Zhou Jun

Jun Xu, Xinkai Du, Yu Ao et al.

Efficient retrieval of external knowledge bases and web pages is crucial for enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs. Previous works on training LLMs to leverage external retrievers for solving complex problems have predominantly employed end-to-end reinforcement learning. However, these approaches neglect supervision over the reasoning process, making it difficult to guarantee logical coherence and rigor. To address these limitations, we propose Thinker, a hierarchical thinking model for deep search through multi-turn interaction, making the reasoning process supervisable and verifiable. It decomposes complex problems into independently solvable sub-problems, each dually represented in both natural language and an equivalent logical function to support knowledge base and web searches. Concurrently, dependencies between sub-problems are passed as parameters via these logical functions, enhancing the logical coherence of the problem-solving process. To avoid unnecessary external searches, we perform knowledge boundary determination to check if a sub-problem is within the LLM's intrinsic knowledge, allowing it to answer directly. Experimental results indicate that with as few as several hundred training samples, the performance of Thinker is competitive with established baselines. Furthermore, when scaled to the full training set, Thinker significantly outperforms these methods across various datasets and model sizes. The source code is available at https://github.com/OpenSPG/KAG-Thinker.

Zhitao Wang, Wei Wang, Zirao Li et al.

In past years, we have been dedicated to automating user acceptance testing (UAT) process of WeChat Pay, one of the most influential mobile payment applications in China. A system titled XUAT has been developed for this purpose. However, there is still a human-labor-intensive stage, i.e, test scripts generation, in the current system. Therefore, in this paper, we concentrate on methods of boosting the automation level of the current system, particularly the stage of test scripts generation. With recent notable successes, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate significant potential in attaining human-like intelligence and there has been a growing research area that employs LLMs as autonomous agents to obtain human-like decision-making capabilities. Inspired by these works, we propose an LLM-powered multi-agent collaborative system, named XUAT-Copilot, for automated UAT. The proposed system mainly consists of three LLM-based agents responsible for action planning, state checking and parameter selecting, respectively, and two additional modules for state sensing and case rewriting. The agents interact with testing device, make human-like decision and generate action command in a collaborative way. The proposed multi-agent system achieves a close effectiveness to human testers in our experimental studies and gains a significant improvement of Pass@1 accuracy compared with single-agent architecture. More importantly, the proposed system has launched in the formal testing environment of WeChat Pay mobile app, which saves a considerable amount of manpower in the daily development work.

Youshao Xiao, Lin Ju, Zhenglei Zhou et al.

Many distributed training techniques like Parameter Server and AllReduce have been proposed to take advantage of the increasingly large data and rich features. However, stragglers frequently occur in distributed training due to resource contention and hardware heterogeneity, which significantly hampers the training efficiency. Previous works only address part of the stragglers and could not adaptively solve various stragglers in practice. Additionally, it is challenging to use a systematic framework to address all stragglers because different stragglers require diverse data allocation and fault-tolerance mechanisms. Therefore, this paper proposes a unified distributed training framework called AntDT (Ant Distributed Training Framework) to adaptively solve the straggler problems. Firstly, the framework consists of four components, including the Stateful Dynamic Data Sharding service, Monitor, Controller, and Agent. These components work collaboratively to efficiently distribute workloads and provide a range of pre-defined straggler mitigation methods with fault tolerance, thereby hiding messy details of data allocation and fault handling. Secondly, the framework provides a high degree of flexibility, allowing for the customization of straggler mitigation solutions based on the specific circumstances of the cluster. Leveraging this flexibility, we introduce two straggler mitigation solutions, namely AntDT-ND for non-dedicated clusters and AntDT-DD for dedicated clusters, as practical examples to resolve various types of stragglers at Ant Group. Justified by our comprehensive experiments and industrial deployment statistics, AntDT outperforms other SOTA methods more than 3x in terms of training efficiency. Additionally, in Alipay's homepage recommendation scenario, using AntDT reduces the training duration of the ranking model from 27.8 hours to just 5.4 hours.