Ascendra: Dynamic Request Prioritization for Efficient LLM Serving

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven the need for more efficient serving strategies. In this context, efficiency refers to the proportion of requests that meet their Service Level Objectives (SLOs), particularly for Time To First Token (TTFT) and Time Between Tokens (TBT). However, existing systems often prioritize one metric at the cost of the other. We present Ascendra, an LLM serving system designed to meet both TTFT and TBT SLOs simultaneously. The core insight behind Ascendra is that a request's urgency evolves as it approaches its deadline. To leverage this, Ascendra partitions GPU resources into two types of instances: low-priority and high-priority. Low-priority instances maximize throughput by processing requests out of arrival order, but at the risk of request starvation. To address this, Ascendra employs a performance model to predict requests at risk of missing their SLOs and proactively offloads them to high-priority instances. High-priority instances are optimized for low-latency execution and handle urgent requests nearing their deadlines. This partitioned architecture enables Ascendra to effectively balance high throughput and low latency. Extensive evaluation shows that Ascendra improves system throughput by up to 1.7x compared to vLLM and Sarathi-Serve while meeting both TTFT and TBT SLOs.

VideoMultiAgents: A Multi-Agent Framework for Video Question Answering

Video Question Answering (VQA) inherently relies on multimodal reasoning, integrating visual, temporal, and linguistic cues to achieve a deeper understanding of video content. However, many existing methods rely on feeding frame-level captions into a single model, making it difficult to adequately capture temporal and interactive contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce VideoMultiAgents, a framework that integrates specialized agents for vision, scene graph analysis, and text processing. It enhances video understanding leveraging complementary multimodal reasoning from independently operating agents. Our approach is also supplemented with a question-guided caption generation, which produces captions that highlight objects, actions, and temporal transitions directly relevant to a given query, thus improving the answer accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Intent-QA (79.0%, +6.2% over previous SOTA), EgoSchema subset (75.4%, +3.4%), and NExT-QA (79.6%, +0.4%). The source code is available at https://github.com/PanasonicConnect/VideoMultiAgents.

A Vision for Auto Research with LLM Agents

This paper introduces Agent-Based Auto Research, a structured multi-agent framework designed to automate, coordinate, and optimize the full lifecycle of scientific research. Leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and modular agent collaboration, the system spans all major research phases, including literature review, ideation, methodology planning, experimentation, paper writing, peer review response, and dissemination. By addressing issues such as fragmented workflows, uneven methodological expertise, and cognitive overload, the framework offers a systematic and scalable approach to scientific inquiry. Preliminary explorations demonstrate the feasibility and potential of Auto Research as a promising paradigm for self-improving, AI-driven research processes.

Combating the Bucket Effect:Multi-Knowledge Alignment for Medication Recommendation

Medication recommendation is crucial in healthcare, offering effective treatments based on patient's electronic health records (EHR). Previous studies show that integrating more medication-related knowledge improves medication representation accuracy. However, not all medications encompass multiple types of knowledge data simultaneously. For instance, some medications provide only textual descriptions without structured data. This imbalance in data availability limits the performance of existing models, a challenge we term the "bucket effect" in medication recommendation. Our data analysis uncovers the severity of the "bucket effect" in medication recommendation. To fill this gap, we introduce a cross-modal medication encoder capable of seamlessly aligning data from different modalities and propose a medication recommendation framework to integrate Multiple types of Knowledge, named MKMed. Specifically, we first pre-train a cross-modal encoder with contrastive learning on five knowledge modalities, aligning them into a unified space. Then, we combine the multi-knowledge medication representations with patient records for recommendations. Extensive experiments on the MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV datasets demonstrate that MKMed mitigates the "bucket effect" in data, and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in recommendation accuracy and safety.

Bridge the Domains: Large Language Models Enhanced Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation

Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (CDSR) aims to extract the preference from the user's historical interactions across various domains. Despite some progress in CDSR, two problems set the barrier for further advancements, i.e., overlap dilemma and transition complexity. The former means existing CDSR methods severely rely on users who own interactions on all domains to learn cross-domain item relationships, compromising the practicability. The latter refers to the difficulties in learning the complex transition patterns from the mixed behavior sequences. With powerful representation and reasoning abilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) are promising to address these two problems by bridging the items and capturing the user's preferences from a semantic view. Therefore, we propose an LLMs Enhanced Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation model (LLM4CDSR). To obtain the semantic item relationships, we first propose an LLM-based unified representation module to represent items. Then, a trainable adapter with contrastive regularization is designed to adapt the CDSR task. Besides, a hierarchical LLMs profiling module is designed to summarize user cross-domain preferences. Finally, these two modules are integrated into the proposed tri-thread framework to derive recommendations. We have conducted extensive experiments on three public cross-domain datasets, validating the effectiveness of LLM4CDSR. We have released the code online.

ScaleGNN: Towards Scalable Graph Neural Networks via Adaptive High-order Neighboring Feature Fusion

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated strong performance across various graph-based tasks by effectively capturing relational information between nodes. These models rely on iterative message passing to propagate node features, enabling nodes to aggregate information from their neighbors. Recent research has significantly improved the message-passing mechanism, enhancing GNN scalability on large-scale graphs. However, GNNs still face two main challenges: over-smoothing, where excessive message passing results in indistinguishable node representations, especially in deep networks incorporating high-order neighbors; and scalability issues, as traditional architectures suffer from high model complexity and increased inference time due to redundant information aggregation. This paper proposes a novel framework for large-scale graphs named ScaleGNN that simultaneously addresses both challenges by adaptively fusing multi-level graph features. We first construct neighbor matrices for each order, learning their relative information through trainable weights through an adaptive high-order feature fusion module. This allows the model to selectively emphasize informative high-order neighbors while reducing unnecessary computational costs. Additionally, we introduce a High-order redundant feature masking mechanism based on a Local Contribution Score (LCS), which enables the model to retain only the most relevant neighbors at each order, preventing redundant information propagation. Furthermore, low-order enhanced feature aggregation adaptively integrates low-order and high-order features based on task relevance, ensuring effective capture of both local and global structural information without excessive complexity. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art GNN models in both accuracy and computational efficiency.

Comprehensive List Generation for Multi-Generator Reranking

Reranking models solve the final recommendation lists that best fulfill users' demands. While existing solutions focus on finding parametric models that approximate optimal policies, recent approaches find that it is better to generate multiple lists to compete for a ``pass'' ticket from an evaluator, where the evaluator serves as the supervisor who accurately estimates the performance of the candidate lists. In this work, we show that we can achieve a more efficient and effective list proposal with a multi-generator framework and provide empirical evidence on two public datasets and online A/B tests. More importantly, we verify that the effectiveness of a generator is closely related to how much it complements the views of other generators with sufficiently different rerankings, which derives the metric of list comprehensiveness. With this intuition, we design an automatic complementary generator-finding framework that learns a policy that simultaneously aligns the users' preferences and maximizes the list comprehensiveness metric. The experimental results indicate that the proposed framework can further improve the multi-generator reranking performance.

Dynamic Legged Ball Manipulation on Rugged Terrains with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Advancing the dynamic loco-manipulation capabilities of quadruped robots in complex terrains is crucial for performing diverse tasks. Specifically, dynamic ball manipulation in rugged environments presents two key challenges. The first is coordinating distinct motion modalities to integrate terrain traversal and ball control seamlessly. The second is overcoming sparse rewards in end-to-end deep reinforcement learning, which impedes efficient policy convergence. To address these challenges, we propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework. A high-level policy, informed by proprioceptive data and ball position, adaptively switches between pre-trained low-level skills such as ball dribbling and rough terrain navigation. We further propose Dynamic Skill-Focused Policy Optimization to suppress gradients from inactive skills and enhance critical skill learning. Both simulation and real-world experiments validate that our methods outperform baseline approaches in dynamic ball manipulation across rugged terrains, highlighting its effectiveness in challenging environments. Videos are on our website: dribble-hrl.github.io.

DialogueAgents: A Hybrid Agent-Based Speech Synthesis Framework for Multi-Party Dialogue

Speech synthesis is crucial for human-computer interaction, enabling natural and intuitive communication. However, existing datasets involve high construction costs due to manual annotation and suffer from limited character diversity, contextual scenarios, and emotional expressiveness. To address these issues, we propose DialogueAgents, a novel hybrid agent-based speech synthesis framework, which integrates three specialized agents -- a script writer, a speech synthesizer, and a dialogue critic -- to collaboratively generate dialogues. Grounded in a diverse character pool, the framework iteratively refines dialogue scripts and synthesizes speech based on speech review, boosting emotional expressiveness and paralinguistic features of the synthesized dialogues. Using DialogueAgent, we contribute MultiTalk, a bilingual, multi-party, multi-turn speech dialogue dataset covering diverse topics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and the high quality of the MultiTalk dataset. We release the dataset and code https://github.com/uirlx/DialogueAgents to facilitate future research on advanced speech synthesis models and customized data generation.

LLM-Enabled Style and Content Regularization for Personalized Text-to-Image Generation

The personalized text-to-image generation has rapidly advanced with the emergence of Stable Diffusion. Existing methods, which typically fine-tune models using embedded identifiers, often struggle with insufficient stylization and inaccurate image content due to reduced textual controllability. In this paper, we propose style refinement and content preservation strategies. The style refinement strategy leverages the semantic information of visual reasoning prompts and reference images to optimize style embeddings, allowing a more precise and consistent representation of style information. The content preservation strategy addresses the content bias problem by preserving the model's generalization capabilities, ensuring enhanced textual controllability without compromising stylization. Experimental results verify that our approach achieves superior performance in generating consistent and personalized text-to-image outputs.