C Xu

h-index3
5papers
20citations

5 Papers

19.8AIJul 23
GuardianAgentBench: Where Agents Fail and How to Guard Them

Vishal Ishwar Naik, Chenyu Xu, Donna Dong et al.

As large language model agents increasingly operate autonomously with access to tools and external environments, ensuring their safe and reliable behavior becomes critical. We present GuardianAgentBench (GABench), a benchmark of 580 scenarios across six domains evaluated on three production-ready frameworks: LangChain, LlamaIndex, and Vectara. The benchmark incorporates rigorous multi-stage validation and five adversarial attack modes. Experiments with six state-of-the-art models reveal that even the strongest configuration achieves only 74.8% overall accuracy and expose two distinct failure regimes: stronger models under-call required tools, while weaker models mis-select and over-call tools. Performance degrades monotonically with both tool-set size and sequential turn depth, with long-horizon planning proving the steeper bottleneck. Our guardrail implementation consistently outperforms system-prompt-based defenses across all models, recovering 19.9% of failures at a false positive rate of just 0.5%. These results demonstrate that execution-time structural intervention improves safety without disrupting correct agent behavior.

14.0MLJul 24
Efficient Online LLM Watermark Detection via Rao-Blackwellized E-Processes

Lu Luo, Dandan Mo, Chengdong Xu et al.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed, reliable and efficient mechanisms for distinguishing AI-generated text from human-written content have become essential. Statistical watermarking has emerged as a promising solution, yet most existing methods are typically fixed-horizon procedures, precluding valid early stopping in streaming generation. In this paper, we develop an efficient online watermark detection framework with anytime-valid inference based on Rao-Blackwellized e-processes, enabling recursive token-level evidence updates without storing the full history. In particular, we instantiate the framework for the Gumbel-max watermark and reduce the original token-level dependence testing problem to a pivot-induced sequential testing problem with an explicit null distribution. Theoretically, we prove anytime-valid Type I error control under arbitrary optional stopping and establish positive asymptotic log-growth under watermarking, implying consistency of the proposed stopping rules. Simulations and experiments on real LLM-generated text demonstrate efficient online detection with rigorous anytime-valid guarantees.

7.9LOJul 22
Information Propagation and Contraction in Functional Interpretations

Chuangjie Xu

This paper separates two components of functional interpretations: affine information propagation and contraction. We introduce information nuclei as an algebraic interface to capture the affine component. An information nucleus specifies what information is associated with finite-type objects, how exact objects are compatible with such information, and how information is propagated through functions. From any information nucleus we obtain a formula translation and a soundness theorem for affine finite-type arithmetic. Extending soundness to finite-type arithmetic with contraction requires one additional ingredient: a formula-indexed contraction structure reducing the challenges generated by duplicated assumptions to a single challenge. Finite collections of candidates with union yield a Herbrand-style interpretation, while exact information with challenge selection yields the usual Dialectica interpretation over an arithmetic system restricted to decidable primitive formulas. The resulting framework provides a uniform method for specifying the information carried by extracted realizers, allowing existing functional interpretations to be systematically enriched with auxiliary data, such as continuity information.

13.2CLJul 22
TriAgent: Divergence-Aware Multi-Agent Committees for Cost-Efficient Financial Sentiment Analysis

Isabel Xu, Cynthia Xu, Rachel Ren et al.

Production LLM-based financial sentiment analysis faces a structural cost trap: most queries are trivially classifiable, yet expensive cloud reasoners process them all, and the bill scales linearly with user count. We present TriAgent, a multi-agent committee stratified by contextual granularity -- a word-level lexicon (VADER), a sentence-level domain transformer (FinBERT), and a cross-sentence reasoner (Qwen2.5, 0.5B-14B-4bit, with Mistral-7B and Phi-3.5-mini cross-family checks). A three-way Semantic Divergence Index (SDI) measures pairwise disagreement across granularities and routes each query accordingly. Our central finding is the critic plateau: when the LLM is re-tasked as a critic over the smaller agents' outputs, F1 plateaus at ~0.87 across 1.5B-7B Qwen (bootstrap 95% CIs overlap), while a same-size 3-persona vote drops to F1=0.66, which is driven by granularity-stratified diversity. Three corollaries follow from the same SDI signal: (i) a Shared Consensus Dictionary on multilingual sentence-BERT answers 95% of Chinese queries from an English cache at F1=0.99 -- cross-border canonicalization at zero marginal cost; (ii) SDI doubles as a post-hoc LLM-hallucination detector at AUC=0.90; (iii) the SDI single-stage strategy attains the best risk-adjusted return (Sharpe=3.50) on a 20-ticker back-test, dominating both always-FinBERT (1.36) and always-LLM (0.11). At 10M-user scale, TriAgent saves $9.3M/year vs. a GPT-4o-mini baseline. Code, lexicons, and the SCD are released.

10.7AIJul 7
FBLayout: Optimizing Memory Layout for Efficient LLM Finetuning on Mobile GPUs

Kahou Tam, Wei Niu, Yu Bao et al.

Transformer-based models have enabled unprecedented capabilities across language, vision, and multimodal tasks. On-device fine-tuning of transformer models offers a privacy-preserving path to personalized AI, yet remains inefficient on mobile GPUs due to severe memory constraints and frequent layout transformations in attention mechanism during training. Existing mobile training frameworks either use unified layouts for forward and backward passes -- leading to fragmented memory access and poor GPU utilization during backpropagation -- or rely on explicit layout conversions, which introduce significant transformation overhead. To overcome this, we propose FBLayout, a layout-aware framework that co-designs tensor organization with mobile GPU platforms. FBLayout introduces: (1) a unified R-Tile layout for multi-dimensional reductions across forward/backward passes; (2) tile-based index transformation to eliminate physical data movement; and (3) activation-guided layout selection to propagate efficient layouts globally. Evaluations on seven transformer models across different mobile phones (including ARM Mali and Qualcomm Adreno GPUs) show that FBLayout achieves 2.2-5.7x speedup over MNN, TFLite, and TVM, while significantly improving cache efficiency and reducing memory footprint, enabling practical on-device large model fine-tuning.