Concurrency without Model Changes: Future-based Asynchronous Function Calling for LLMs

Function calling, also known as tool use, is a core capability of modern LLM agents but is typically constrained by synchronous execution semantics. Under these semantics, LLM decoding is blocked until each function call completes, resulting in increasing end-to-end latency. In this work, we introduce AsyncFC, a pure execution-layer framework that decouples LLM decoding from function execution, enabling overlap between model decoding and function execution as well as inter-function parallelism when dependencies permit. AsyncFC layers over existing models and unmodified function implementations, requiring no fine-tuning or changes to the standard synchronous function-calling protocol. Across standard function-calling benchmarks and adapted software engineering benchmarks, AsyncFC significantly reduces end-to-end task completion time while preserving task accuracy. Furthermore, these results reveal that LLMs possess a native capability to reason over symbolic futures that represent unresolved execution results, enabling an asynchronous paradigm for model-tool interaction.

Offline Learning of Closed-Loop Deep Brain Stimulation Controllers for Parkinson Disease Treatment

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has shown great promise toward treating motor symptoms caused by Parkinson's disease (PD), by delivering electrical pulses to the Basal Ganglia (BG) region of the brain. However, DBS devices approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) can only deliver continuous DBS (cDBS) stimuli at a fixed amplitude; this energy inefficient operation reduces battery lifetime of the device, cannot adapt treatment dynamically for activity, and may cause significant side-effects (e.g., gait impairment). In this work, we introduce an offline reinforcement learning (RL) framework, allowing the use of past clinical data to train an RL policy to adjust the stimulation amplitude in real time, with the goal of reducing energy use while maintaining the same level of treatment (i.e., control) efficacy as cDBS. Moreover, clinical protocols require the safety and performance of such RL controllers to be demonstrated ahead of deployments in patients. Thus, we also introduce an offline policy evaluation (OPE) method to estimate the performance of RL policies using historical data, before deploying them on patients. We evaluated our framework on four PD patients equipped with the RC+S DBS system, employing the RL controllers during monthly clinical visits, with the overall control efficacy evaluated by severity of symptoms (i.e., bradykinesia and tremor), changes in PD biomakers (i.e., local field potentials), and patient ratings. The results from clinical experiments show that our RL-based controller maintains the same level of control efficacy as cDBS, but with significantly reduced stimulation energy. Further, the OPE method is shown effective in accurately estimating and ranking the expected returns of RL controllers.