational power, limited memory, and slow storage. Unlike traditional approaches that mainly compress existing models built for clouds, we architect SmallThinker from the ground up to thrive within these limitations. Our innovation lies in a deployment-aware architecture that transforms constraints into design principles. First, We introduce a two-level sparse structure combining fine-grained Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with sparse feed-forward networks, drastically reducing computational demands without sacrificing model capacity. Second, to conquer the I/O bottleneck of slow storage, we design a pre-attention router that enables our co-designed inference engine to prefetch expert parameters from storage while computing attention, effectively hiding storage latency that would otherwise cripple on-device inference. Third, for memory efficiency, we utilize NoPE-RoPE hybrid sparse attention mechanism to slash KV cache requirements. We release SmallThinker-4B-A0.6B and SmallThinker-21B-A3B, which achieve state-of-the-art performance scores and even outperform larger LLMs. Remarkably, our co-designed system mostly eliminates the need for expensive GPU hardware: with Q4_0 quantization, both models exceed 20 tokens/s on ordinary consumer CPUs, while consuming only 1GB and 8GB of memory respectively. SmallThinker is publicly available at hf.co/PowerInfer/SmallThinker-4BA0.6B-Instruct and hf.co/PowerInfer/SmallThinker-21BA3B-Instruct.

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) in automated negotiation has set a high performance benchmark, but their computational cost and data privacy requirements render them unsuitable for many privacy-sensitive, on-device applications such as mobile assistants, embodied AI agents or private client interactions. While small language models (SLMs) offer a practical alternative, they suffer from a significant performance gap compared to LLMs in playing emotionally charged complex personas, especially for credit negotiation. This paper introduces EQ-Negotiator, a novel framework that bridges this capability gap using emotional personas. Its core is a reasoning system that integrates game theory with a Hidden Markov Model(HMM) to learn and track debtor emotional states online, without pre-training. This allows EQ-Negotiator to equip SLMs with the strategic intelligence to counter manipulation while de-escalating conflict and upholding ethical standards. Through extensive agent-to-agent simulations across diverse credit negotiation scenarios, including adversarial debtor strategies like cheating, threatening, and playing the victim, we show that a 7B parameter language model with EQ-Negotiator achieves better debt recovery and negotiation efficiency than baseline LLMs more than 10 times its size. This work advances persona modeling from descriptive character profiles to dynamic emotional architectures that operate within privacy constraints. Besides, this paper establishes that strategic emotional intelligence, not raw model scale, is the critical factor for success in automated negotiation, paving the way for effective, ethical, and privacy-preserving AI negotiators that can operate on the edge.

The deployment of intelligent reinforcement learning (RL) agents on resource-constrained edge devices remains a fundamental challenge due to the substantial memory, computational, and energy requirements of modern deep learning systems. While large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful architectures for decision-making agents, their multi-billion parameter scale confines them to cloud-based deployment, raising concerns about latency, privacy, and connectivity dependence. We introduce BitRL, a framework for building RL agents using 1-bit quantized language models that enables practical on-device learning and inference under severe resource constraints. Leveraging the BitNet b1.58 architecture with ternary weights (-1, 0, +1) and an optimized inference stack, BitRL achieves 10-16x memory reduction and 3-5x energy efficiency improvements over full-precision baselines while maintaining 85-98 percent of task performance across benchmarks. We provide theoretical analysis of quantization as structured parameter perturbation, derive convergence bounds for quantized policy gradients under frozen-backbone architectures, and identify the exploration-stability trade-off in extreme quantization. Our framework systematically integrates 1-bit quantized language models with reinforcement learning for edge deployment and demonstrates effectiveness on commodity hardware.

Guardrails have emerged as an alternative to safety alignment for content moderation of large language models (LLMs). Existing model-based guardrails have not been designed for resource-constrained computational portable devices, such as mobile phones, more and more of which are running LLM-based applications locally. We introduce LoRA-Guard, a parameter-efficient guardrail adaptation method that relies on knowledge sharing between LLMs and guardrail models. LoRA-Guard extracts language features from the LLMs and adapts them for the content moderation task using low-rank adapters, while a dual-path design prevents any performance degradation on the generative task. We show that LoRA-Guard outperforms existing approaches with 100-1000x lower parameter overhead while maintaining accuracy, enabling on-device content moderation.

Modern pretrained vision models achieve strong accuracy but demand substantial GPU memory for fine-tuning, making edge deployment impractical. This paper compares five parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods (Full FT, LoRA, AdaLoRA, QLoRA, BitFit) on Transformers- (ViT-Small, TinyViT) and Mamba-based vision backbones (Vim-Small, MambaVision-T) under an on-device VRAM budget (e.g., 2 GB), together with three gradient-checkpointing strategies (none, static, and a proposed memory-budget-aware adaptive algorithm); and we evaluate three families of foundation-model baselines: zero-shot contrastive vision language models (OpenCLIP, SigLIP), self-supervised vision backbones with lightweight evaluation protocols (DINOv2), and autoregressive VLMs for prompt-based classification (PaliGemma, MobileVLM, SmolVLM). Experiments on CIFAR-100 and DTD report accuracy, training time, energy, and the NetScore family of multi-objective metrics, which we extend with two deployment-aware variants. QLoRA and BitFit cut energy 20-30% at a 1-2% accuracy cost; the adaptive algorithm reduces peak memory 43-79% with 9-30% energy overhead. DINOv2 surpasses fine-tuned models on CIFAR-100 (0.917 vs. 0.897) at a fraction of the energy, while small autoregressive VLMs remain uncompetitive.

Small Language Models (SLMs) enable cost-effective, on-device and latency-sensitive AI applications, yet their deployment in Traditional Chinese (TC) remains hindered by token-level instability - models unpredictably emit non-TC characters or code-switch into other languages. We address this practical reliability gap by creating PureTC-1B, a three-stage stabilization pipeline for Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct (an open-weight, instruction-tuned model released by Meta) using parameter-efficient LoRA adapters. Our method combines Continual Pre-Training (CPT) on TC-centric corpora, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with instruction data, and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) using TC-adherence preferences to improve monolingual robustness without full-model retraining. On a benchmark designed to simulate real-world usage, PureTC-1B achieves a 51.3% relative reduction (micro-average) in non-TC output tokens versus the base model. On a Named Entity Translation (NET) task, PureTC-1B further reduces incorrect-language tokens by 77.2% relative to Llama-3B and 57.2% relative to Qwen-1.5B, indicating that robust TC adherence is attainable even at the 1B scale. The pipeline is reproducible, adapter-only, and hardware-friendly, offering practitioners a practical recipe to enhance language stability for TC and potentially other non-English languages.

The interest in developing small language models (SLM) for on-device deployment is fast growing. However, the existing SLM design hardly considers the device hardware characteristics. Instead, this work presents a simple yet effective principle for SLM design: architecture searching for (near-)optimal runtime efficiency before pre-training. Guided by this principle, we develop PhoneLM SLM family (currently with 0.5B and 1.5B versions), that acheive the state-of-the-art capability-efficiency tradeoff among those with similar parameter size. We fully open-source the code, weights, and training datasets of PhoneLM for reproducibility and transparency, including both base and instructed versions. We also release a finetuned version of PhoneLM capable of accurate Android Intent invocation, and an end-to-end Android demo. All materials are available at https://github.com/UbiquitousLearning/PhoneLM.

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices is increasingly important to enhance on-device intelligence. Weight quantization is crucial for reducing the memory footprint of LLMs on devices. However, low-bit LLMs necessitate mixed precision matrix multiplication (mpGEMM) of low precision weights and high precision activations during inference. Existing systems, lacking native support for mpGEMM, resort to dequantize weights for high precision computation. Such an indirect way can lead to a significant inference overhead. In this paper, we introduce T-MAC, an innovative lookup table(LUT)-based method designed for efficient low-bit LLM (i.e., weight-quantized LLM) inference on CPUs. T-MAC directly supports mpGEMM without dequantization, while simultaneously eliminating multiplications and reducing additions required. Specifically, T-MAC transforms the traditional data-type-centric multiplication to bit-wise table lookup, and enables a unified and scalable mpGEMM solution. Our LUT-based kernels scale linearly to the weight bit-width. Evaluated on low-bit Llama and BitNet models, T-MAC demonstrates up to 4x increase in throughput and 70% reduction in energy consumption compared to llama.cpp. For BitNet-b1.58-3B, T-MAC delivers a token generation throughput of 30 tokens/s with a single core and 71 tokens/s with eight cores on M2-Ultra, and 11 tokens/s on lower-end devices like Raspberry Pi 5, which significantly exceeds the adult average reading speed. T-MAC with LUT-based computing paradigm, paves the way for the practical deployment of low-bit LLMs on resource-constrained edge devices without compromising computational efficiency. The system is open-sourced at https://github.com/microsoft/T-MAC.

Rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have increased interest in deploying them on mobile devices for on-device AI applications. Mobile users interact differently with LLMs compared to desktop users, creating unique expectations and data biases. Current benchmark datasets primarily target at server and desktop environments, and there is a notable lack of extensive datasets specifically designed for mobile contexts. Additionally, mobile devices face strict limitations in storage and computing resources, constraining model size and capabilities, thus requiring optimized efficiency and prioritized knowledge. To address these challenges, we introduce Mobile-MMLU, a large-scale benchmark dataset tailored for mobile intelligence. It consists of 16,186 questions across 80 mobile-related fields, designed to evaluate LLM performance in realistic mobile scenarios. A challenging subset, Mobile-MMLU-Pro, provides advanced evaluation similar in size to MMLU-Pro but significantly more difficult than our standard full set. Both benchmarks use multiple-choice, order-invariant questions focused on practical mobile interactions, such as recipe suggestions, travel planning, and essential daily tasks. The dataset emphasizes critical mobile-specific metrics like inference latency, energy consumption, memory usage, and response quality, offering comprehensive insights into model performance under mobile constraints. Moreover, it prioritizes privacy and adaptability, assessing models' ability to perform on-device processing, maintain user privacy, and adapt to personalized usage patterns. Mobile-MMLU family offers a standardized framework for developing and comparing mobile-optimized LLMs, enabling advancements in productivity and decision-making within mobile computing environments. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/VILA-Lab/Mobile-MMLU.

The design space of agentic AI inference spans two extremes: frontier large language models (LLMs), typically hosted in the cloud and offering strong performance across a wide range of tasks at substantially high cost, and more cost-efficient small language models (SLMs), which are amenable to on-device inference. Hybrid multi-agent systems (MASs) combining on-device and cloud models offer a promising middle ground, but they also introduce a complex and poorly understood design space in which task accuracy, monetary cost, and edge energy consumption are tightly coupled; in the absence of general design principles, hybrid components, although not the most prevalent choice, are typically introduced through ad hoc decisions tailored to specific domains. In this work, we examine this design space more systematically. We adapt two representative MAS architectures to support hybrid inference and study how individual design choices shift the operating point along the Pareto frontier of power, cost, and performance. Our findings paint a nuanced picture of hybrid MAS design: while SLMs can effectively benefit from LLM assistance, the optimal architecture is highly task-dependent, and greater frontier-level compute does not consistently translate to better performance.

Large language models(LLMs) have shown its outperforming ability on various tasks and question answering. However, LLMs require high computation cost and large memory cost. At the same time, LLMs may cause privacy leakage when training or prediction procedure contains sensitive information. In this paper, we propose SPA(Side Plugin Adaption), a lightweight architecture for fast on-devices inference and privacy retaining on the constraints of strict on-devices computation and memory constraints. Compared with other on-devices seq2seq generation, SPA could make a fast and stable inference on low-resource constraints, allowing it to obtain cost effiency. Our method establish an interaction between a pretrained LLMs on-cloud and additive parameters on-devices, which could provide the knowledge on both pretrained LLMs and private personal feature.Further more, SPA provides a framework to keep feature-base parameters on private guaranteed but low computational devices while leave the parameters containing general information on the high computational devices.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in cost-sensitive and on-device scenarios, and safety guardrails have advanced mainly in English. However, real-world Chinese malicious queries typically conceal intent via homophones, pinyin, symbol-based splitting, and other Chinese-specific patterns. These Chinese-specific adversarial patterns create the safety evaluation gap that is not well captured by existing benchmarks focused on English. This gap is particularly concerning for lightweight models, which may be more vulnerable to such specific adversarial perturbations. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Chinese-Specific Safety Benchmark (CSSBench) that emphasizes these adversarial patterns and evaluates the safety of lightweight LLMs in Chinese. Our benchmark covers six domains that are common in real Chinese scenarios, including illegal activities and compliance, privacy leakage, health and medical misinformation, fraud and hate, adult content, and public and political safety, and organizes queries into multiple task types. We evaluate a set of popular lightweight LLMs and measure over-refusal behavior to assess safety-induced performance degradation. Our results show that the Chinese-specific adversarial pattern is a critical challenge for lightweight LLMs. This benchmark offers a comprehensive evaluation of LLM safety in Chinese, assisting robust deployments in practice.

Deploying large language models (LLMs) in mobile and edge computing environments is constrained by limited on-device resources, scarce wireless bandwidth, and frequent model evolution. Although edge-cloud collaborative inference with speculative decoding (SD) can reduce end-to-end latency by executing a lightweight draft model at the edge and verifying it with a cloud-side target model, existing frameworks fundamentally rely on tight coupling between the two models. Consequently, repeated model synchronization introduces excessive communication overhead, increasing end-to-end latency, and ultimately limiting the scalability of SD in edge environments. To address these limitations, we propose FlexSpec, a communication-efficient collaborative inference framework tailored for evolving edge-cloud systems. The core design of FlexSpec is a shared-backbone architecture that allows a single and static edge-side draft model to remain compatible with a large family of evolving cloud-side target models. By decoupling edge deployment from cloud-side model updates, FlexSpec eliminates the need for edge-side retraining or repeated model downloads, substantially reducing communication and maintenance costs. Furthermore, to accommodate time-varying wireless conditions and heterogeneous device constraints, we develop a channel-aware adaptive speculation mechanism that dynamically adjusts the speculative draft length based on real-time channel state information and device energy budgets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlexSpec achieves superior performance compared to conventional SD approaches in terms of inference efficiency.

Over two billion Apple devices ship with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) - the Apple Neural Engine (ANE) - yet this accelerator remains largely unused for large language model workloads. CoreML, Apple's public ML framework, imposes opaque abstractions that prevent direct ANE programming and do not support on-device training. We present Orion, to our knowledge the first open end-to-end system that combines direct ANE execution, a compiler pipeline, and stable multi-step training with checkpoint resume in a single native runtime, bypassing CoreML entirely via Apple's private _ANEClient and _ANECompiler APIs. Building on prior characterization work by maderix, we extend public knowledge of ANE constraints to a catalog of 20 restrictions on MIL IR programs, memory layout, compilation limits, and numerical behavior, including 14 previously undocumented constraints discovered during Orion development. Orion includes a compiler that lowers a graph IR through five optimization passes to ANE-native MIL and a runtime that manages IOSurface-backed zero-copy tensor I/O, program caching, and delta compilation for weight updates. Because the ANE bakes weights at compile time, naive training normally requires full recompilation per step (~4.2 s). We show that compiled programs can instead be updated by unloading, patching weight files, and reloading, bypassing ANECCompile() and reducing recompilation from 4,200 ms to 494 ms per step (8.5x), yielding a 3.8x training speedup. On an M4 Max, Orion achieves 170+ tokens/s for GPT-2 124M inference and demonstrates stable training of a 110M-parameter transformer on TinyStories for 1,000 steps in 22 minutes with zero NaN occurrences. We also present LoRA adapter-as-input, enabling hot-swap of adapters via IOSurface inputs without recompilation.

On-device learning and efficient fine-tuning enable continuous and privacy-preserving customization (e.g., locally fine-tuning large language models on personalized data). However, existing training frameworks are designed for cloud servers with powerful accelerators (e.g., GPUs, TPUs) and lack the optimizations for learning on the edge, which faces challenges of resource limitations and edge hardware diversity. We introduce PockEngine: a tiny, sparse and efficient engine to enable fine-tuning on various edge devices. PockEngine supports sparse backpropagation: it prunes the backward graph and sparsely updates the model with measured memory saving and latency reduction while maintaining the model quality. Secondly, PockEngine is compilation first: the entire training graph (including forward, backward and optimization steps) is derived at compile-time, which reduces the runtime overhead and brings opportunities for graph transformations. PockEngine also integrates a rich set of training graph optimizations, thus can further accelerate the training cost, including operator reordering and backend switching. PockEngine supports diverse applications, frontends and hardware backends: it flexibly compiles and tunes models defined in PyTorch/TensorFlow/Jax and deploys binaries to mobile CPU/GPU/DSPs. We evaluated PockEngine on both vision models and large language models. PockEngine achieves up to 15 times speedup over off-the-shelf TensorFlow (Raspberry Pi), 5.6 times memory saving back-propagation (Jetson AGX Orin). Remarkably, PockEngine enables fine-tuning LLaMav2-7B on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin at 550 tokens/s, 7.9times faster than the PyTorch.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral to daily life, especially advancing as intelligent assistants through on-device deployment on smartphones. However, existing LLM evaluation benchmarks predominantly focus on objective tasks like mathematics and coding in English, which do not necessarily reflect the practical use cases of on-device LLMs in real-world mobile scenarios, especially for Chinese users. To address these gaps, we introduce SmartBench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of on-device LLMs in Chinese mobile contexts. We analyze functionalities provided by representative smartphone manufacturers and divide them into five categories: text summarization, text Q&A, information extraction, content creation, and notification management, further detailed into 20 specific tasks. For each task, we construct high-quality datasets comprising 50 to 200 question-answer pairs that reflect everyday mobile interactions, and we develop automated evaluation criteria tailored for these tasks. We conduct comprehensive evaluations of on-device LLMs and MLLMs using SmartBench and also assess their performance after quantized deployment on real smartphone NPUs. Our contributions provide a standardized framework for evaluating on-device LLMs in Chinese, promoting further development and optimization in this critical area. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/vivo-ai-lab/SmartBench.

Large language models (LLMs) has been widely used for automated negotiation, but their high computational cost and privacy risks limit deployment in privacy-sensitive, on-device settings such as mobile assistants or rescue robots. Small language models (SLMs) offer a viable alternative, yet struggle with the complex emotional dynamics of high-stakes negotiation. We introduces EmoMAS, a Bayesian multi-agent framework that transforms emotional decision-making from reactive to strategic. EmoMAS leverages a Bayesian orchestrator to coordinate three specialized agents: game-theoretic, reinforcement learning, and psychological coherence models. The system fuses their real-time insights to optimize emotional state transitions while continuously updating agent reliability based on negotiation feedback. This mixture-of-agents architecture enables online strategy learning without pre-training. We further introduce four high-stakes, edge-deployable negotiation benchmarks across debt, healthcare, emergency response, and educational domains. Through extensive agent-to-agent simulations across all benchmarks, both SLMs and LLMs equipped with EmoMAS consistently surpass all baseline models in negotiation performance while balancing ethical behavior. These results show that strategic emotional intelligence is also the key driver of negotiation success. By treating emotional expression as a strategic variable within a Bayesian multi-agent optimization framework, EmoMAS establishes a new paradigm for effective, private, and adaptive negotiation AI suitable for high-stakes edge deployment.

Small language models (SLMs) are attractive for agentic deployment due to low latency, reduced cost, and on-device privacy, yet they struggle with tool-use tasks where training data is scarce and noisy. Unlike larger models, SLMs cannot compensate for low-quality supervision through sheer capacity, making data quality the critical bottleneck. We present Data Turnstile, an open-source framework that takes user-defined API specifications and generates high-quality synthetic training data for function calling. Turnstile decomposes multi-turn tool-use interactions into constrained, stepwise generation with validation and error-feedback loops, providing fine-grained control over API diversity, conversation complexity, and output correctness. We demonstrate effectiveness of domain adaptation with Turnstile data on two challenging function calling benchmarks. On the BFCL single-turn benchmark, a Qwen3-0.6B fine-tuned on Turnstile data without chain-of-thought achieves 75.9% overall accuracy (versus 67.4% for the base model with thinking enabled), closing the gap with thinking-enabled Qwen3-1.7B (78.4%) and Qwen3-4B (79.9%) despite being 3times and 7times smaller respectively. On τ^2-bench, a multi-turn agentic benchmark, Turnstile-trained Qwen3-1.7B achieves 31.1% pass^1 on the Telecom domain, improving 4.7times over its 6.6% base and surpassing Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct (27.4%), a model 19times larger. Turnstile-trained Qwen3-0.6B achieves 24.6%, improving 7times over its 3.5% base and approaching the 32B model (53times larger). We release Data Turnstile along with a dataset spanning 1,000+ APIs and 100K+ multi-turn interactions.

Generating user intent from a sequence of user interface (UI) actions is a core challenge in comprehensive UI understanding. Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have led to substantial progress in this area, but their demands for extensive model parameters, computing power, and high latency makes them impractical for scenarios requiring lightweight, on-device solutions with low latency or heightened privacy. Additionally, the lack of high-quality datasets has hindered the development of such lightweight models. To address these challenges, we propose UI-JEPA, a novel framework that employs masking strategies to learn abstract UI embeddings from unlabeled data through self-supervised learning, combined with an LLM decoder fine-tuned for user intent prediction. We also introduce two new UI-grounded multimodal datasets, "Intent in the Wild" (IIW) and "Intent in the Tame" (IIT), designed for few-shot and zero-shot UI understanding tasks. IIW consists of 1.7K videos across 219 intent categories, while IIT contains 914 videos across 10 categories. We establish the first baselines for these datasets, showing that representations learned using a JEPA-style objective, combined with an LLM decoder, can achieve user intent predictions that match the performance of state-of-the-art large MLLMs, but with significantly reduced annotation and deployment resources. Measured by intent similarity scores, UI-JEPA outperforms GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3.5 Sonnet by 10.0% and 7.2% respectively, averaged across two datasets. Notably, UI-JEPA accomplishes the performance with a 50.5x reduction in computational cost and a 6.6x improvement in latency in the IIW dataset. These results underscore the effectiveness of UI-JEPA, highlighting its potential for lightweight, high-performance UI understanding.

The ever-increasing large language models (LLMs), though opening a potential path for the upcoming artificial general intelligence, sadly drops a daunting obstacle on the way towards their on-device deployment. As one of the most well-established pre-LLMs approaches in reducing model complexity, network pruning appears to lag behind in the era of LLMs, due mostly to its costly fine-tuning (or re-training) necessity under the massive volumes of model parameter and training data. To close this industry-academia gap, we introduce Dynamic Sparse No Training (DSnoT), a training-free fine-tuning approach that slightly updates sparse LLMs without the expensive backpropagation and any weight updates. Inspired by the Dynamic Sparse Training, DSnoT minimizes the reconstruction error between the dense and sparse LLMs, in the fashion of performing iterative weight pruning-and-growing on top of sparse LLMs. To accomplish this purpose, DSnoT particularly takes into account the anticipated reduction in reconstruction error for pruning and growing, as well as the variance w.r.t. different input data for growing each weight. This practice can be executed efficiently in linear time since its obviates the need of backpropagation for fine-tuning LLMs. Extensive experiments on LLaMA-V1/V2, Vicuna, and OPT across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of DSnoT in enhancing the performance of sparse LLMs, especially at high sparsity levels. For instance, DSnoT is able to outperform the state-of-the-art Wanda by 26.79 perplexity at 70% sparsity with LLaMA-7B. Our paper offers fresh insights into how to fine-tune sparse LLMs in an efficient training-free manner and open new venues to scale the great potential of sparsity to LLMs. Codes are available at https://github.com/zyxxmu/DSnoT.

With the rapid progress of multimodal large language models, operating system (OS) agents become increasingly capable of automating tasks through on-device graphical user interfaces (GUIs). However, most existing OS agents are designed for idealized settings, whereas real-world environments often present untrustworthy conditions. To mitigate risks of over-execution in such scenarios, we propose a query-driven human-agent-GUI interaction framework that enables OS agents to decide when to query humans for more reliable task completion. Built upon this framework, we introduce VeriOS-Agent, a trustworthy OS agent trained with a two-stage learning paradigm that falicitate the decoupling and utilization of meta-knowledge. Concretely, VeriOS-Agent autonomously executes actions in normal conditions while proactively querying humans in untrustworthy scenarios. Experiments show that VeriOS-Agent improves the average step-wise success rate by 20.64\% in untrustworthy scenarios over the state-of-the-art, without compromising normal performance. Analysis highlights VeriOS-Agent's rationality, generalizability, and scalability. The codes, datasets and models are available at https://github.com/Wuzheng02/VeriOS.

Large language models (LLMs) have brought exciting new advances to mobile UI agents, a long-standing research field that aims to complete arbitrary natural language tasks through mobile UI interactions. However, existing UI agents usually demand high reasoning capabilities of powerful large models that are difficult to be deployed locally on end-users' devices, which raises huge concerns about user privacy and centralized serving cost. One way to reduce the required model size is to customize a smaller domain-specific model with high-quality training data, e.g. large-scale human demonstrations of diverse types of apps and tasks, while such datasets are extremely difficult to obtain. Inspired by the remarkable coding abilities of recent small language models (SLMs), we propose to convert the UI task automation problem to a code generation problem, which can be effectively solved by an on-device SLM and efficiently executed with an on-device code interpreter. Unlike normal coding tasks that can be extensively pretrained with public datasets, generating UI automation code is challenging due to the diversity, complexity, and variability of target apps. Therefore, we adopt a document-centered approach that automatically builds fine-grained API documentation for each app and generates diverse task samples based on this documentation. By guiding the agent with the synthetic documents and task samples, it learns to generate precise and efficient scripts to complete unseen tasks. Based on detailed comparisons with state-of-the-art mobile UI agents, our approach effectively improves the mobile task automation with significantly higher success rates and lower latency/token consumption. Code will be open-sourced.

Data-to-text (D2T) generation is a crucial task in many natural language understanding (NLU) applications and forms the foundation of task-oriented dialog systems. In the context of conversational AI solutions that can work directly with local data on the user's device, architectures utilizing large pre-trained language models (PLMs) are impractical for on-device deployment due to a high memory footprint. To this end, we propose TrICy, a novel lightweight framework for an enhanced D2T task that generates text sequences based on the intent in context and may further be guided by user-provided triggers. We leverage an attention-copy mechanism to predict out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words accurately. Performance analyses on E2E NLG dataset (BLEU: 66.43%, ROUGE-L: 70.14%), WebNLG dataset (BLEU: Seen 64.08%, Unseen 52.35%), and our Custom dataset related to text messaging applications, showcase our architecture's effectiveness. Moreover, we show that by leveraging an optional trigger input, data-to-text generation quality increases significantly and achieves the new SOTA score of 69.29% BLEU for E2E NLG. Furthermore, our analyses show that TrICy achieves at least 24% and 3% improvement in BLEU and METEOR respectively over LLMs like GPT-3, ChatGPT, and Llama 2. We also demonstrate that in some scenarios, performance improvement due to triggers is observed even when they are absent in training.

Embodied agents have made strong progress in navigating to target objects, but reaching the goal vicinity does not guarantee that the agent has found the correct instance: subtle attribute differences (e.g., "white floral" vs. "white striped") often require close-range, multi-view inspection. We address this gap with Active Instance Verification (AIV), a task in which an agent actively selects viewpoints around a candidate object to decide whether it matches a fine-grained natural-language description. We formalize AIV as a finite-horizon decision process and introduce PInVerify, an offline embodied benchmark for AIV: 3,000 evaluation episodes across 18 object categories, delivered as multi-view captures with a 6-sector navigation topology that exposes trap views (navigable but uninformative) and unreachable sectors. As reference baselines we build a training-free pipeline and a LoRA-fine-tuned end-to-end agent around open-source multimodal large language models (MLLMs) at on-device scale (leq8B parameters), with attribute decomposition, a visibility-weighted multi-view tracker, and three next-best-view (NBV) strategies. In our evaluation across Qwen3-VL (4B/8B), SenseNova-SI-1.2-InternVL3-8B, CLIP, and SigLIP2, the best MLLM-based baseline exceeds the best embedding baseline by 4.9 pp; GT-box ablations show a +3.1 pp detection gap; and we do not observe reliable gains from active viewpoint selection within the tested NBV strategies. A LoRA-fine-tuned agent (SFT+GSPO) reaches 85.6%. PInVerify aims to support further work on active, fine-grained semantic verification in embodied AI. Code: https://github.com/Avalon-S/PInVerify.

While large language models excel in a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, to perform well on spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks, they must either rely on off-the-shelf automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for transcription, or be equipped with an in-built speech modality. This work focuses on the former scenario, where LLM's accuracy on SLU tasks is constrained by the accuracy of a fixed ASR system on the spoken input. Specifically, we tackle speech-intent classification task, where a high word-error-rate can limit the LLM's ability to understand the spoken intent. Instead of chasing a high accuracy by designing complex or specialized architectures regardless of deployment costs, we seek to answer how far we can go without substantially changing the underlying ASR and LLM, which can potentially be shared by multiple unrelated tasks. To this end, we propose prompting the LLM with an n-best list of ASR hypotheses instead of only the error-prone 1-best hypothesis. We explore prompt-engineering to explain the concept of n-best lists to the LLM; followed by the finetuning of Low-Rank Adapters on the downstream tasks. Our approach using n-best lists proves to be effective on a device-directed speech detection task as well as on a keyword spotting task, where systems using n-best list prompts outperform those using 1-best ASR hypothesis; thus paving the way for an efficient method to exploit ASR uncertainty via LLMs for speech-based applications.

Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) have emerged as a key paradigm of Physical AI and are increasingly deployed in autonomous vehicles, robots, and smart spaces. In these resource-constrained on-device settings, selecting an appropriate large language model (LLM) backbone is a critical challenge: models must balance accuracy with strict inference latency and hardware efficiency constraints. This makes hardware-software co-design a game-changing requirement for on-device LLM deployment, where each hardware platform demands a tailored architectural solution. We propose a hardware co-design law that jointly captures model accuracy and inference performance. Specifically, we model training loss as an explicit function of architectural hyperparameters and characterise inference latency via roofline modelling. We empirically evaluate 1,942 candidate architectures on NVIDIA Jetson Orin, training 170 selected models for 10B tokens each to fit a scaling law relating architecture to training loss. By coupling this scaling law with latency modelling, we establish a direct accuracy-latency correspondence and identify the Pareto frontier for hardware co-designed LLMs. We further formulate architecture search as a joint optimisation over precision and performance, deriving feasible design regions under industrial hardware and application budgets. Our approach reduces architecture selection from months to days. At the same latency as Qwen2.5-0.5B on the target hardware, our co-designed architecture achieves 19.42% lower perplexity on WikiText-2. To our knowledge, this is the first principled and operational framework for hardware co-design scaling laws in on-device LLM deployment. We will make the code and related checkpoints publicly available.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models exhibit remarkable action generation for embodied intelligence, but their heavy compute make deployment on edge platforms impractical. Aggressive, sub-4-bit weight quantization is the natural solution, yet existing post-training quantization (PTQ) methods suffer severe performance degradation in this regime. To address this, we introduce ActQuant, an action-guided mixed-precision PTQ framework that operates in two stages: (1) an inter-tensor bit allocator that assigns each weight matrix a single bit-width based on how much it contributes to predicting the agent's actions; (2) an intra-tensor scale optimizer tunes per-block quantization scales using action-aware curvature, so that dynamic range is concentrated on the weights most influential for control. To deliver the on-device benefits of our aggressive quantization, we further introduce OmniModel.cpp, an agentic conversion pipeline that ports architectures into a native C/C++ runtime with efficient low-bit kernels. We evaluate ActQuant both in simulation and on a real-world 6-DoF UR3 arm, with all models deployed through OmniModel.cpp. On the LIBERO benchmark, ActQuant is the only method that operates at or below 3 bits-per-weight, retaining 95.0% on OpenVLA-OFT and 94.8% on π_{0.5}. Pushed further, ActQuant reaches 2.5 bpw at 90.1% on OpenVLA-OFT, compressing the backbone from 14.3 GB to 2.7 GB (5.3times). On the physical UR3 arm, π_{0.5} quantized with ActQuant retains the baseline's success rate while reducing the memory footprint by 2.5times.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in reasoning, yet come with substantial computational cost, limiting their deployment in resource-constrained settings. Despite recent efforts on improving the efficiency of MLLMs, prior solutions fall short in responding to varying runtime conditions, in particular changing resource availability (e.g., contention due to the execution of other programs on the device). To bridge this gap, we introduce AdaLLaVA, an adaptive inference framework that learns to dynamically reconfigure operations in an MLLM during inference, accounting for the input data and a latency budget. We conduct extensive experiments across benchmarks involving question-answering, reasoning, and hallucination. Our results show that AdaLLaVA effectively adheres to input latency budget, achieving varying accuracy and latency tradeoffs at runtime. Further, we demonstrate that AdaLLaVA adapts to both input latency and content, can be integrated with token selection for enhanced efficiency, and generalizes across MLLMs. Our project webpage with code release is at https://zhuoyan-xu.github.io/ada-llava/.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models unify perception, reasoning, and control within a single policy, yet their multi-billion-parameter backbones and diffusion-based action heads make on-device deployment prohibitively expensive. Prior quantization efforts offer only partial solutions, compressing the LLM backbone while leaving the DiT action head at full precision, or resorting to mixed-precision schemes, driven by the belief that uniformly quantizing the action head is inherently unstable. We challenge this assumption with Omega-QVLA, the first training-free post-training quantization framework that compresses both the language backbone and the entire diffusion action head of a VLA model to a uniform W4A4 precision, eliminating the need for mixed-precision allocation. Omega-QVLA combines a composite SVD-Hadamard rotation that equalizes per-channel weight energy while diffusing residual activation outliers with per-step DiT activation scaling quantization that absorbs dynamic-range drift across denoising steps. On LIBERO, Omega-QVLA compresses Pi 0.5 and GR00T N1.5 to W4A4 with 98.0% and 87.8% task success rates, matching or exceeding their FP16 references of 97.1% and 87.0%, while reducing the static memory footprint by 71.3%. Real-world manipulation experiments further confirm smooth, accurate manipulation where prior methods fail. Code is available at https://github.com/UCMP13753/Omega-QVLA.

This paper explores the feasibility and performance of on-device large language model (LLM) inference on various Apple iPhone models. Amidst the rapid evolution of generative AI, on-device LLMs offer solutions to privacy, security, and connectivity challenges inherent in cloud-based models. Leveraging existing literature on running multi-billion parameter LLMs on resource-limited devices, our study examines the thermal effects and interaction speeds of a high-performing LLM across different smartphone generations. We present real-world performance results, providing insights into on-device inference capabilities.

Embodied AI agents increasingly require parallel execution of multiple tasks, such as manipulation, conversation, and memory construction, from shared observations under distinct time constraints. Recent Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) architecturally support such heterogeneous outputs, yet existing inference systems fail to achieve efficient multi-task parallelism for on-device deployment due to redundant computation and resource contention. We identify isolated KV cache management as the root cause. To address this, we propose unified KV cache management, an inference paradigm that treats KV cache as a first-class shared resource across tasks and over time. This abstraction enables two key optimizations: cross-task KV sharing eliminates redundant prefill of shared observations, while cross-frame continuous batching decouples variable-length language decoding from fixed-rate action generation across control cycles. We implement this paradigm for π_{0.5}, the most popular MoT VLA, and evaluate under representative robotic configurations. OxyGen achieves up to 3.7times speedup over isolated execution, delivering over 200 tokens/s language throughput and 70 Hz action frequency simultaneously without action quality degradation.

In this paper, we investigate the distillation of time series reasoning capabilities into small, instruction-tuned language models as a step toward building interpretable time series foundation models. Leveraging a synthetic dataset of mean-reverting time series with systematically varied trends and noise levels, we generate natural language annotations using a large multimodal model and use these to supervise the fine-tuning of compact Qwen models. We introduce evaluation metrics that assess the quality of the distilled reasoning - focusing on trend direction, noise intensity, and extremum localization - and show that the post-trained models acquire meaningful interpretive capabilities. Our results highlight the feasibility of compressing time series understanding into lightweight, language-capable models suitable for on-device or privacy-sensitive deployment. This work contributes a concrete foundation toward developing small, interpretable models that explain temporal patterns in natural language.

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged due to their capability to generate high-quality content across diverse contexts. To reduce their explosively increasing demands for computing resources, a mixture of experts (MoE) has emerged. The MoE layer enables exploiting a huge number of parameters with less computation. Applying state-of-the-art continuous batching increases throughput; however, it leads to frequent DRAM access in the MoE and attention layers. We observe that conventional computing devices have limitations when processing the MoE and attention layers, which dominate the total execution time and exhibit low arithmetic intensity (Op/B). Processing MoE layers only with devices targeting low-Op/B such as processing-in-memory (PIM) architectures is challenging due to the fluctuating Op/B in the MoE layer caused by continuous batching. To address these challenges, we propose Duplex, which comprises xPU tailored for high-Op/B and Logic-PIM to effectively perform low-Op/B operation within a single device. Duplex selects the most suitable processor based on the Op/B of each layer within LLMs. As the Op/B of the MoE layer is at least 1 and that of the attention layer has a value of 4-8 for grouped query attention, prior PIM architectures are not efficient, which place processing units inside DRAM dies and only target extremely low-Op/B (under one) operations. Based on recent trends, Logic-PIM adds more through-silicon vias (TSVs) to enable high-bandwidth communication between the DRAM die and the logic die and place powerful processing units on the logic die, which is best suited for handling low-Op/B operations ranging from few to a few dozens. To maximally utilize the xPU and Logic-PIM, we propose expert and attention co-processing.

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain substantially less data-efficient than humans. Pre-pretraining (PPT) on synthetic languages has been proposed to close this gap, with prior work emphasizing highly expressive formal languages such as k-Shuffle Dyck. Inspired by the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) hypothesis, which posits that innate constraints preemptively restrict the learner's hypothesis space to natural-language-like structure, we propose LAD-inspired PPT: pre-pretraining on MP-STRUCT, a formal language whose strings encode hierarchical composition, feature-based dependencies, and long-distance displacement via MERGE, AGREE, and MOVE. A brief 500-step PPT with MP-STRUCT matches strong formal-language baselines in token efficiency while additionally imparting a human-like resistance to structurally implausible languages (e.g., REVERSE). Analyzing simplified variants, we find that MP-STRUCT CORE outperforms k-Shuffle Dyck despite not being definable in C-RASP (a formal bound on transformer expressivity), challenging the prior hypothesis that effective PPT languages must be both hierarchically expressive and circuit-theoretically learnable. We show that functional landmarks, which reduce dependency resolution ambiguity, are a key driver, suggesting that effective PPT design depends not only on expressivity but also on the accessibility of dependency resolution.

Finding ways to accelerate text input for individuals with profound motor impairments has been a long-standing area of research. Closing the speed gap for augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices such as eye-tracking keyboards is important for improving the quality of life for such individuals. Recent advances in neural networks of natural language pose new opportunities for re-thinking strategies and user interfaces for enhanced text-entry for AAC users. In this paper, we present SpeakFaster, consisting of large language models (LLMs) and a co-designed user interface for text entry in a highly-abbreviated form, allowing saving 57% more motor actions than traditional predictive keyboards in offline simulation. A pilot study with 19 non-AAC participants typing on a mobile device by hand demonstrated gains in motor savings in line with the offline simulation, while introducing relatively small effects on overall typing speed. Lab and field testing on two eye-gaze typing users with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) demonstrated text-entry rates 29-60% faster than traditional baselines, due to significant saving of expensive keystrokes achieved through phrase and word predictions from context-aware LLMs. These findings provide a strong foundation for further exploration of substantially-accelerated text communication for motor-impaired users and demonstrate a direction for applying LLMs to text-based user interfaces.

The growing demand for real-time robotic deployment necessitates fast and on-device inference for vision-language-action (VLA) models. Within the VLA literature, efficiency has been extensively studied at the token level, such as visual token pruning. In contrast, systematic transformer layer reduction has received limited attention and, to the best of our knowledge, has not been explored for flow-based VLA models under knowledge distillation. In this work, we propose Shallow-pi, a principled knowledge distillation framework that aggressively reduces the transformer depth of both the VLM backbone and the flow-based action head, compressing the model from 18 to 6 layers. Shallow-pi achieves over two times faster inference with less than one percent absolute drop in success rate on standard manipulation benchmarks, establishing state-of-the-art performance among reduced VLA models. Crucially, we validate our approach through industrial-scale real-world experiments on Jetson Orin and Jetson Thor across multiple robot platforms, including humanoid systems, in complex and dynamic manipulation scenarios.

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for human-like conversations, they are primarily pre-trained on text data. Incorporating audio or video improves performance, but collecting large-scale multimodal data and pre-training multimodal LLMs is challenging. To this end, we propose a Fusion Low Rank Adaptation (FLoRA) technique that efficiently adapts a pre-trained unimodal LLM to consume new, previously unseen modalities via low rank adaptation. For device-directed speech detection, using FLoRA, the multimodal LLM achieves 22% relative reduction in equal error rate (EER) over the text-only approach and attains performance parity with its full fine-tuning (FFT) counterpart while needing to tune only a fraction of its parameters. Furthermore, with the newly introduced adapter dropout, FLoRA is robust to missing data, improving over FFT by 20% lower EER and 56% lower false accept rate. The proposed approach scales well for model sizes from 16M to 3B parameters.

Federated learning (FL) allows clients to collaboratively train a global model without sharing their local data with a server. However, clients' contributions to the server can still leak sensitive information. Differential privacy (DP) addresses such leakage by providing formal privacy guarantees, with mechanisms that add randomness to the clients' contributions. The randomness makes it infeasible to train large transformer-based models, common in modern federated learning systems. In this work, we empirically evaluate the practicality of fine-tuning large scale on-device transformer-based models with differential privacy in a federated learning system. We conduct comprehensive experiments on various system properties for tasks spanning a multitude of domains: speech recognition, computer vision (CV) and natural language understanding (NLU). Our results show that full fine-tuning under differentially private federated learning (DP-FL) generally leads to huge performance degradation which can be alleviated by reducing the dimensionality of contributions through parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). Our benchmarks of existing DP-PEFT methods show that DP-Low-Rank Adaptation (DP-LoRA) consistently outperforms other methods. An even more promising approach, DyLoRA, which makes the low rank variable, when naively combined with FL would straightforwardly break differential privacy. We therefore propose an adaptation method that can be combined with differential privacy and call it DP-DyLoRA. Finally, we are able to reduce the accuracy degradation and word error rate (WER) increase due to DP to less than 2% and 7% respectively with 1 million clients and a stringent privacy budget of ε=2.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for addressing modern challenges and enabling practical applications. However, their computational expense remains a significant barrier to widespread adoption. Quantization has emerged as a promising technique to democratize access and enable low resource device deployment. Despite these advancements, the safety and trustworthiness of quantized models remain underexplored, as prior studies often overlook contemporary architectures and rely on overly simplistic benchmarks and evaluations. To address this gap, we introduce OpenSafetyMini, a novel open-ended safety dataset designed to better distinguish between models. We evaluate 4 state-of-the-art quantization techniques across LLaMA and Mistral models using 4 benchmarks, including human evaluations. Our findings reveal that the optimal quantization method varies for 4-bit precision, while vector quantization techniques deliver the best safety and trustworthiness performance at 2-bit precision, providing foundation for future research.

Interactions with virtual assistants typically start with a predefined trigger phrase followed by the user command. To make interactions with the assistant more intuitive, we explore whether it is feasible to drop the requirement that users must begin each command with a trigger phrase. We explore this task in three ways: First, we train classifiers using only acoustic information obtained from the audio waveform. Second, we take the decoder outputs of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, such as 1-best hypotheses, as input features to a large language model (LLM). Finally, we explore a multimodal system that combines acoustic and lexical features, as well as ASR decoder signals in an LLM. Using multimodal information yields relative equal-error-rate improvements over text-only and audio-only models of up to 39% and 61%. Increasing the size of the LLM and training with low-rank adaption leads to further relative EER reductions of up to 18% on our dataset.

We present MegaTrain, a memory-centric system that efficiently trains 100B+ parameter large language models at full precision on a single GPU. Unlike traditional GPU-centric systems, MegaTrain stores parameters and optimizer states in host memory (CPU memory) and treats GPUs as transient compute engines. For each layer, we stream parameters in and compute gradients out, minimizing persistent device state. To battle the CPU-GPU bandwidth bottleneck, we adopt two key optimizations. 1) We introduce a pipelined double-buffered execution engine that overlaps parameter prefetching, computation, and gradient offloading across multiple CUDA streams, enabling continuous GPU execution. 2) We replace persistent autograd graphs with stateless layer templates, binding weights dynamically as they stream in, eliminating persistent graph metadata while providing flexibility in scheduling. On a single H200 GPU with 1.5TB host memory, MegaTrain reliably trains models up to 120B parameters. It also achieves 1.84times the training throughput of DeepSpeed ZeRO-3 with CPU offloading when training 14B models. MegaTrain also enables 7B model training with 512k token context on a single GH200.