Wei Zhang

Jiaqi Shao, Hanck Chen, Wei Zhang et al.

Agent benchmarks increasingly evaluate repository editing, web research, terminal use, and long-horizon interaction. Their scores support capability claims only when the evaluation protocol keeps the intended capability necessary for success. Recent reward-hacking benchmarks and system reports show that agents can instead recover public solutions, read evaluation artifacts, infer generator structure, manipulate feedback, or benefit from invalid scoring paths; existing responses do not provide a common procedure for attributing these shortcuts and quantifying their effect across benchmarks. We formulate protocol validity and introduce HackDetect, a post-hoc audit that identifies an exposure, determines how the agent used it, and assesses whether the resulting score is misleading. We quantify score inflation with the Mislead gap, defined as the exploit score minus the intended score. We audit 2,385 traces across 15 agent benchmarks and find evidence of exposures and reward hacking in 67.0% of Frontier Science traces and 66.7% of AutoLab tasks. Across paired comparisons, we measure score inflation of 0.45-1.00, showing that benchmark reports should provide evidence that scores reflect the intended capability.

Afzal Ahmad, Gaoyu Mao, Shoubo Hu et al.

Multi-task inference models share a single backbone across diverse tasks, yet execute identical computation regardless of which task is active - wasting energy and cycles on task-irrelevant operations. We observe that the task command, typically available before inference begins, provides a free signal that can be exploited to skip unnecessary computation at the hardware level. We present a HW/SW co-designed approach in which a lightweight gating network, trained jointly with the backbone, predicts per-tile binary execution masks conditioned on the task input. Each tile corresponds to a fixed group of output channels (the native scheduling granularity of the accelerator), enabling masked tiles to be skipped with zero overhead. This yields a task-dependent reduction in compute, where each command activates only the subset of the network it requires, without changes to the model architecture or inference pipeline. We co-design the full system stack: a command-conditioned training procedure that learns hardware-aligned tile masks under a sparsity objective; an instruction set architecture whose instructions carry per-tile bitmask fields, allowing the hardware to skip masked tiles without software intervention; and a tiled inference accelerator with configurable parallelism, double-buffered memory, and INT8 datapath that natively supports sparse tile execution. We prototype on an AMD/Xilinx Alveo U50 FPGA and evaluate on a closed-loop visuomotor driving task in CARLA autonomous driving simulator. Task-conditional sparsity reduces FLOPs by 66-76% while maintaining driving quality. On-device latency decreases by 51-59%, from 9.12 ms to 3.74-4.44 ms (2.1-2.4x speedup), with energy per inference dropping from 263 to 108-128mJ.

Wei Zhang, Xinwu Liu, Yihang Cheng

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely used parameter-efficient fine-tuning method for large language models, but its performance depends strongly on how a fixed rank budget is distributed across Transformer modules. Existing adaptive-rank methods usually rely on local gradient statistics collected during training, which introduces extra memory and computation and overlooks task-conditioned global information flow. We propose IFCLoRA, a topology-aware rank allocation method applied before fine-tuning. Using a small calibration set and a frozen pretrained model, IFCLoRA builds a sparse task-conditioned interaction graph whose nodes represent LoRA-compatible modules. It combines a global information-flow topology prior with local gradient sensitivity to compute Information-Flow Centrality scores, which estimate each module's adaptation importance under multi-hop propagation. Ranks are then assigned once under a global budget. Across multiple models, tasks, and low-rank settings, IFCLoRA consistently outperforms LoRA, AdaLoRA, and EVA under matched training configurations and total rank budgets, while retaining training costs comparable to standard LoRA. On mathematical reasoning with LLaMA 3 8B, IFCLoRA improves over LoRA by 1.36 percent at rank 4 and 1.82 percent at rank 8. Further analysis shows task-dependent, non-uniform rank profiles, indicating that global information-flow structure provides an informative and interpretable prior for low-budget parameter-efficient fine-tuning.