EviSD: Evidence-Conditioned Self-Distillation for Search-Augmented AgentsJianan Xie, Xin Sun, Zhongqi Chen et al.
Outcome-based reinforcement learning enables search-augmented language agents to learn from verifiable final answers, but its trajectory-level credit cannot distinguish the contributions of individual actions in a multi-turn search process. We propose EviSD, an evidence-conditioned self-distillation framework that uses instance-level supporting evidence as privileged information for search actions and golden answers as complementary privilege for answer actions. During training, the student samples actions from the original context, while the same model re-scores them as a privileged teacher under an action-aligned context. EviSD converts the detached teacher--student gap into a bounded correction to the outcome-derived GRPO advantage and applies it only to generated action spans. This design localizes privileged guidance while preserving the update direction determined by the outcome reward, without an auxiliary distillation objective or any change at inference time. Across seven question-answering benchmarks and three backbones spanning model scales and generations, EviSD achieves the highest macro-average Exact Match in all evaluated settings, outperforming the strongest compared methods by 1.3--2.3 points while modulating only 6.7%--15.1% of response tokens. Code is available at https://github.com/JiananXie/EviSD.
15.7ROAug 3
SyncPlan: Long-Horizon LLM Coordination with Explicit Synchronization and Adaptive CorrectionShen You, Xiaoming Zhu, Weining Weng et al.
LLM-based multi-agent coordination faces a fundamental trade-off between efficiency and adaptivity in dynamic environments. Existing approaches typically rely on repeated LLM invocations or multi-round communication to adapt decisions during execution, introducing substantial latency and making coordination vulnerable to asynchronous progress and environmental changes. Conversely, one-shot planning reduces coordination overhead but produces open-loop plans that can quickly become stale or fail when actions depend on other agents and the environment. We introduce SyncPlan, a plan-execute-correct framework for long-horizon coordination through explicit synchronization and adaptive correction. Given the state and team-level task, a centralized LLM coordinator generates per-agent action chains in a single planning call. During execution, explicit wait primitives and deadlock detection enforce inter-agent and agent-environment dependencies, while a lightweight Plan Staleness Detector continuously assesses the remaining plan and triggers replanning when environmental changes invalidate its assumptions. We further optimize the coordinator through SFT and planning-oriented RL with dense task progress and outcome-level execution feedback. Experiments on the public Overcooked benchmark and the complex Honor of Kings environment show that SyncPlan achieves state-of-the-art task success rates while using less than 0.05% of the wall-clock runtime compared with existing LLM-based coordinators. Code and datasets will be made publicly available.
12.5IRAug 2
GRACE: Generative Recommender Acceleration Engine for Real-Time Ads RetrievalZhou Fang, Yuhang Huang, Ang Zhang et al.
Productionizing generative recommenders for high-volume, real-time ads retrieval creates two serving challenges: eligibility, ensuring that each generated ad is eligible for the request under the advertiser's audience targeting rules, and compute, which requires meeting strict latency and GPU cost requirements while remaining capable of generating thousands of ads per request with wide-beam decoding. This paper presents GRACE, a serving system for ads generative retrieval that addresses both challenges. For eligibility, GRACE introduces Generative Target Matching (GTM), which extends catalog-valid constrained decoding with personalized filtering over Semantic ID (SID) prefixes using bitmask and Bloom filter matchers derived from targeting rules. SID-level GTM improves final ad-level target matching pass rate from 23.55% to 40.42% over constrained decoding alone. For compute-cost and latency, GRACE targets encoder-decoder Transformers, which are more lightweight than LLMs. It redesigns the decoder around the wide-beam, short-sequence regime, covering attention kernels, KV cache, and beam search optimizations. On NVIDIA GH200, compared with the faster of FlashAttention-2 and FlashAttention-3 baselines, GRACE improves cross-attention latency by 68.0 times and self-attention latency by 23.4-25.8 times across decode steps. Together, these changes reduce decoder latency by 11.1 times, keeping ads generative retrieval within latency and compute requirements.