SSL: Sweet Spot Learning for Differentiated Guidance in Agentic Optimization

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training intelligent agents. However, existing methods typically employ binary rewards that fail to capture quality differences among trajectories achieving identical outcomes, thereby overlooking potential diversity within the solution space. Inspired by the ``sweet spot'' concept in tennis-the racket's core region that produces optimal hitting effects, we introduce \textbf{S}weet \textbf{S}pot \textbf{L}earning (\textbf{SSL}), a novel framework that provides differentiated guidance for agent optimization. SSL follows a simple yet effective principle: progressively amplified, tiered rewards guide policies toward the sweet-spot region of the solution space. This principle naturally adapts across diverse tasks: visual perception tasks leverage distance-tiered modeling to reward proximity, while complex reasoning tasks reward incremental progress toward promising solutions. We theoretically demonstrate that SSL preserves optimal solution ordering and enhances the gradient signal-to-noise ratio, thereby fostering more directed optimization. Extensive experiments across GUI perception, short/long-term planning, and complex reasoning tasks show consistent improvements over strong baselines on 12 benchmarks, achieving up to 2.5X sample efficiency gains and effective cross-task transferability. Our work establishes SSL as a general principle for training capable and robust agents.

Unified Multimodal and Multilingual Retrieval via Multi-Task Learning with NLU Integration

Multimodal retrieval systems typically employ Vision Language Models (VLMs) that encode images and text independently into vectors within a shared embedding space. Despite incorporating text encoders, VLMs consistently underperform specialized text models on text-only retrieval tasks. Moreover, introducing additional text encoders increases storage, inference overhead, and exacerbates retrieval inefficiencies, especially in multilingual settings. To address these limitations, we propose a multi-task learning framework that unifies the feature representation across images, long and short texts, and intent-rich queries. To our knowledge, this is the first work to jointly optimize multilingual image retrieval, text retrieval, and natural language understanding (NLU) tasks within a single framework. Our approach integrates image and text retrieval with a shared text encoder that is enhanced by NLU features for intent understanding and retrieval accuracy.

HyperVL: An Efficient and Dynamic Multimodal Large Language Model for Edge Devices

Current multimodal large lanauge models possess strong perceptual and reasoning capabilities, however high computational and memory requirements make them difficult to deploy directly on on-device environments. While small-parameter models are progressively endowed with strong general capabilities, standard Vision Transformer (ViT) encoders remain a critical bottleneck, suffering from excessive latency and memory consumption when processing high-resolution inputs.To address these challenges, we introduce HyperVL, an efficient multimodal large language model tailored for on-device inference. HyperVL adopts an image-tiling strategy to cap peak memory usage and incorporates two novel techniques: (1) a Visual Resolution Compressor (VRC) that adaptively predicts optimal encoding resolutions to eliminate redundant computation, and (2) Dual Consistency Learning (DCL), which aligns multi-scale ViT encoders within a unified framework, enabling dynamic switching between visual branches under a shared LLM. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HyperVL achieves state-of-the-art performance among models of comparable size across multiple benchmarks. Furthermore, it significantly significantly reduces latency and power consumption on real mobile devices, demonstrating its practicality for on-device multimodal inference.

SpecDiff: Accelerating Diffusion Model Inference with Self-Speculation

Feature caching has recently emerged as a promising method for diffusion model acceleration. It effectively alleviates the inefficiency problem caused by high computational requirements by caching similar features in the inference process of the diffusion model. In this paper, we analyze existing feature caching methods from the perspective of information utilization, and point out that relying solely on historical information will lead to constrained accuracy and speed performance. And we propose a novel paradigm that introduces future information via self-speculation based on the information similarity at the same time step across different iteration times. Based on this paradigm, we present \textit{SpecDiff}, a training-free multi-level feature caching strategy including a cached feature selection algorithm and a multi-level feature classification algorithm. (1) Feature selection algorithm based on self-speculative information. \textit{SpecDiff} determines a dynamic importance score for each token based on self-speculative information and historical information, and performs cached feature selection through the importance score. (2) Multi-level feature classification algorithm based on feature importance scores. \textit{SpecDiff} classifies tokens by leveraging the differences in feature importance scores and introduces a multi-level feature calculation strategy. Extensive experiments show that \textit{SpecDiff} achieves average 2.80 \times, 2.74 \times , and 3.17\times speedup with negligible quality loss in Stable Diffusion 3, 3.5, and FLUX compared to RFlow on NVIDIA A800-80GB GPU. By merging speculative and historical information, \textit{SpecDiff} overcomes the speedup-accuracy trade-off bottleneck, pushing the Pareto frontier of speedup and accuracy in the efficient diffusion model inference.

SpecEE: Accelerating Large Language Model Inference with Speculative Early Exiting

Early exiting has recently emerged as a promising technique for accelerating large language models (LLMs) by effectively reducing the hardware computation and memory access. In this paper, we present SpecEE, a fast LLM inference engine with speculative early exiting. (1) At the algorithm level, we propose the speculation-based lightweight predictor design by exploiting the probabilistic correlation between the speculative tokens and the correct results and high parallelism of GPUs. (2) At the system level, we point out that not all layers need a predictor and design the two-level heuristic predictor scheduling engine based on skewed distribution and contextual similarity. (3) At the mapping level, we point out that different decoding methods share the same essential characteristics, and propose the context-aware merged mapping for predictor with efficient GPU implementations to support speculative decoding, and form a framework for various existing orthogonal acceleration techniques (e.g., quantization and sparse activation) on cloud and personal computer (PC) scenarios, successfully pushing the Pareto frontier of accuracy and speedup. It is worth noting that SpecEE can be applied to any LLM by negligible training overhead in advance without affecting the model original parameters. Extensive experiments show that SpecEE achieves 2.25x and 2.43x speedup with Llama2-7B on cloud and PC scenarios respectively.

Learning Coordinated Bimanual Manipulation Policies using State Diffusion and Inverse Dynamics Models

When performing tasks like laundry, humans naturally coordinate both hands to manipulate objects and anticipate how their actions will change the state of the clothes. However, achieving such coordination in robotics remains challenging due to the need to model object movement, predict future states, and generate precise bimanual actions. In this work, we address these challenges by infusing the predictive nature of human manipulation strategies into robot imitation learning. Specifically, we disentangle task-related state transitions from agent-specific inverse dynamics modeling to enable effective bimanual coordination. Using a demonstration dataset, we train a diffusion model to predict future states given historical observations, envisioning how the scene evolves. Then, we use an inverse dynamics model to compute robot actions that achieve the predicted states. Our key insight is that modeling object movement can help learning policies for bimanual coordination manipulation tasks. Evaluating our framework across diverse simulation and real-world manipulation setups, including multimodal goal configurations, bimanual manipulation, deformable objects, and multi-object setups, we find that it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art state-to-action mapping policies. Our method demonstrates a remarkable capacity to navigate multimodal goal configurations and action distributions, maintain stability across different control modes, and synthesize a broader range of behaviors than those present in the demonstration dataset.

Large Language Model Inference Acceleration: A Comprehensive Hardware Perspective

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various fields, from natural language understanding to text generation. Compared to non-generative LLMs like BERT and DeBERTa, generative LLMs like GPT series and Llama series are currently the main focus due to their superior algorithmic performance. The advancements in generative LLMs are closely intertwined with the development of hardware capabilities. Various hardware platforms exhibit distinct hardware characteristics, which can help improve LLM inference performance. Therefore, this paper comprehensively surveys efficient generative LLM inference on different hardware platforms. First, we provide an overview of the algorithm architecture of mainstream generative LLMs and delve into the inference process. Then, we summarize different optimization methods for different platforms such as CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC, and PIM/NDP, and provide inference results for generative LLMs. Furthermore, we perform a qualitative and quantitative comparison of inference performance with batch sizes 1 and 8 on different hardware platforms by considering hardware power consumption, absolute inference speed (tokens/s), and energy efficiency (tokens/J). We compare the performance of the same optimization methods across different hardware platforms, the performance across different hardware platforms, and the performance of different methods on the same hardware platform. This provides a systematic and comprehensive summary of existing inference acceleration work by integrating software optimization methods and hardware platforms, which can point to the future trends and potential developments of generative LLMs and hardware technology for edge-side scenarios.

MARCA: Mamba Accelerator with ReConfigurable Architecture

We propose a Mamba accelerator with reconfigurable architecture, MARCA.We propose three novel approaches in this paper. (1) Reduction alternative PE array architecture for both linear and element-wise operations. For linear operations, the reduction tree connected to PE arrays is enabled and executes the reduction operation. For element-wise operations, the reduction tree is disabled and the output bypasses. (2) Reusable nonlinear function unit based on the reconfigurable PE. We decompose the exponential function into element-wise operations and a shift operation by a fast biased exponential algorithm, and the activation function (SiLU) into a range detection and element-wise operations by a piecewise approximation algorithm. Thus, the reconfigurable PEs are reused to execute nonlinear functions with negligible accuracy loss.(3) Intra-operation and inter-operation buffer management strategy. We propose intra-operation buffer management strategy to maximize input data sharing for linear operations within operations, and inter-operation strategy for element-wise operations between operations. We conduct extensive experiments on Mamba model families with different sizes.MARCA achieves up to 463.22$\times$/11.66$\times$ speedup and up to 9761.42$\times$/242.52$\times$ energy efficiency compared to Intel Xeon 8358P CPU and NVIDIA Tesla A100 GPU implementations, respectively.

Collaborative Learning with Shared Linear Representations: Statistical Rates and Optimal Algorithms

Collaborative learning enables multiple clients to learn shared feature representations across local data distributions, with the goal of improving model performance and reducing overall sample complexity. While empirical evidence shows the success of collaborative learning, a theoretical understanding of the optimal statistical rate remains lacking, even in linear settings. In this paper, we identify the optimal statistical rate when clients share a common low-dimensional linear representation. Specifically, we design a spectral estimator with local averaging that approximates the optimal solution to the least squares problem. We establish a minimax lower bound to demonstrate that our estimator achieves the optimal error rate. Notably, the optimal rate reveals two distinct phases. In typical cases, our rate matches the standard rate based on the parameter counting of the linear representation. However, a statistical penalty arises in collaborative learning when there are too many clients or when local datasets are relatively small. Furthermore, our results, unlike existing ones, show that, at a system level, collaboration always reduces overall sample complexity compared to independent client learning. In addition, at an individual level, we provide a more precise characterization of when collaboration benefits a client in transfer learning and private fine-tuning.

A Survey on Efficient Inference for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted extensive attention due to their remarkable performance across various tasks. However, the substantial computational and memory requirements of LLM inference pose challenges for deployment in resource-constrained scenarios. Efforts within the field have been directed towards developing techniques aimed at enhancing the efficiency of LLM inference. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the existing literature on efficient LLM inference. We start by analyzing the primary causes of the inefficient LLM inference, i.e., the large model size, the quadratic-complexity attention operation, and the auto-regressive decoding approach. Then, we introduce a comprehensive taxonomy that organizes the current literature into data-level, model-level, and system-level optimization. Moreover, the paper includes comparative experiments on representative methods within critical sub-fields to provide quantitative insights. Last but not least, we provide some knowledge summary and discuss future research directions.