AIJan 9Code
From Off-Policy to On-Policy: Enhancing GUI Agents via Bi-level Expert-to-Policy AssimilationZezhou Wang, Ziyun Zhang, Xiaoyi Zhang et al.
Vision-language models are increasingly deployed as computer-use agents (CUAs) that operate desktops and browsers. Top-performing CUAs are framework-based systems that decompose planning and execution, while end-to-end screenshot-to-action policies are easier to deploy but lag behind on benchmarks such as OSWorld-Verified. GUI datasets like OSWorld pose two bottlenecks: they expose only a few hundred interactive, verifiable tasks and environments, and expert trajectories must be gathered by interacting with these environments, making such data hard to scale. We therefore ask how reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) can best exploit a small pool of exist expert trajectories to train end-to-end policies. Naively mixing these off-policy traces into on-policy RLVR is brittle: even after format conversion, expert trajectories exhibit structural mismatch and distribution shift from the learner. We propose BEPA (Bi-Level Expert-to-Policy Assimilation), which turns static expert traces into policy-aligned guidance via self-rolled reachable trajectories under the base policy (LEVEL-1) and a per-task, dynamically updated cache used in RLVR (LEVEL-2). On OSWorld-Verified, BEPA improves UITARS1.5-7B success from 22.87% to 32.13% and raises a held-out split from 5.74% to 10.30%, with consistent gains on MMBench-GUI and Online-Mind2Web. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/LEON-gittech/Verl_GUI.git
CLJan 7
InfiniteWeb: Scalable Web Environment Synthesis for GUI Agent TrainingZiyun Zhang, Zezhou Wang, Xiaoyi Zhang et al.
GUI agents that interact with graphical interfaces on behalf of users represent a promising direction for practical AI assistants. However, training such agents is hindered by the scarcity of suitable environments. We present InfiniteWeb, a system that automatically generates functional web environments at scale for GUI agent training. While LLMs perform well on generating a single webpage, building a realistic and functional website with many interconnected pages faces challenges. We address these challenges through unified specification, task-centric test-driven development, and a combination of website seed with reference design image to ensure diversity. Our system also generates verifiable task evaluators enabling dense reward signals for reinforcement learning. Experiments show that InfiniteWeb surpasses commercial coding agents at realistic website construction, and GUI agents trained on our generated environments achieve significant performance improvements on OSWorld and Online-Mind2Web, demonstrating the effectiveness of proposed system.
LGSep 30, 2024
Optimizing Cross-Client Domain Coverage for Federated Instruction Tuning of Large Language ModelsZezhou Wang, Yaxin Du, Xingjun Ma et al.
Federated domain-specific instruction tuning (FedDIT) for large language models (LLMs) aims to enhance performance in specialized domains using distributed private and limited data, yet identifying key performance drivers and optimal augmentation strategies remains challenging. We empirically establish that cross-client domain coverage, rather than data heterogeneity, is the pivotal factor. We then introduce FedDCA, an algorithm that explicitly maximizes this coverage through diversity-oriented client center selection and retrieval-based augmentation, constructing diverse, non-redundant cross-client instruction sets. Extensive experiments across multiple domains demonstrate FedDCA's superiority over eleven baselines, achieving performance gains of up to 29.19\% and domain coverage improvements of 4.82\%-21.36\%. FedDCA maintains its effectiveness in diverse and challenging scenarios, including data selection, held-out settings where task-specific public data is scarce and various data heterogeneity, with manageable privacy risks. This work clarifies critical FedDIT dynamics and presents FedDCA as an effective, privacy-preserving, and scalable solution for advancing domain-specific LLM tuning.
CVMar 26, 2025Code
Dynamic Pyramid Network for Efficient Multimodal Large Language ModelHao Ai, Kunyi Wang, Zezhou Wang et al.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various vision-language (VL) tasks, but their expensive computations still limit the real-world application. To address this issue, recent efforts aim to compress the visual features to save the computational costs of MLLMs. However, direct visual compression methods, e.g. efficient projectors, inevitably destroy the visual semantics in MLLM, especially in difficult samples. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose a novel dynamic pyramid network (DPN) for efficient MLLMs. Specifically, DPN formulates MLLM as a hierarchical structure where visual features are gradually compressed with increasing depth. In this case, even with a high compression ratio, fine-grained visual information can still be perceived in shallow layers. To maximize the benefit of DPN, we further propose an innovative Dynamic Pooling Experts (DPE) that can dynamically choose the optimal visual compression rate according to input features. With this design, harder samples will be assigned larger computations, thus preserving the model performance. To validate our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on two popular MLLMs and ten benchmarks. Experimental results show that DPN can save up to 56% average FLOPs on LLaVA while further achieving +0.74% performance gains. Besides, the generalization ability of DPN is also validated on the existing high-resolution MLLM called LLaVA-HR. The source code will be released at https://github.com/aihao2000/DPN-LLaVA.
CVNov 25, 2023
OpenNet: Incremental Learning for Autonomous Driving Object Detection with Balanced LossZezhou Wang, Guitao Cao, Xidong Xi et al.
Automated driving object detection has always been a challenging task in computer vision due to environmental uncertainties. These uncertainties include significant differences in object sizes and encountering the class unseen. It may result in poor performance when traditional object detection models are directly applied to automated driving detection. Because they usually presume fixed categories of common traffic participants, such as pedestrians and cars. Worsely, the huge class imbalance between common and novel classes further exacerbates performance degradation. To address the issues stated, we propose OpenNet to moderate the class imbalance with the Balanced Loss, which is based on Cross Entropy Loss. Besides, we adopt an inductive layer based on gradient reshaping to fast learn new classes with limited samples during incremental learning. To against catastrophic forgetting, we employ normalized feature distillation. By the way, we improve multi-scale detection robustness and unknown class recognition through FPN and energy-based detection, respectively. The Experimental results upon the CODA dataset show that the proposed method can obtain better performance than that of the existing methods.
DCFeb 25
veScale-FSDP: Flexible and High-Performance FSDP at ScaleZezhou Wang, Youjie Li, Zhiqi Lin et al.
Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP), also known as ZeRO, is widely used for training large-scale models, featuring its flexibility and minimal intrusion on model code. However, current FSDP systems struggle with structure-aware training methods (e.g., block-wise quantized training) and with non-element-wise optimizers (e.g., Shampoo and Muon) used in cutting-edge models (e.g., Gemini, Kimi K2). FSDP's fixed element- or row-wise sharding formats conflict with the block-structured computations. In addition, today's implementations fall short in communication and memory efficiency, limiting scaling to tens of thousands of GPUs. We introduce veScale-FSDP, a redesigned FSDP system that couples a flexible sharding format, RaggedShard, with a structure-aware planning algorithm to deliver both flexibility and performance at scale. veScale-FSDP natively supports efficient data placement required by FSDP, empowering block-wise quantization and non-element-wise optimizers. As a result, veScale-FSDP achieves 5~66% higher throughput and 16~30% lower memory usage than existing FSDP systems, while scaling efficiently to tens of thousands of GPUs.
84.5LGMay 10
DisagMoE: Computation-Communication overlapped MoE Training via Disaggregated AF-Pipe ParallelismZhichen Zeng, Chi-Chih Chang, Jiayi Wang et al.
Mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures enable trillion-parameter LLMs with sparsely activated experts. Expert parallelism (EP) is a widely adopted MoE training strategy, but it suffers from severe all-to-all communication bottlenecks, which is exaggerated by the limited inter-node network bandwidth as the growing model size requires distributing experts across GPU nodes. Prior work focused on overlapping these all-to-all communications with feed-forward network (FFN) and self-attention computations, which often leaves residual network-bound stalls due to inherent imbalance in attention and FFN layers' computation-communication ratios. We present DisagMoE, a disaggregated MoE training system that jointly optimizes model placement and scheduling for maximal efficiency. DisagMoE separates attention and FFN layers into disjoint GPU groups, introduces a multi-stage pipeline with uni-directional, many-to-many communications, and employs a computation-communication roofline model to balance GPU and network bandwidth allocation among the attention and FFN groups. DisagMoE is implemented on Megatron-LM, and evaluation shows that DisagMoE improves training efficiency across multiple MoE models with up to 1.8x speedup on 16-node 8xH800 clusters.
LGDec 19, 2024
Utilizing Causal Network Markers to Identify Tipping Points ahead of Critical TransitionShirui Bian, Zezhou Wang, Siyang Leng et al.
Early-warning signals of delicate design are always used to predict critical transitions in complex systems, which makes it possible to render the systems far away from the catastrophic state by introducing timely interventions. Traditional signals including the dynamical network biomarker (DNB), based on statistical properties such as variance and autocorrelation of nodal dynamics, overlook directional interactions and thus have limitations in capturing underlying mechanisms and simultaneously sustaining robustness against noise perturbations. This paper therefore introduces a framework of causal network markers (CNMs) by incorporating causality indicators, which reflect the directional influence between variables. Actually, to detect and identify the tipping points ahead of critical transition, two markers are designed: CNM-GC for linear causality and CNM-TE for non-linear causality, as well as a functional representation of different causality indicators and a clustering technique to verify the system's dominant group. Through demonstrations using benchmark models and real-world datasets of epileptic seizure, the framework of CNMs shows higher predictive power and accuracy than the traditional DNB indicator. It is believed that, due to the versatility and scalability, the CNMs are suitable for comprehensively evaluating the systems. The most possible direction for application includes the identification of tipping points in clinical disease.
NIFeb 9, 2024
ForestColl: Throughput-Optimal Collective Communications on Heterogeneous Network FabricsLiangyu Zhao, Saeed Maleki, Yuanhong Wang et al.
As modern DNN models grow ever larger, collective communications between the accelerators (allreduce, etc.) emerge as a significant performance bottleneck. Designing efficient communication schedules is challenging, given today's heterogeneous and diverse network fabrics. We present ForestColl, a tool that generates throughput-optimal schedules for any network topology. ForestColl constructs broadcast/aggregation spanning trees as the communication schedule, achieving theoretical optimality. Its schedule generation runs in polynomial time and is highly scalable. ForestColl supports any network fabric, including both switching fabrics and direct accelerator connections. We evaluated ForestColl on AMD MI250 and NVIDIA DGX A100 & H100 clusters. ForestColl showed significant improvements over the vendors' own optimized communication libraries across various settings and in LLM training. ForestColl also outperformed other state-of-the-art schedule generation techniques with both more efficient generated schedules and substantially faster generation speed.