Hui Zang

Sichu Liang, Zhenglin Wang, Jiajia Chu et al.

Multi-agent LLM systems routinely generate multiple candidate responses that are aggregated by an LLM judge. To reduce the dominant prefill cost in such pipelines, recent work advocates KV cache reuse across partially shared contexts and reports substantial speedups for generation agents. In this work, we show that these efficiency gains do not transfer uniformly to judge-centric inference. Across GSM8K, MMLU, and HumanEval, we find that reuse strategies that are effective for execution agents can severely perturb judge behavior: end-task accuracy may appear stable, yet the judge's selection becomes highly inconsistent with dense prefill. We quantify this risk using Judge Consistency Rate (JCR) and provide diagnostics showing that reuse systematically weakens cross-candidate attention, especially for later candidate blocks. Our ablation further demonstrates that explicit cross-candidate interaction is crucial for preserving dense-prefill decisions. Overall, our results identify a previously overlooked failure mode of KV cache reuse and highlight judge-centric inference as a distinct regime that demands dedicated, risk-aware system design.

Zishu Wei, Qixiang Ma, Xavier Hu et al.

Building AI systems for GUI automation task has attracted remarkable research efforts, where MLLMs are leveraged for processing user requirements and give operations. However, GUI automation includes a wide range of tasks, from document processing to online shopping, from CAD to video editing. Diversity between particular tasks requires MLLMs for GUI automation to have heterogeneous capabilities and master multidimensional expertise, raising problems on constructing such a model. To address such challenge, we propose GAIR: GUI Automation via Information-Joint Reasoning and Group Reflection, a novel MLLM-based GUI automation agent framework designed for integrating knowledge and combining capabilities from heterogeneous models to build GUI automation agent systems with higher performance. Since different GUI-specific MLLMs are trained on different dataset and thus have different strengths, GAIR introduced a general-purpose MLLM for jointly processing the information from multiple GUI-specific models, further enhancing performance of the agent framework. The general-purpose MLLM also serves as decision maker, trying to execute a reasonable operation based on previously gathered information. When the general-purpose model thinks that there isn't sufficient information for a reasonable decision, GAIR would transit into group reflection status, where the general-purpose model would provide GUI-specific models with different instructions and hints based on their strengths and weaknesses, driving them to gather information with more significance and accuracy that can support deeper reasoning and decision. We evaluated the effectiveness and reliability of GAIR through extensive experiments on GUI benchmarks.

Nader Bouacida, Jiahui Hou, Hui Zang et al.

With more regulations tackling users' privacy-sensitive data protection in recent years, access to such data has become increasingly restricted and controversial. To exploit the wealth of data generated and located at distributed entities such as mobile phones, a revolutionary decentralized machine learning setting, known as Federated Learning, enables multiple clients located at different geographical locations to collaboratively learn a machine learning model while keeping all their data on-device. However, the scale and decentralization of federated learning present new challenges. Communication between the clients and the server is considered a main bottleneck in the convergence time of federated learning. In this paper, we propose and study Adaptive Federated Dropout (AFD), a novel technique to reduce the communication costs associated with federated learning. It optimizes both server-client communications and computation costs by allowing clients to train locally on a selected subset of the global model. We empirically show that this strategy, combined with existing compression methods, collectively provides up to 57x reduction in convergence time. It also outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions for communication efficiency. Furthermore, it improves model generalization by up to 1.7%.