arXiv subjects

Nikhil Reddy

Publications and source records attributed to Nikhil Reddy.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

FAME: QoS-aware Async Service Orchestration for Agentic Workflows

Agentic workflows built on Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on external tools, with Model Context Protocol (MCP) services emerging as a common interface for tool discovery and invocation. These workflows are stateful, bursty and can block for minutes to hours while external tools execute. Always-on virtual machines and managed agent runtimes simplify deployment, but can over-provision capacity, bill idle wait time or encounter execution limits for long-running tool calls. We present FAME, a service-oriented middleware that optimizes MCP-enabled agentic workflows through modular service orchestration, explicit state management, MCP service input/output reduction and timeout-safe async invocation for long-running external services. FAME realizes these composite services using FaaS-based agent roles, persists workflow state through agent memory injection, and reduces MCP service overhead using S3 handle passing and tool-output caching. For long-running external MCP tools, FAME checkpoints agent and orchestrator state, suspends execution and resumes from callbacks without billing idle waits. Across 26 short-running service tasks over 10 MCP servers, FAME improves service-level QoS by reducing infrastructure cost by 8-12x relative to virtual machines and 43-106x relative to managed runtimes, while reducing latency by up to 17x, input tokens by up to 88% and total cost by up to 66%. On two long-running MLZero workloads from MLE-Bench, FAME completes all iterations while synchronous AWS Step Functions time out, and is 3.64-4.24x cheaper than AWS Durable Functions at the agent level and 2.67-8.23x cheaper at the orchestrator level.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

Characterizing FaaS Workflows on Public Clouds: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Function-as-a-service (FaaS) is a popular serverless computing paradigm for developing event-driven functions that elastically scale on public clouds. FaaS workflows, such as AWS Step Functions and Azure Durable Functions, are composed from FaaS functions, like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions, to build practical applications. But, the complex interactions between functions in the workflow and the limited visibility into the internals of proprietary FaaS platforms are major impediments to gaining a deeper understanding of FaaS workflow platforms. While several works characterize FaaS platforms to derive such insights, there is a lack of a principled and rigorous study for FaaS workflow platforms, which have unique scaling, performance and costing behavior influenced by the platform design, dataflow and workloads. In this article, we perform extensive evaluations of three popular FaaS workflow platforms from AWS and Azure, running 25 micro-benchmark and application workflows over 132k invocations. Our detailed analysis confirms some conventional wisdom but also uncovers unique insights on the function execution, workflow orchestration, inter-function interactions, cold-start scaling and monetary costs. Our observations help developers better configure and program these platforms, set performance and scalability expectations, and identify research gaps on enhancing the platforms.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2020

MAIRE -- A Model-Agnostic Interpretable Rule Extraction Procedure for Explaining Classifiers

The paper introduces a novel framework for extracting model-agnostic human interpretable rules to explain a classifier's output. The human interpretable rule is defined as an axis-aligned hyper-cuboid containing the instance for which the classification decision has to be explained. The proposed procedure finds the largest (high \textit{coverage}) axis-aligned hyper-cuboid such that a high percentage of the instances in the hyper-cuboid have the same class label as the instance being explained (high \textit{precision}). Novel approximations to the coverage and precision measures in terms of the parameters of the hyper-cuboid are defined. They are maximized using gradient-based optimizers. The quality of the approximations is rigorously analyzed theoretically and experimentally. Heuristics for simplifying the generated explanations for achieving better interpretability and a greedy selection algorithm that combines the local explanations for creating global explanations for the model covering a large part of the instance space are also proposed. The framework is model agnostic, can be applied to any arbitrary classifier, and all types of attributes (including continuous, ordered, and unordered discrete). The wide-scale applicability of the framework is validated on a variety of synthetic and real-world datasets from different domains (tabular, text, and image).

cs.AI↗