Yajie Zhou

Sathiya Kumaran Mani, Yajie Zhou, Kevin Hsieh et al.

Analyzing network topologies and communication graphs plays a crucial role in contemporary network management. However, the absence of a cohesive approach leads to a challenging learning curve, heightened errors, and inefficiencies. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to facilitate a natural-language-based network management experience, utilizing large language models (LLMs) to generate task-specific code from natural language queries. This method tackles the challenges of explainability, scalability, and privacy by allowing network operators to inspect the generated code, eliminating the need to share network data with LLMs, and concentrating on application-specific requests combined with general program synthesis techniques. We design and evaluate a prototype system using benchmark applications, showcasing high accuracy, cost-effectiveness, and the potential for further enhancements using complementary program synthesis techniques.

Yajie Zhou, Jiajun Ruan, Eric S. Wang et al.

Despite growing interest in domain-specific benchmarking of large language models (LLMs) and agents, current evaluations remain limited to static, small-scale datasets, especially in high-stakes tasks like network operations that demand reliability for deployments. We present NetPress, an automated benchmark generation framework for evaluating LLM agents in network applications. NetPress introduces a unified abstraction with state and action, enabling dynamic generation of diverse query sets along with corresponding ground truths. At runtime, users can specify benchmark configurations to generate millions of queries on the fly. In addition to dynamic benchmark construction, NetPress integrates with network emulators to provide realistic environment feedback, supporting comprehensive evaluation across correctness, safety, and latency. We instantiate NetPress on three representative applications, revealing interesting fine-grained differences in agent behavior that static, correctness-only benchmarks often miss. NetPress moves LLM evaluation toward realistic, scalable testing in infrastructure-centric domains, helping close the gap between benchmark performance and real-world deployment readiness. Code is available at https://github.com/Froot-NetSys/NetPress.

Yajie Zhou, Xiaoyi Pang, Zhibo Wang

Federated fine-tuning has emerged as a promising approach to adapt foundation models to downstream tasks using decentralized data. However, real-world deployment remains challenging due to the high computational and communication demands of fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on clients with data and system resources that are heterogeneous and constrained. In such settings, the global model's performance is often bottlenecked by the weakest clients and further degraded by the non-IID nature of local data. Although existing methods leverage parameter-efficient techniques such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to reduce communication and computation overhead, they often fail to simultaneously ensure accurate aggregation of low-rank updates and maintain low system costs, thereby hindering overall performance. To address these challenges, we propose AFLoRA, an adaptive and lightweight federated fine-tuning framework for LLMs. AFLoRA decouples shared and client-specific updates to reduce overhead and improve aggregation accuracy, incorporates diagonal matrix-based rank pruning to better utilize local resources, and employs rank-aware aggregation with public data refinement to strengthen generalization under data heterogeneity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AFLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and efficiency, providing a practical solution for efficient LLM adaptation in heterogeneous environments in the real world.