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Wei Niu

Publications and source records attributed to Wei Niu.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Structured Agent Distillation for Large Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong capabilities as decision-making agents by interleaving reasoning and actions, as seen in ReAct-style frameworks. Yet, their practical deployment is constrained by high inference costs and large model sizes. We propose Structured Agent Distillation, a framework that compresses large LLM-based agents into smaller student models while preserving both reasoning fidelity and action consistency. Unlike standard token-level distillation, our method segments trajectories into [REASON] and [ACT] spans, applying segment-specific losses to align each component with the teacher's behavior. This structure-aware supervision enables compact agents to better replicate the teacher's decision process. Experiments on ALFWorld, HotPotQA-ReAct, and WebShop show that our approach consistently outperforms token-level and imitation learning baselines, achieving significant compression with minimal performance drop. Scaling and ablation results further highlight the importance of span-level alignment for efficient and deployable agents.

cs.LG↗

ReacTOD: Bounded Neuro-Symbolic Agentic NLU for Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking

Task-oriented dialogue systems -- handling transactions, reservations, and service requests -- require predictable behavior, yet the moderately-sized LLMs needed for practical latency are prone to hallucination and format errors that cascade into incorrect actions (e.g., a hotel booked for the wrong date). We propose ReacTOD, a bounded neuro-symbolic architecture that reformulates NLU as discrete tool calls within a self-correcting ReAct loop governed by deterministic validation. A bounded ReAct loop enables iterative self-correction, improving accuracy by up to 9.3 percentage points over single-pass inference on MultiWOZ. A symbolic validator enforces action compliance, schema conformance, and coreference consistency on every dialogue state update, achieving a 93.1% self-correction rate on intercepted errors and producing structured execution traces. Incremental state prediction and on-demand history retrieval keep prompts compact, empirically improving instruction adherence in parameter-constrained models. On MultiWOZ 2.1, ReacTOD achieves a new zero-shot state-of-the-art: gpt-oss-20B reaches 52.71% joint goal accuracy, surpassing the previous best by 14 percentage points, while Qwen3-8B achieves 47.34% with only 8B parameters. On the Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) benchmark, ReacTOD with Claude-Opus-4.6 achieves 80.68% JGA under fully end-to-end evaluation with predicted domains, and Qwen3-32B reaches 64.09% -- demonstrating cross-benchmark generalization without task-specific training data.

cs.CL↗

Gaussians on a Diet: High-Quality Memory-Bounded 3D Gaussian Splatting Training

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has revolutionized novel view synthesis with high-quality rendering through continuous aggregations of millions of 3D Gaussian primitives. However, it suffers from a substantial memory footprint, particularly during training due to uncontrolled densification, posing a critical bottleneck for deployment on memory-constrained edge devices. While existing methods prune redundant Gaussians post-training, they fail to address the peak memory spikes caused by the abrupt growth of Gaussians early in the training process. To solve the training memory consumption problem, we propose a systematic memory-bounded training framework that dynamically optimizes Gaussians through iterative growth and pruning. In other words, the proposed framework alternates between incremental pruning of low-impact Gaussians and strategic growing of new primitives with an adaptive Gaussian compensation, maintaining a near-constant low memory usage while progressively refining rendering fidelity. We comprehensively evaluate the proposed training framework on various real-world datasets under strict memory constraints, showing significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods. Particularly, our proposed method practically enables memory-efficient 3DGS training on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier, achieving similar visual quality with up to 80% lower peak training memory consumption than the original 3DGS.

cs.CV↗

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.

cs.LG↗

Toward Adaptive Large Language Models Structured Pruning via Hybrid-grained Weight Importance Assessment

Structured pruning for large language models (LLMs) has garnered significant academic interest due to its ability to efficiently compress and accelerate LLMs by eliminating redundant weight groups at a coarse-grained granularity. Current structured pruning methods for LLMs typically depend on a singular granularity for assessing weight importance, resulting in notable performance degradation in downstream tasks. Intriguingly, our empirical investigations reveal that utilizing unstructured pruning, which achieves better performance retention by pruning weights at a finer granularity, \emph{i.e.}, individual weights, yields significantly varied sparse LLM structures when juxtaposed to structured pruning. This suggests that evaluating both holistic and individual assessment for weight importance is essential for LLM pruning. Building on this insight, we introduce the Hybrid-grained Weight Importance Assessment (HyWIA), a novel method that merges fine-grained and coarse-grained evaluations of weight importance for the pruning of LLMs. Leveraging an attention mechanism, HyWIA adaptively determines the optimal blend of granularity in weight importance assessments in an end-to-end pruning manner. Extensive experiments on LLaMA-V1/V2, Vicuna, Baichuan, and Bloom across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of HyWIA in pruning LLMs. For example, HyWIA surpasses the cutting-edge LLM-Pruner by an average margin of 2.82% in accuracy across seven downstream tasks when pruning LLaMA-7B by 50%. Code:https://github.com/azuryl/LLM-HWIA

cs.CL↗

FlashMem: Supporting Modern DNN Workloads on Mobile with GPU Memory Hierarchy Optimizations

The increasing size and complexity of modern deep neural networks (DNNs) pose significant challenges for on-device inference on mobile GPUs, with limited memory and computational resources. Existing DNN acceleration frameworks primarily deploy a weight preloading strategy, where all model parameters are loaded into memory before execution on mobile GPUs. We posit that this approach is not adequate for modern DNN workloads that comprise very large model(s) and possibly execution of several distinct models in succession. In this work, we introduce FlashMem, a memory streaming framework designed to efficiently execute large-scale modern DNNs and multi-DNN workloads while minimizing memory consumption and reducing inference latency. Instead of fully preloading weights, FlashMem statically determines model loading schedules and dynamically streams them on demand, leveraging 2.5D texture memory to minimize data transformations and improve execution efficiency. Experimental results on 11 models demonstrate that FlashMem achieves 2.0x to 8.4x memory reduction and 1.7x to 75.0x speedup compared to existing frameworks, enabling efficient execution of large-scale models and multi-DNN support on resource-constrained mobile GPUs.

cs.DC↗

WISE-Flow: Workflow-Induced Structured Experience for Self-Evolving Conversational Service Agents

Large language model (LLM)-based agents are widely deployed in user-facing services but remain error-prone in new tasks, tend to repeat the same failure patterns, and show substantial run-to-run variability. Fixing failures via environment-specific training or manual patching is costly and hard to scale. To enable self-evolving agents in user-facing service environments, we propose WISE-Flow, a workflow-centric framework that converts historical service interactions into reusable procedural experience by inducing workflows with prerequisite-augmented action blocks. At deployment, WISE-Flow aligns the agent's execution trajectory to retrieved workflows and performs prerequisite-aware feasibility reasoning to achieve state-grounded next actions. Experiments on ToolSandbox and $τ^2$-bench show consistent improvement across base models.

cs.CL↗

Optimizing 3D Gaussian Splattering for Mobile GPUs

Image-based 3D scene reconstruction, which transforms multi-view images into a structured 3D representation of the surrounding environment, is a common task across many modern applications. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is a new paradigm to address this problem and offers considerable efficiency as compared to the previous methods. Motivated by this, and considering various benefits of mobile device deployment (data privacy, operating without internet connectivity, and potentially faster responses), this paper develops Texture3dgs, an optimized mapping of 3DGS for a mobile GPU. A critical challenge in this area turns out to be optimizing for the two-dimensional (2D) texture cache, which needs to be exploited for faster executions on mobile GPUs. As a sorting method dominates the computations in 3DGS on mobile platforms, the core of Texture3dgs is a novel sorting algorithm where the processing, data movement, and placement are highly optimized for 2D memory. The properties of this algorithm are analyzed in view of a cost model for the texture cache. In addition, we accelerate other steps of the 3DGS algorithm through improved variable layout design and other optimizations. End-to-end evaluation shows that Texture3dgs delivers up to 4.1$\times$ and 1.7$\times$ speedup for the sorting and overall 3D scene reconstruction, respectively -- while also reducing memory usage by up to 1.6$\times$ -- demonstrating the effectiveness of our design for efficient mobile 3D scene reconstruction.

cs.CV↗

TSLA: A Task-Specific Learning Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation on Autonomous Vehicles Platform

Autonomous driving platforms encounter diverse driving scenarios, each with varying hardware resources and precision requirements. Given the computational limitations of embedded devices, it is crucial to consider computing costs when deploying on target platforms like the NVIDIA\textsuperscript{\textregistered} DRIVE PX 2. Our objective is to customize the semantic segmentation network according to the computing power and specific scenarios of autonomous driving hardware. We implement dynamic adaptability through a three-tier control mechanism -- width multiplier, classifier depth, and classifier kernel -- allowing fine-grained control over model components based on hardware constraints and task requirements. This adaptability facilitates broad model scaling, targeted refinement of the final layers, and scenario-specific optimization of kernel sizes, leading to improved resource allocation and performance. Additionally, we leverage Bayesian Optimization with surrogate modeling to efficiently explore hyperparameter spaces under tight computational budgets. Our approach addresses scenario-specific and task-specific requirements through automatic parameter search, accommodating the unique computational complexity and accuracy needs of autonomous driving. It scales its Multiply-Accumulate Operations (MACs) for Task-Specific Learning Adaptation (TSLA), resulting in alternative configurations tailored to diverse self-driving tasks. These TSLA customizations maximize computational capacity and model accuracy, optimizing hardware utilization.

cs.CV↗

End-to-End On-Device Quantization-Aware Training for LLMs at Inference Cost

Quantization is an effective technique to reduce the deployment cost of large language models (LLMs), and post-training quantization (PTQ) has been widely studied due to its efficiency. However, existing PTQ methods are limited by their inability to fine-tune model parameters and often suffer significant accuracy loss in low-bit scenarios. Quantization-aware training (QAT) provides a more principled solution, but its reliance on backpropagation incurs prohibitive memory costs, limiting its practicality for LLM deployment. To address these challenges, we propose ZeroQAT, a zeroth-order optimization-based QAT framework that supports both weight and activation quantization. ZeroQAT leverages forward-only gradient estimation to eliminate backpropagation, substantially reducing computational and memory overhead while retaining the benefits of end-to-end optimization. We further introduce a lightweight variant of ZeroQAT for quantized fine-tuning, which freezes and pre-quantizes most parameters to further cut memory usage. Experiments show that ZeroQAT consistently outperforms representative PTQ and QAT baselines while requiring significantly less memory. For example, ZeroQAT enables fine-tuning of a 13B model at extremely low bit-widths (e.g., 2-4 bits) on a single 8GB GPU, and even allows fine-tuning a 6.7B model on a OnePlus 12 smartphone, demonstrating its practicality for end-to-end QAT on resource-limited edge devices.

cs.LG↗

Electric field control of third-order nonlinear Hall effect

The third-order nonlinear Hall effect (NLHE) serves as a sensitive probe of energy band geometric property, providing a new paradigm for revealing the Berry curvature distribution and topological response of quantum materials. In the Weyl semimetal TaIrTe4, we report for the first time that the sign of the third-order NLHE reverses with decreasing temperature. Through scaling law analysis, we think that the third-order NLHE at high (T > 23 K) and low (T < 23 K) temperatures is dominated by Berry-connection polarizability (BCP) and impurity scattering, respectively. The third-order NLHE response strength can be effectively modulated by an additional applied in-plane constant electric field. At the high temperature region, the BCP reduction induced by the electric field leads to a decrease in the third-order NLHE response strength, while at the low temperature region, the electric field cause both BCP and impurity scattering effects to weaken, resulting in a more significant modulation of the third-order NLHE response strength. At 4 K and an electric field strength of 0.3 kV/cm, the modulated relative response strength could reach up to 65.3%. This work provides a new means to explore the third-order NLHE and a valuable reference for the development of novel electronic devices.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

NeurLZ: An Online Neural Learning-Based Method to Enhance Scientific Lossy Compression

Large-scale scientific simulations generate massive datasets, posing challenges for storage and I/O. Traditional lossy compression struggles to advance more in balancing compression ratio, data quality, and adaptability to diverse scientific data features. While deep learning-based solutions have been explored, their common practice of relying on large models and offline training limits adaptability to dynamic data characteristics and computational efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose NeurLZ, a neural method designed to enhance lossy compression by integrating online learning, cross-field learning, and robust error regulation. Key innovations of NeurLZ include: (1) compression-time online neural learning with lightweight skipping DNN models, adapting to residual errors without costly offline pertaining, (2) the error-mitigating capability, recovering fine details from compression errors overlooked by conventional compressors, (3) $1\times$ and $2\times$ error-regulation modes, ensuring strict adherence to $1\times$ user-input error bounds strictly or relaxed 2$\times$ bounds for better overall quality, and (4) cross-field learning leveraging inter-field correlations in scientific data to improve conventional methods. Comprehensive evaluations on representative HPC datasets, e.g., Nyx, Miranda, Hurricane, against state-of-the-art compressors show NeurLZ's effectiveness. During the first five learning epochs, NeurLZ achieves an 89% bit rate reduction, with further optimization yielding up to around 94% reduction at equivalent distortion, significantly outperforming existing methods, demonstrating NeurLZ's superior performance in enhancing scientific lossy compression as a scalable and efficient solution.

cs.DC↗

GaussianSpa: An "Optimizing-Sparsifying" Simplification Framework for Compact and High-Quality 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a mainstream for novel view synthesis, leveraging continuous aggregations of Gaussian functions to model scene geometry. However, 3DGS suffers from substantial memory requirements to store the multitude of Gaussians, hindering its practicality. To address this challenge, we introduce GaussianSpa, an optimization-based simplification framework for compact and high-quality 3DGS. Specifically, we formulate the simplification as an optimization problem associated with the 3DGS training. Correspondingly, we propose an efficient "optimizing-sparsifying" solution that alternately solves two independent sub-problems, gradually imposing strong sparsity onto the Gaussians in the training process. Our comprehensive evaluations on various datasets show the superiority of GaussianSpa over existing state-of-the-art approaches. Notably, GaussianSpa achieves an average PSNR improvement of 0.9 dB on the real-world Deep Blending dataset with 10$\times$ fewer Gaussians compared to the vanilla 3DGS. Our project page is available at https://noodle-lab.github.io/gaussianspa/.

cs.CV↗

AdaCM$^2$: On Understanding Extremely Long-Term Video with Adaptive Cross-Modality Memory Reduction

The advancements in large language models (LLMs) have propelled the improvement of video understanding tasks by incorporating LLMs with visual models. However, most existing LLM-based models (e.g., VideoLLaMA, VideoChat) are constrained to processing short-duration videos. Recent attempts to understand long-term videos by extracting and compressing visual features into a fixed memory size. Nevertheless, those methods leverage only visual modality to merge video tokens and overlook the correlation between visual and textual queries, leading to difficulties in effectively handling complex question-answering tasks. To address the challenges of long videos and complex prompts, we propose AdaCM$^2$, which, for the first time, introduces an adaptive cross-modality memory reduction approach to video-text alignment in an auto-regressive manner on video streams. Our extensive experiments on various video understanding tasks, such as video captioning, video question answering, and video classification, demonstrate that AdaCM$^2$ achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple datasets while significantly reducing memory usage. Notably, it achieves a 4.5% improvement across multiple tasks in the LVU dataset with a GPU memory consumption reduction of up to 65%.

cs.CV↗

LazyDiT: Lazy Learning for the Acceleration of Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers have emerged as the preeminent models for a wide array of generative tasks, demonstrating superior performance and efficacy across various applications. The promising results come at the cost of slow inference, as each denoising step requires running the whole transformer model with a large amount of parameters. In this paper, we show that performing the full computation of the model at each diffusion step is unnecessary, as some computations can be skipped by lazily reusing the results of previous steps. Furthermore, we show that the lower bound of similarity between outputs at consecutive steps is notably high, and this similarity can be linearly approximated using the inputs. To verify our demonstrations, we propose the \textbf{LazyDiT}, a lazy learning framework that efficiently leverages cached results from earlier steps to skip redundant computations. Specifically, we incorporate lazy learning layers into the model, effectively trained to maximize laziness, enabling dynamic skipping of redundant computations. Experimental results show that LazyDiT outperforms the DDIM sampler across multiple diffusion transformer models at various resolutions. Furthermore, we implement our method on mobile devices, achieving better performance than DDIM with similar latency. Code: https://github.com/shawnricecake/lazydit

cs.LG↗

QuartDepth: Post-Training Quantization for Real-Time Depth Estimation on the Edge

Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) has emerged as a pivotal task in computer vision, supporting numerous real-world applications. However, deploying accurate depth estimation models on resource-limited edge devices, especially Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), is challenging due to the high computational and memory demands. Recent advancements in foundational depth estimation deliver impressive results but further amplify the difficulty of deployment on ASICs. To address this, we propose QuartDepth which adopts post-training quantization to quantize MDE models with hardware accelerations for ASICs. Our approach involves quantizing both weights and activations to 4-bit precision, reducing the model size and computation cost. To mitigate the performance degradation, we introduce activation polishing and compensation algorithm applied before and after activation quantization, as well as a weight reconstruction method for minimizing errors in weight quantization. Furthermore, we design a flexible and programmable hardware accelerator by supporting kernel fusion and customized instruction programmability, enhancing throughput and efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves competitive accuracy while enabling fast inference and higher energy efficiency on ASICs, bridging the gap between high-performance depth estimation and practical edge-device applicability. Code: https://github.com/shawnricecake/quart-depth

cs.CV↗

Learning LLM Preference over Intra-Dialogue Pairs: A Framework for Utterance-level Understandings

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling complex dialogue tasks without requiring use case-specific fine-tuning. However, analyzing live dialogues in real-time necessitates low-latency processing systems, making it impractical to deploy models with billions of parameters due to latency constraints. As a result, practitioners often prefer smaller models with millions of parameters, trained on high-quality, human-annotated datasets. Yet, curating such datasets is both time-consuming and costly. Consequently, there is a growing need to combine the scalability of LLM-generated labels with the precision of human annotations, enabling fine-tuned smaller models to achieve both higher speed and accuracy comparable to larger models. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective framework to address this challenge. Our approach is specifically designed for per-utterance classification problems, which encompass tasks such as intent detection, dialogue state tracking, and more. To mitigate the impact of labeling errors from LLMs -- the primary source of inaccuracies in student models -- we propose a noise-reduced preference learning loss. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves accuracy across utterance-level dialogue tasks, including sentiment detection (over $2\%$), dialogue act classification (over $1.5\%$), etc.

cs.CL↗

Electric field control of nonlinear Hall effect in Weyl semimetal TaIrTe4

The nonlinear Hall effect (NLHE), as an important probe to reveal the symmetry breaking in topological properties of materials, opens up a new dimension for exploring the energy band structure and electron transport mechanism of quantum materials. Current studies mainly focus on the observation of material intrinsic the NLHE or inducing the NLHE response by artificially constructing corrugated/twisted twodimensionalmaterial systems. Notably, the modulation of NLHE signal strength, a core parameter of device performance, has attracted much attention, while theoretical predictions suggest that an applied electric field can achieve the NLHE enhancement through modulation of the Berry curvature dipole (BCD). Here we report effective modulation the magnitude and sign of the NLHE by applying additional constant electric fields of different directions and magnitudes in the semimetal TaIrTe4. The NLHE response strength is enhanced by 168 times compared to the intrinsic one at 4 K when the additional constant electric field of -0.5 kV/cm is applied to the b-axis of TaIrTe4 and the through a.c. current is parallel to the TaIrTe4 a-axis. Scaling law analysis suggests that the enhancement may be the result of the combined effect of the electric field on the intrinsic BCD and disorder scattering effect of TaIrTe4. This work provides a means to study the properties of TaIrTe4, as well as a valuable reference for the study of novel electronic devices.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗