Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract:Generative Recommendation (GR) has recently transitioned from atomic item-indexing to Semantic ID (SID)-based frameworks to capture intrinsic item relationships and enhance generalization. However, the adoption of high-granularity SIDs leads to two critical challenges: prohibitive training overhead due to sequence expansion and unstable performance reliability characterized by non-monotonic accuracy fluctuations. We identify that these disparate issues are fundamentally rooted in the Semantic Dilution Effect, where redundant tokens waste massive computation and dilute the already sparse learning signals in recommendation. To counteract this, we propose STAMP (Semantic Trimming and Auxiliary Multi-step Prediction), a framework utilizing a dual-end optimization strategy. We argue that effective SID learning requires simultaneously addressing low input information density and sparse output supervision. On the input side, Semantic Adaptive Pruning (SAP) dynamically filters redundancy during the forward pass, converting noise-laden sequences into compact, information-rich representations. On the output side, Multi-step Auxiliary Prediction (MAP) employs a multi-token objective to densify feedback, strengthening long-range dependency capture and ensuring robust learning signals despite compressed inputs. Unifying input purification and signal amplification, STAMP enhances both training efficiency and representation capability. Experiments on public Amazon and large-scale industrial datasets show STAMP achieves 1.23--1.38$\times$ speedup and 17.2\%--54.7\% VRAM reduction while maintaining or improving performance across multiple architectures.
Abstract:Auto-regressive (AR) models have recently made notable progress in image generation, achieving performance comparable to diffusion-based approaches. However, their computational intensity and sequential nature impede on-device deployment, causing disruptive latency. We address this via a cloud-device collaboration framework \textbf{CIAR}, which utilizes on-device self-verification to handle two key properties of visual synthesis: \textit{the vast token vocabulary} required for high-fidelity images and \textit{inherent spatial redundancy} which leads to extreme predictability in homogeneous regions, while object boundaries exhibit high uncertainty. Uniform verification wastes resources on such redundant tokens. Our solution centers on an on-device token uncertainty quantifier, which adopts continuous probability intervals to accelerate processing and make it feasible for large visual vocabularies instead of conventional discrete solution sets. Additionally, we incorporate a Interval-enhanced decoding module to further speed up decoding while maintaining visual fidelity and semantic consistency via a distribution alignment training strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CIAR achieves a 2.18x speed-up and reduces cloud requests by 70\%, while preserving image quality compared to existing methods.
Abstract:The accurate prediction of protein-RNA binding affinity remains an unsolved problem in structural biology, limiting opportunities in understanding gene regulation and designing RNA-targeting therapeutics. A central obstacle is the structural flexibility of RNA, as, unlike proteins, RNA molecules exist as dynamic conformational ensembles. Thus, committing to a single predicted structure discards information relevant to binding. Here, we show that this obstacle can be addressed by extracting pre-structural embeddings, which are intermediate representations from a biomolecular foundation model captured before the structure decoding step. Pre-structural embeddings implicitly encode conformational ensemble information without requiring predicted structures. We build ZeroFold, a transformer-based model that combines pre-structural embeddings from Boltz-2 for both protein and RNA molecules through a cross-modal attention mechanism to predict binding affinity directly from sequence. To support training and evaluation, we construct PRADB, a curated dataset of 2,621 unique protein-RNA pairs with experimentally measured affinities drawn from four complementary databases. On a held-out test set constructed with 40% sequence identity thresholds, ZeroFold achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.65, a value approaching the ceiling imposed by experimental measurement noise. Under progressively fairer evaluation conditions that control for training-set overlap, ZeroFold compares favourably with respect to leading structure-based and leading sequence-based predictors, with the performance gap widening as sequence similarity to competitor training data is reduced. These results illustrate how pre-structural embeddings offer a representation strategy for flexible biomolecules, opening a route to affinity prediction for protein-RNA pairs for which no structural data exist.
Abstract:Web agents based on large language models have demonstrated promising capability in automating web tasks. However, current web agents struggle to reason out sensible actions due to the limitations of predicting environment changes, and might not possess comprehensive awareness of execution risks, prematurely performing risky actions that cause losses and lead to task failure. To address these challenges, we propose WAC, a web agent that integrates model collaboration, consequence simulation, and feedback-driven action refinement. To overcome the cognitive isolation of individual models, we introduce a multi-agent collaboration process that enables an action model to consult a world model as a web-environment expert for strategic guidance; the action model then grounds these suggestions into executable actions, leveraging prior knowledge of environmental state transition dynamics to enhance candidate action proposal. To achieve risk-aware resilient task execution, we introduce a two-stage deduction chain. A world model, specialized in environmental state transitions, simulates action outcomes, which a judge model then scrutinizes to trigger action corrective feedback when necessary. Experiments show that WAC achieves absolute gains of 1.8% on VisualWebArena and 1.3% on Online-Mind2Web.
Abstract:With the widespread deployment of Computer-using Agents (CUAs) in complex real-world environments, prevalent long-term risks often lead to severe and irreversible consequences. Most existing guardrails for CUAs adopt a reactive approach, constraining agent behavior only within the current observation space. While these guardrails can prevent immediate short-term risks (e.g., clicking on a phishing link), they cannot proactively avoid long-term risks: seemingly reasonable actions can lead to high-risk consequences that emerge with a delay (e.g., cleaning logs leads to future audits being untraceable), which reactive guardrails cannot identify within the current observation space. To address these limitations, we propose a predictive guardrail approach, with the core idea of aligning predicted future risks with current decisions. Based on this approach, we present SafePred, a predictive guardrail framework for CUAs that establishes a risk-to-decision loop to ensure safe agent behavior. SafePred supports two key abilities: (1) Short- and long-term risk prediction: by using safety policies as the basis for risk prediction, SafePred leverages the prediction capability of the world model to generate semantic representations of both short-term and long-term risks, thereby identifying and pruning actions that lead to high-risk states; (2) Decision optimization: translating predicted risks into actionable safe decision guidances through step-level interventions and task-level re-planning. Extensive experiments show that SafePred significantly reduces high-risk behaviors, achieving over 97.6% safety performance and improving task utility by up to 21.4% compared with reactive baselines.
Abstract:The scaling law, which indicates that model performance improves with increasing dataset and model capacity, has fueled a growing trend in expanding recommendation models in both industry and academia. However, the advent of large-scale recommenders also brings significantly higher computational costs, particularly under the long-sequence dependencies inherent in the user intent of recommendation systems. Current approaches often rely on pre-storing the intermediate states of the past behavior for each user, thereby reducing the quadratic re-computation cost for the following requests. Despite their effectiveness, these methods often treat memory merely as a medium for acceleration, without adequately considering the space overhead it introduces. This presents a critical challenge in real-world recommendation systems with billions of users, each of whom might initiate thousands of interactions and require massive memory for state storage. Fortunately, there have been several memory management strategies examined for compression in LLM, while most have not been evaluated on the recommendation task. To mitigate this gap, we introduce MALLOC, a comprehensive benchmark for memory-aware long sequence compression. MALLOC presents a comprehensive investigation and systematic classification of memory management techniques applicable to large sequential recommendations. These techniques are integrated into state-of-the-art recommenders, enabling a reproducible and accessible evaluation platform. Through extensive experiments across accuracy, efficiency, and complexity, we demonstrate the holistic reliability of MALLOC in advancing large-scale recommendation. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MALLOC.
Abstract:The development of Multimodal Virtual Agents has made significant progress through the integration of Multimodal Large Language Models. However, mainstream training paradigms face key challenges: Behavior Cloning is simple and effective through imitation but suffers from low behavioral diversity, while Reinforcement Learning is capable of discovering novel strategies through exploration but heavily relies on manually designed reward functions. To address the conflict between these two methods, we present CORE, a Code-based Inverse Self-Training Framework with Graph Expansion that bridges imitation and exploration, offering a novel training framework that promotes behavioral diversity while eliminating the reliance on manually reward design. Specifically, we introduce Semantic Code Abstraction to automatically infers reward functions from expert demonstrations without manual design. The inferred reward function, referred to as the Label Function, is executable code that verifies one key step within a task. Building on this, we propose Strategy Graph Expansion to enhance in-domain behavioral diversity, which constructs a multi-path graph called Strategy Graph that captures diverse valid solutions beyond expert demonstrations. Furthermore, we introduce Trajectory-Guided Extrapolation, which enriches out-of-domain behavioral diversity by utilizing both successful and failed trajectories to expand the task space. Experiments on Web and Android platforms demonstrate that CORE significantly improves both overall performance and generalization, highlighting its potential as a robust and generalizable training paradigm for building powerful virtual agents.




Abstract:Building AI systems for GUI automation task has attracted remarkable research efforts, where MLLMs are leveraged for processing user requirements and give operations. However, GUI automation includes a wide range of tasks, from document processing to online shopping, from CAD to video editing. Diversity between particular tasks requires MLLMs for GUI automation to have heterogeneous capabilities and master multidimensional expertise, raising problems on constructing such a model. To address such challenge, we propose GAIR: GUI Automation via Information-Joint Reasoning and Group Reflection, a novel MLLM-based GUI automation agent framework designed for integrating knowledge and combining capabilities from heterogeneous models to build GUI automation agent systems with higher performance. Since different GUI-specific MLLMs are trained on different dataset and thus have different strengths, GAIR introduced a general-purpose MLLM for jointly processing the information from multiple GUI-specific models, further enhancing performance of the agent framework. The general-purpose MLLM also serves as decision maker, trying to execute a reasonable operation based on previously gathered information. When the general-purpose model thinks that there isn't sufficient information for a reasonable decision, GAIR would transit into group reflection status, where the general-purpose model would provide GUI-specific models with different instructions and hints based on their strengths and weaknesses, driving them to gather information with more significance and accuracy that can support deeper reasoning and decision. We evaluated the effectiveness and reliability of GAIR through extensive experiments on GUI benchmarks.




Abstract:Recent advancements in Audio-Video Large Language Models (AV-LLMs) have enhanced their capabilities in tasks like audio-visual question answering and multimodal dialog systems. Video and audio introduce an extended temporal dimension, resulting in a larger key-value (KV) cache compared to static image embedding. A naive optimization strategy is to selectively focus on and retain KV caches of audio or video based on task. However, in the experiment, we observed that the attention of AV-LLMs to various modalities in the high layers is not strictly dependent on the task. In higher layers, the attention of AV-LLMs shifts more towards the video modality. In addition, we also found that directly integrating temporal KV of audio and spatial-temporal KV of video may lead to information confusion and significant performance degradation of AV-LLMs. If audio and video are processed indiscriminately, it may also lead to excessive compression or reservation of a certain modality, thereby disrupting the alignment between modalities. To address these challenges, we propose AccKV, an Adaptive-Focusing and Cross-Calibration KV cache optimization framework designed specifically for efficient AV-LLMs inference. Our method is based on layer adaptive focusing technology, selectively focusing on key modalities according to the characteristics of different layers, and enhances the recognition of heavy hitter tokens through attention redistribution. In addition, we propose a Cross-Calibration technique that first integrates inefficient KV caches within the audio and video modalities, and then aligns low-priority modalities with high-priority modalities to selectively evict KV cache of low-priority modalities. The experimental results show that AccKV can significantly improve the computational efficiency of AV-LLMs while maintaining accuracy.




Abstract:As multimodal LLM-driven agents continue to advance in autonomy and generalization, evaluation based on static datasets can no longer adequately assess their true capabilities in dynamic environments and diverse tasks. Existing LLM-based synthetic data methods are largely designed for LLM training and evaluation, and thus cannot be directly applied to agent tasks that require tool use and interactive capabilities. While recent studies have explored automatic agent task generation with LLMs, most efforts remain limited to text or image analysis, without systematically modeling multi-step interactions in web environments. To address these challenges, we propose Graph2Eval, a knowledge graph-based framework that automatically generates both multimodal document comprehension tasks and web interaction tasks, enabling comprehensive evaluation of agents' reasoning, collaboration, and interactive capabilities. In our approach, knowledge graphs constructed from multi-source external data serve as the task space, where we translate semantic relations into structured multimodal tasks using subgraph sampling, task templates, and meta-paths. A multi-stage filtering pipeline based on node reachability, LLM scoring, and similarity analysis is applied to guarantee the quality and executability of the generated tasks. Furthermore, Graph2Eval supports end-to-end evaluation of multiple agent types (Single-Agent, Multi-Agent, Web Agent) and measures reasoning, collaboration, and interaction capabilities. We instantiate the framework with Graph2Eval-Bench, a curated dataset of 1,319 tasks spanning document comprehension and web interaction scenarios. Experiments show that Graph2Eval efficiently generates tasks that differentiate agent and model performance, revealing gaps in reasoning, collaboration, and web interaction across different settings and offering a new perspective for agent evaluation.