Abstract:Quantization has emerged as an effective and lightweight solution to reduce the memory footprint of the KV cache in Large Language Models (LLMs). Nevertheless, minimizing the performance degradation caused by ultra-low-bit KV cache quantization remains a significant challenge. We observe that quantizing the KV cache of different tokens has varying impacts on the quality of attention outputs. To systematically investigate this phenomenon, we perform forward error propagation analysis on attention and propose the Anchor Score (AnS) that quantifies the sensitivity of each token's KV cache to quantization-induced error. Our analysis reveals significant disparities in AnS across tokens, suggesting that preserving a small subset with full precision (FP16) of high-AnS tokens can greatly mitigate accuracy loss in aggressive quantization scenarios. Based on this insight, we introduce AnTKV, a novel framework that leverages Anchor Token-aware Vector Quantization to compress the KV cache. Furthermore, to support efficient deployment, we design and develop a triton kernel that is fully compatible with FlashAttention, enabling fast online Anchor Token selection. AnTKV enables LLaMA-3-8B to handle context lengths up to 840K tokens on a single 80GB A100 GPU, while achieving up to 3.5x higher decoding throughput compared to the FP16 baseline. Our experiment results demonstrate that AnTKV matches or outperforms prior works such as KIVI, SKVQ, KVQuant, and CQ under 4-bit settings. More importantly, AnTKV achieves significantly lower perplexity under ultra-low-bit quantization on Mistral-7B, with only 6.32 at 1-bit and 8.87 at 0.375-bit, compared to the FP16 baseline of 4.73.
Abstract:Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have emerged as powerful tools for 3D reconstruction and SLAM tasks. However, their performance depends heavily on accurate camera pose priors. Existing approaches attempt to address this issue by introducing external constraints but fall short of achieving satisfactory accuracy, particularly when camera trajectories are complex. In this paper, we propose a novel method, RA-NeRF, capable of predicting highly accurate camera poses even with complex camera trajectories. Following the incremental pipeline, RA-NeRF reconstructs the scene using NeRF with photometric consistency and incorporates flow-driven pose regulation to enhance robustness during initialization and localization. Additionally, RA-NeRF employs an implicit pose filter to capture the camera movement pattern and eliminate the noise for pose estimation. To validate our method, we conduct extensive experiments on the Tanks\&Temple dataset for standard evaluation, as well as the NeRFBuster dataset, which presents challenging camera pose trajectories. On both datasets, RA-NeRF achieves state-of-the-art results in both camera pose estimation and visual quality, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness in scene reconstruction under complex pose trajectories.
Abstract:Post-training compression reduces the computational and memory costs of large language models (LLMs), enabling resource-efficient deployment. However, existing compression benchmarks only focus on language modeling (e.g., perplexity) and natural language understanding tasks (e.g., GLUE accuracy), ignoring the agentic capabilities - workflow, tool use/function call, long-context understanding and real-world application. We introduce the Agent Compression Benchmark (ACBench), the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating how compression impacts LLMs' agentic abilities. ACBench spans (1) 12 tasks across 4 capabilities (e.g., WorfBench for workflow generation, Needle-in-Haystack for long-context retrieval), (2) quantization (GPTQ, AWQ) and pruning (Wanda, SparseGPT), and (3) 15 models, including small (Gemma-2B), standard (Qwen2.5 7B-32B), and distilled reasoning LLMs (DeepSeek-R1-Distill). Our experiments reveal compression tradeoffs: 4-bit quantization preserves workflow generation and tool use (1%-3% drop) but degrades real-world application accuracy by 10%-15%. We introduce ERank, Top-k Ranking Correlation and Energy to systematize analysis. ACBench provides actionable insights for optimizing LLM compression in agentic scenarios. The code can be found in https://github.com/pprp/ACBench.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-turn conversational applications, where the management of the Key-Value (KV) Cache presents a significant bottleneck. The linear growth of the KV Cache with dialogue history imposes substantial computational costs, and existing eviction strategies often degrade performance by repeatedly compressing early conversational context, leading to information loss and context forgetting. This paper introduces FlowKV, a novel \textbf{multi-turn isolation mechanism} for KV Cache management, which can be applied to any KV Cache compression method without training. FlowKV's core innovation is a multi-turn isolation mechanism that preserves the accumulated compressed KV cache from past turns. Compression is then strategically applied only to the newly generated KV pairs of the latest completed turn, effectively preventing the re-compression of older context and thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Our results demonstrate that FlowKV consistently and significantly outperforms baseline strategies in maintaining instruction-following accuracy and user preference retention from 10.90\% to 75.40\%, particularly in later conversational turns.
Abstract:Generative large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention due to their exceptional capabilities in various AI tasks. Traditionally deployed in cloud datacenters, LLMs are now increasingly moving towards more accessible edge platforms to protect sensitive user data and ensure privacy preservation. The limited computational resources of individual edge devices, however, can result in excessively prolonged inference latency and overwhelmed memory usage. While existing research has explored collaborative edge computing to break the resource wall of individual devices, these solutions yet suffer from massive communication overhead and under-utilization of edge resources. Furthermore, they focus exclusively on optimizing the prefill phase, neglecting the crucial autoregressive decoding phase for generative LLMs. To address that, we propose Jupiter, a fast, scalable, and resource-efficient collaborative edge AI system for generative LLM inference. Jupiter introduces a flexible pipelined architecture as a principle and differentiates its system design according to the differentiated characteristics of the prefill and decoding phases. For prefill phase, Jupiter submits a novel intra-sequence pipeline parallelism and develops a meticulous parallelism planning strategy to maximize resource efficiency; For decoding, Jupiter devises an effective outline-based pipeline parallel decoding mechanism combined with speculative decoding, which further magnifies inference acceleration. Extensive evaluation based on realistic implementation demonstrates that Jupiter remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art approaches under various edge environment setups, achieving up to 26.1x end-to-end latency reduction while rendering on-par generation quality.
Abstract:In recent years, accurately and quickly deploying medical large language models (LLMs) has become a significant trend. Among these, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has garnered significant attention due to its features of rapid deployment and privacy protection. However, existing medical RAG frameworks still have shortcomings. Most existing medical RAG frameworks are designed for single-round question answering tasks and are not suitable for multi-round diagnostic dialogue. On the other hand, existing medical multi-round RAG frameworks do not consider the interconnections between potential diseases to inquire precisely like a doctor. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Round Diagnostic RAG (MRD-RAG) framework that mimics the doctor's diagnostic process. This RAG framework can analyze diagnosis information of potential diseases and accurately conduct multi-round diagnosis like a doctor. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed frameworks, we conduct experiments on two modern medical datasets and two traditional Chinese medicine datasets, with evaluations by GPT and human doctors on different methods. The results indicate that our RAG framework can significantly enhance the diagnostic performance of LLMs, highlighting the potential of our approach in medical diagnosis. The code and data can be found in our project website https://github.com/YixiangCh/MRD-RAG/tree/master.
Abstract:Motivated by reducing the computational and storage costs of LLMs, model compression and KV cache compression have attracted much attention from researchers. However, current methods predominantly emphasize maintaining the performance of compressed LLMs, as measured by perplexity or simple accuracy on tasks of common sense knowledge QA and basic arithmetic reasoning. In this blog, we present a brief review of recent advancements in LLMs related to retrieval-augmented generation, multi-step reasoning, external tools, and computational expressivity, all of which substantially enhance LLM performance. Then, we propose a lottery LLM hypothesis suggesting that for a given LLM and task, there exists a smaller lottery LLM capable of producing the same performance as the original LLM with the assistance of multi-step reasoning and external tools. Based on the review of current progress in LLMs, we discuss and summarize the essential capabilities that the lottery LLM and KV cache compression must possess, which are currently overlooked in existing methods.
Abstract:The rapid advancement of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) has led to an exponential growth in research publications, creating an urgent need for efficient knowledge management and reasoning systems in this domain. We present a comprehensive knowledge-enhanced system for PSCs that integrates three key components. First, we develop Perovskite-KG, a domain-specific knowledge graph constructed from 1,517 research papers, containing 23,789 entities and 22,272 relationships. Second, we create two complementary datasets: Perovskite-Chat, comprising 55,101 high-quality question-answer pairs generated through a novel multi-agent framework, and Perovskite-Reasoning, containing 2,217 carefully curated materials science problems. Third, we introduce two specialized large language models: Perovskite-Chat-LLM for domain-specific knowledge assistance and Perovskite-Reasoning-LLM for scientific reasoning tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our system significantly outperforms existing models in both domain-specific knowledge retrieval and scientific reasoning tasks, providing researchers with effective tools for literature review, experimental design, and complex problem-solving in PSC research.
Abstract:Due to the rapid development of panorama cameras, the task of estimating panorama depth has attracted significant attention from the computer vision community, especially in applications such as robot sensing and autonomous driving. However, existing methods relying on different projection formats often encounter challenges, either struggling with distortion and discontinuity in the case of equirectangular, cubemap, and tangent projections, or experiencing a loss of texture details with the spherical projection. To tackle these concerns, we present SphereFusion, an end-to-end framework that combines the strengths of various projection methods. Specifically, SphereFusion initially employs 2D image convolution and mesh operations to extract two distinct types of features from the panorama image in both equirectangular and spherical projection domains. These features are then projected onto the spherical domain, where a gate fusion module selects the most reliable features for fusion. Finally, SphereFusion estimates panorama depth within the spherical domain. Meanwhile, SphereFusion employs a cache strategy to improve the efficiency of mesh operation. Extensive experiments on three public panorama datasets demonstrate that SphereFusion achieves competitive results with other state-of-the-art methods, while presenting the fastest inference speed at only 17 ms on a 512$\times$1024 panorama image.
Abstract:Model merging aggregates Large Language Models (LLMs) finetuned on different tasks into a stronger one. However, parameter conflicts between models leads to performance degradation in averaging. While model routing addresses this issue by selecting individual models during inference, it imposes excessive storage and compute costs, and fails to leverage the common knowledge from different models. In this work, we observe that different layers exhibit varying levels of parameter conflicts. Building on this insight, we average layers with minimal parameter conflicts and use a novel task-level expert routing for layers with significant conflicts. To further reduce storage costs, inspired by task arithmetic sparsity, we decouple multiple fine-tuned experts into a dense expert and several sparse experts. Considering the out-of-distribution samples, we select and merge appropriate experts based on the task uncertainty of the input data. We conduct extensive experiments on both LLaMA and Qwen with varying parameter scales, and evaluate on real-world reasoning tasks. Results demonstrate that our method consistently achieves significant performance improvements while requiring less system cost compared to existing methods.