S. G. Hu

Jingquan Chen, Jinghua Piao, Jie Feng et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for program-aided reasoning, agentic decision making, and structured task execution, but these applications often incur high inference cost. We present MiniCache, a reusable program caching framework that transforms Program-of-Thought (PoT) programs into parameterized cache objects, enabling reusable computation across structurally similar requests. MiniCache reuses the same small model for semantic variable extraction on cache-hit requests and speculative drafting during target-LLM generation, reducing expensive target-LLM invocations while preserving task quality. Experiments on shopping-style request datasets, WebShop, Formula, and CodeTAT-QA demonstrate that MiniCache improves the trade-off between inference latency, cache reuse, and accuracy, achieving up to 3.1x lower latency and 2.8x higher throughput under parallel serving. These results show that small models are most effective not as replacements for large models, but as lightweight interface models that enable reliable and efficient reusable program caching.

Ruichen Ma, Xiaoyang Zhang, Jian Bai et al.

The performance of deep spiking neural networks (SNNs) often relies on batch normalization (BN). However, the advanced dynamic BN variants used in state-of-the-art models introduce runtime multiplications, which weaken the hardware-efficiency motivation of SNNs. To address this tension, we identify catastrophic firing-rate decay as a primary cause of severe performance degradation in normalization-free SNNs. Guided by this insight, this work proposes the Intrinsically Stable SNN (IS-SNN) architecture, which removes activation-normalization layers by enforcing signal homeostasis through topology-aware weight standardization and modified residual connections. By folding the standardization operations into static weights offline, IS-SNN removes the runtime statistics tracking and multiplications introduced by activation normalization, restoring an accumulation-oriented inference datapath. Comprehensive experiments show that IS-SNN achieves performance competitive with or superior to computationally expensive dynamic BN techniques across VGG, ResNet, and Transformer-based models. Notably, it achieves a competitive accuracy of 68.05\% on ImageNet and overcomes the severe depth limitations of prior BN-free attempts. Together with a 96.4\% reduction in FPGA lookup table resource consumption for neuron implementations, these results support IS-SNN as a practical framework for building accurate and hardware-friendly deep neuromorphic systems.