Hongming Zhang

Tianqing Fang, Hongming Zhang, Zhisong Zhang et al. · tencent-ai

Agent self-improvement, where the backbone Large Language Model (LLM) of the agent are trained on trajectories sampled autonomously based on their own policies, has emerged as a promising approach for enhancing performance. Recent advancements, particularly in web environments, face a critical limitation: their performance will reach a stagnation point during autonomous learning cycles, hindering further improvement. We argue that this stems from limited exploration of the web environment and insufficient exploitation of pre-trained web knowledge in LLMs. To improve the performance of self-improvement, we propose a novel framework that introduces a co-evolving World Model LLM. This world model predicts the next observation based on the current observation and action within the web environment. Leveraging LLMs' pretrained knowledge of abundant web content, the World Model serves dual roles: (1) as a virtual web server generating self-instructed training data to continuously refine the agent's policy, and (2) as an imagination engine during inference, enabling look-ahead simulation to guide action selection for the agent LLM. Experiments in real-world web environments (Mind2Web-Live, WebVoyager, and GAIA-web) show a 10% performance gain over existing self-evolving agents, demonstrating the efficacy and generalizability of our approach, without using any distillation from more powerful close-sourced models. Our work establishes the necessity of integrating world models into autonomous agent frameworks to unlock sustained adaptability. Code is available at https://github.com/Tencent/SelfEvolvingAgent

Jun-Peng Zhu, Qizhi Wang, Yulong Zhai et al.

Flaky failure triage is crucial for keeping distributed database continuous integration (CI) efficient and reliable. After a failure is observed, operators must quickly decide whether to auto-rerun the job as likely flaky or escalate it as likely persistent, often under CPU-only millisecond budgets. Existing approaches remain difficult to deploy in this setting because they may rely on post-failure artifacts, produce poorly calibrated scores under telemetry and workload shifts, or learn from labels generated by finite rerun policies. To address these challenges, we present SCOUT, a practical state-aware causal online uncertainty-calibrated triage framework for distributed database CI. SCOUT uses only strict-causal features, including pre-failure telemetry and strictly historical data, to make online decisions without lookahead. Specifically, SCOUT combines lightweight state-aware scoring with optional sparse metadata fusion, applies post-hoc calibration to support fixed-threshold decisions across temporal and cross-domain shifts, and introduces a posterior-soft correction to reduce label bias induced by finite rerun budgets. We evaluated SCOUT on a benchmark of 3,680 labeled failed runs, including 462 flaky positives, and 62 telemetry/context features. Further, we studied the feasibility of SCOUT on TiDB v7/v8 and a large GitHub Actions metadata-only trace. The experimental results demonstrated its effectiveness and usefulness. We deployed SCOUT in the production environment, achieving an end-to-end P95 latency of 1.17 ms on CPU.

Chenlong Deng, Zhisong Zhang, Kelong Mao et al. · tencent-ai

Large language models are increasingly capable of handling long-context inputs, but the memory overhead of key-value (KV) cache remains a major bottleneck for general-purpose deployment. While various compression strategies have been explored, sequence-level compression, which drops the full KV caches for certain tokens, is particularly challenging as it can lead to the loss of important contextual information. To address this, we introduce UniGist, a sequence-level long-context compression framework that efficiently preserves context information by replacing raw tokens with special compression tokens (gists) in a fine-grained manner. We adopt a chunk-free training strategy and design an efficient kernel with a gist shift trick, enabling optimized GPU training. Our scheme also supports flexible inference by allowing the actual removal of compressed tokens, resulting in real-time memory savings. Experiments across multiple long-context tasks demonstrate that UniGist significantly improves compression quality, with especially strong performance in detail-recalling tasks and long-range dependency modeling.