From Bits to Chips: An LLM-based Hardware-Aware Quantization Agent for Streamlined Deployment of LLMs

Deploying models, especially large language models (LLMs), is becoming increasingly attractive to a broader user base, including those without specialized expertise. However, due to the resource constraints of certain hardware, maintaining high accuracy with larger model while meeting the hardware requirements remains a significant challenge. Model quantization technique helps mitigate memory and compute bottlenecks, yet the added complexities of tuning and deploying quantized models further exacerbates these challenges, making the process unfriendly to most of the users. We introduce the Hardware-Aware Quantization Agent (HAQA), an automated framework that leverages LLMs to streamline the entire quantization and deployment process by enabling efficient hyperparameter tuning and hardware configuration, thereby simultaneously improving deployment quality and ease of use for a broad range of users. Our results demonstrate up to a 2.3x speedup in inference, along with increased throughput and improved accuracy compared to unoptimized models on Llama. Additionally, HAQA is designed to implement adaptive quantization strategies across diverse hardware platforms, as it automatically finds optimal settings even when they appear counterintuitive, thereby reducing extensive manual effort and demonstrating superior adaptability. Code will be released.

Continual Learning for Acoustic Event Classification

Continuously learning new classes without catastrophic forgetting is a challenging problem for on-device acoustic event classification given the restrictions on computation resources (e.g., model size, running memory). To alleviate such an issue, we propose two novel diversity-aware incremental learning method for Spoken Keyword Spotting and Environmental Sound Classification. Our method selects the historical data for the training by measuring the per-sample classification uncertainty. For the Spoken Keyword Spotting application, the proposed RK approach introduces a diversity-aware sampler to select a diverse set from historical and incoming keywords by calculating classification uncertainty. As a result, the RK approach can incrementally learn new tasks without forgetting prior knowledge. Besides, the RK approach also proposes data augmentation and knowledge distillation loss function for efficient memory management on the edge device. For the Environmental Sound Classification application, we measure the uncertainty by observing how the classification probability of data fluctuates against the parallel perturbations added to the classifier embedding. In this way, the computation cost can be significantly reduced compared with adding perturbation to the raw data. Experimental results show that the proposed RK approach achieves 4.2% absolute improvement in terms of average accuracy over the best baseline on Google Speech Command dataset with less required memory. Experimental results on the DCASE 2019 Task 1 and ESC-50 dataset show that our proposed method outperforms baseline continual learning methods on classification accuracy and computational efficiency, indicating our method can efficiently and incrementally learn new classes without the catastrophic forgetting problem for on-device environmental sound classification

Phys-Liquid: A Physics-Informed Dataset for Estimating 3D Geometry and Volume of Transparent Deformable Liquids

Estimating the geometric and volumetric properties of transparent deformable liquids is challenging due to optical complexities and dynamic surface deformations induced by container movements. Autonomous robots performing precise liquid manipulation tasks, such as dispensing, aspiration, and mixing, must handle containers in ways that inevitably induce these deformations, complicating accurate liquid state assessment. Current datasets lack comprehensive physics-informed simulation data representing realistic liquid behaviors under diverse dynamic scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce Phys-Liquid, a physics-informed dataset comprising 97,200 simulation images and corresponding 3D meshes, capturing liquid dynamics across multiple laboratory scenes, lighting conditions, liquid colors, and container rotations. To validate the realism and effectiveness of Phys-Liquid, we propose a four-stage reconstruction and estimation pipeline involving liquid segmentation, multi-view mask generation, 3D mesh reconstruction, and real-world scaling. Experimental results demonstrate improved accuracy and consistency in reconstructing liquid geometry and volume, outperforming existing benchmarks. The dataset and associated validation methods facilitate future advancements in transparent liquid perception tasks. The dataset and code are available at https://dualtransparency.github.io/Phys-Liquid/.

Interaction as Intelligence Part II: Asynchronous Human-Agent Rollout for Long-Horizon Task Training

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have recently shown strong potential in domains such as automated coding, deep research, and graphical user interface manipulation. However, training them to succeed on long-horizon, domain-specialized tasks remains challenging. Current methods primarily fall into two categories. The first relies on dense human annotations through behavior cloning, which is prohibitively expensive for long-horizon tasks that can take days or months. The second depends on outcome-driven sampling, which often collapses due to the rarity of valid positive trajectories on domain-specialized tasks. We introduce Apollo, a sampling framework that integrates asynchronous human guidance with action-level data filtering. Instead of requiring annotators to shadow every step, Apollo allows them to intervene only when the agent drifts from a promising trajectory, by providing prior knowledge, strategic advice, etc. This lightweight design makes it possible to sustain interactions for over 30 hours and produces valuable trajectories at a lower cost. Apollo then applies supervision control to filter out sub-optimal actions and prevent error propagation. Together, these components enable reliable and effective data collection in long-horizon environments. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Apollo, we evaluate it using InnovatorBench. Our experiments show that when applied to train the GLM-4.5 model on InnovatorBench, Apollo achieves more than a 50% improvement over the untrained baseline and a 28% improvement over a variant trained without human interaction. These results highlight the critical role of human-in-the-loop sampling and the robustness of Apollo's design in handling long-horizon, domain-specialized tasks.

InnovatorBench: Evaluating Agents' Ability to Conduct Innovative LLM Research

AI agents could accelerate scientific discovery by automating hypothesis formation, experiment design, coding, execution, and analysis, yet existing benchmarks probe narrow skills in simplified settings. To address this gap, we introduce InnovatorBench, a benchmark-platform pair for realistic, end-to-end assessment of agents performing Large Language Model (LLM) research. It comprises 20 tasks spanning Data Construction, Filtering, Augmentation, Loss Design, Reward Design, and Scaffold Construction, which require runnable artifacts and assessment of correctness, performance, output quality, and uncertainty. To support agent operation, we develop ResearchGym, a research environment offering rich action spaces, distributed and long-horizon execution, asynchronous monitoring, and snapshot saving. We also implement a lightweight ReAct agent that couples explicit reasoning with executable planning using frontier models such as Claude-4, GPT-5, GLM-4.5, and Kimi-K2. Our experiments demonstrate that while frontier models show promise in code-driven research tasks, they struggle with fragile algorithm-related tasks and long-horizon decision making, such as impatience, poor resource management, and overreliance on template-based reasoning. Furthermore, agents require over 11 hours to achieve their best performance on InnovatorBench, underscoring the benchmark's difficulty and showing the potential of InnovatorBench to be the next generation of code-based research benchmark.

Context Engineering 2.0: The Context of Context Engineering

Karl Marx once wrote that ``the human essence is the ensemble of social relations'', suggesting that individuals are not isolated entities but are fundamentally shaped by their interactions with other entities, within which contexts play a constitutive and essential role. With the advent of computers and artificial intelligence, these contexts are no longer limited to purely human--human interactions: human--machine interactions are included as well. Then a central question emerges: How can machines better understand our situations and purposes? To address this challenge, researchers have recently introduced the concept of context engineering. Although it is often regarded as a recent innovation of the agent era, we argue that related practices can be traced back more than twenty years. Since the early 1990s, the field has evolved through distinct historical phases, each shaped by the intelligence level of machines: from early human--computer interaction frameworks built around primitive computers, to today's human--agent interaction paradigms driven by intelligent agents, and potentially to human--level or superhuman intelligence in the future. In this paper, we situate context engineering, provide a systematic definition, outline its historical and conceptual landscape, and examine key design considerations for practice. By addressing these questions, we aim to offer a conceptual foundation for context engineering and sketch its promising future. This paper is a stepping stone for a broader community effort toward systematic context engineering in AI systems.

AFT: An Exemplar-Free Class Incremental Learning Method for Environmental Sound Classification

As sounds carry rich information, environmental sound classification (ESC) is crucial for numerous applications such as rare wild animals detection. However, our world constantly changes, asking ESC models to adapt to new sounds periodically. The major challenge here is catastrophic forgetting, where models lose the ability to recognize old sounds when learning new ones. Many methods address this using replay-based continual learning. This could be impractical in scenarios such as data privacy concerns. Exemplar-free methods are commonly used but can distort old features, leading to worse performance. To overcome such limitations, we propose an Acoustic Feature Transformation (AFT) technique that aligns the temporal features of old classes to the new space, including a selectively compressed feature space. AFT mitigates the forgetting of old knowledge without retaining past data. We conducted experiments on two datasets, showing consistent improvements over baseline models with accuracy gains of 3.7\% to 3.9\%.

Temporally Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Acoustic event Classification

Multimodal acoustic event classification plays a key role in audio-visual systems. Although combining audio and visual signals improves recognition, it is still difficult to align them over time and to reduce the effect of noise across modalities. Existing methods often treat audio and visual streams separately, fusing features later with contrastive or mutual information objectives. Recent advances explore multimodal graph learning, but most fail to distinguish between intra- and inter-modal temporal dependencies. To address this, we propose Temporally Heterogeneous Graph-based Contrastive Learning (THGCL). Our framework constructs a temporal graph for each event, where audio and video segments form nodes and their temporal links form edges. We introduce Gaussian processes for intra-modal smoothness, Hawkes processes for inter-modal decay, and contrastive learning to capture fine-grained relationships. Experiments on AudioSet show that THGCL achieves state-of-the-art performance.

LPGNet: A Lightweight Network with Parallel Attention and Gated Fusion for Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) aims to predict the emotional state of each utterance by using multiple input types, such as text and audio. While Transformer-based models have shown strong performance in this task, they often face two major issues: high computational cost and heavy dependence on speaker information. These problems reduce their ability to generalize in real-world conversations. To solve these challenges, we propose LPGNet, a Lightweight network with Parallel attention and Gated fusion for multimodal ERC. The main part of LPGNet is the Lightweight Parallel Interaction Attention (LPIA) module. This module replaces traditional stacked Transformer layers with parallel dot-product attention, which can model both within-modality and between-modality relationships more efficiently. To improve emotional feature learning, LPGNet also uses a dual-gated fusion method. This method filters and combines features from different input types in a flexible and dynamic way. In addition, LPGNet removes speaker embeddings completely, which allows the model to work independently of speaker identity. Experiments on the IEMOCAP dataset show that LPGNet reaches over 87% accuracy and F1-score in 4-class emotion classification. It outperforms strong baseline models while using fewer parameters and showing better generalization across speakers.

Noise-Robust Sound Event Detection and Counting via Language-Queried Sound Separation

Most sound event detection (SED) systems perform well on clean datasets but degrade significantly in noisy environments. Language-queried audio source separation (LASS) models show promise for robust SED by separating target events; existing methods require elaborate multi-stage training and lack explicit guidance for target events. To address these challenges, we introduce event appearance detection (EAD), a counting-based approach that counts event occurrences at both the clip and frame levels. Based on EAD, we propose a co-training-based multi-task learning framework for EAD and SED to enhance SED's performance in noisy environments. First, SED struggles to learn the same patterns as EAD. Then, a task-based constraint is designed to improve prediction consistency between SED and EAD. This framework provides more reliable clip-level predictions for LASS models and strengthens timestamp detection capability. Experiments on DESED and WildDESED datasets demonstrate better performance compared to existing methods, with advantages becoming more pronounced at higher noise levels.