Zhou Shao

Mingxin Li, Enge Song, Yueshang Zuo et al.

LLM agents increasingly rely on tool calling to act on external systems, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) has quickly become its de facto interface. Operating MCP at cloud scale, however, becomes difficult. On the tool provider side, legacy services are not directly callable through MCP; the rapid protocol development also creates ongoing compatibility cost. On the agent side, the number of accessible tool is limited by the LLM context window and inference overhead; mounting a large tool set increases token usage and inference latency and can reduce task success rate. Moreover, for stateful MCP backends with multiple replicas, preserving session affinity increases client-side complexity. We present a cloud-scale gateway system for MCP service. It breaks the direct-connect model on the data plane and offloads legacy service integration, consolidating incompatible MCP variants, access control, tool recommendation, and session-aware routing to the gateway. Hybrid retrieval sustains 98% Top-15 recall; it scales agent tool access to 3,000+ with high tool selection accuracy, and reduces tool selection time by $8.9\times$ and token usage by $23.8\times$, with low per-call overhead, stable under scale-out. Finally, we share the lessons learned from deploying the gateway system in production.

Zihan Wang, Zihan Liang, Zhou Shao et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising approach to address key limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as hallucination, outdated knowledge, and lacking reference. However, current RAG frameworks often struggle with identifying whether retrieved documents meaningfully contribute to answer generation. This shortcoming makes it difficult to filter out irrelevant or even misleading content, which notably impacts the final performance. In this paper, we propose Document Information Gain (DIG), a novel metric designed to quantify the contribution of retrieved documents to correct answer generation. DIG measures a document's value by computing the difference of LLM's generation confidence with and without the document augmented. Further, we introduce InfoGain-RAG, a framework that leverages DIG scores to train a specialized reranker, which prioritizes each retrieved document from exact distinguishing and accurate sorting perspectives. This approach can effectively filter out irrelevant documents and select the most valuable ones for better answer generation. Extensive experiments across various models and benchmarks demonstrate that InfoGain-RAG can significantly outperform existing approaches, on both single and multiple retrievers paradigm. Specifically on NaturalQA, it achieves the improvements of 17.9%, 4.5%, 12.5% in exact match accuracy against naive RAG, self-reflective RAG and modern ranking-based RAG respectively, and even an average of 15.3% increment on advanced proprietary model GPT-4o across all datasets. These results demonstrate the feasibility of InfoGain-RAG as it can offer a reliable solution for RAG in multiple applications.

Zhou Shao, Tong Lin

Adaptive gradient methods, especially Adam-type methods (such as Adam, AMSGrad, and AdaBound), have been proposed to speed up the training process with an element-wise scaling term on learning rates. However, they often generalize poorly compared with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its accelerated schemes such as SGD with momentum (SGDM). In this paper, we propose a new adaptive method called DecGD, which simultaneously achieves good generalization like SGDM and obtain rapid convergence like Adam-type methods. In particular, DecGD decomposes the current gradient into the product of two terms including a surrogate gradient and a loss based vector. Our method adjusts the learning rates adaptively according to the current loss based vector instead of the squared gradients used in Adam-type methods. The intuition for adaptive learning rates of DecGD is that a good optimizer, in general cases, needs to decrease the learning rates as the loss decreases, which is similar to the learning rates decay scheduling technique. Therefore, DecGD gets a rapid convergence in the early phases of training and controls the effective learning rates according to the loss based vectors which help lead to a better generalization. Convergence analysis is discussed in both convex and non-convex situations. Finally, empirical results on widely-used tasks and models demonstrate that DecGD shows better generalization performance than SGDM and rapid convergence like Adam-type methods.

Ming Ding, Zhuoyi Yang, Wenyi Hong et al.

Text-to-Image generation in the general domain has long been an open problem, which requires both a powerful generative model and cross-modal understanding. We propose CogView, a 4-billion-parameter Transformer with VQ-VAE tokenizer to advance this problem. We also demonstrate the finetuning strategies for various downstream tasks, e.g. style learning, super-resolution, text-image ranking and fashion design, and methods to stabilize pretraining, e.g. eliminating NaN losses. CogView achieves the state-of-the-art FID on the blurred MS COCO dataset, outperforming previous GAN-based models and a recent similar work DALL-E.

Sha Yuan, Zhou Shao, Yu Zhang et al.

Science of science (SciSci) is an emerging discipline wherein science is used to study the structure and evolution of science itself using large data sets. The increasing availability of digital data on scholarly outcomes offers unprecedented opportunities to explore SciSci. In the progress of science, the previously discovered knowledge principally inspires new scientific ideas, and citation is a reasonably good reflection of this cumulative nature of scientific research. The researches that choose potentially influential references will have a lead over the emerging publications. Although the peer review process is the mainly reliable way of predicting a paper's future impact, the ability to foresee the lasting impact based on citation records is increasingly essential in the scientific impact analysis in the era of big data. This paper develops an attention mechanism for the long-term scientific impact prediction and validates the method based on a real large-scale citation data set. The results break conventional thinking. Instead of accurately simulating the original power-law distribution, emphasizing the limited attention can better stand on the shoulders of giants.