Liu, Yuhan
EQ-Negotiator: An Emotion-Reasoning LLM Agent in Credit Dialogues
Liu, Yuhan, Long, Yunbo
While large language model (LLM)-based chatbots have been applied for effective engagement in credit dialogues, their capacity for dynamic emotional expression remains limited. Current agents primarily rely on passive empathy rather than affective reasoning. For instance, when faced with persistent client negativity, the agent should employ strategic emotional adaptation by expressing measured anger to discourage counterproductive behavior and guide the conversation toward resolution. This context-aware emotional modulation is essential for imitating the nuanced decision-making of human negotiators. This paper introduces an EQ-negotiator that combines emotion sensing from pre-trained language models (PLMs) with emotional reasoning based on Game Theory and Hidden Markov Models. It takes into account both the current and historical emotions of the client to better manage and address negative emotions during interactions. By fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) on public emotion datasets and validating them on the credit dialogue datasets, our approach enables LLM-based agents to effectively capture shifts in client emotions and dynamically adjust their response tone based on our emotion decision policies in real-world financial negotiations. This EQ-negotiator can also help credit agencies foster positive client relationships, enhancing satisfaction in credit services.
The Devil is in Low-Level Features for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation
Liu, Yuhan, Zou, Yixiong, Li, Yuhua, Li, Ruixuan
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation (CDFSS) is proposed to transfer the pixel-level segmentation capabilities learned from large-scale source-domain datasets to downstream target-domain datasets, with only a few annotated images per class. In this paper, we focus on a well-observed but under-explored phenomenon in CDFSS: for target domains, particularly those distant from the source domain, segmentation performance peaks at the very early epochs, and declines sharply as the source-domain training proceeds. We delve into this phenomenon for an interpretation: low-level features are vulnerable to domain shifts, leading to sharper loss landscapes during the source-domain training, which is the devil of CDFSS. Based on this phenomenon and interpretation, we further propose a method that includes two plug-and-play modules: one to flatten the loss landscapes for low-level features during source-domain training as a novel sharpness-aware minimization method, and the other to directly supplement target-domain information to the model during target-domain testing by low-level-based calibration. Extensive experiments on four target datasets validate our rationale and demonstrate that our method surpasses the state-of-the-art method in CDFSS signifcantly by 3.71% and 5.34% average MIoU in 1-shot and 5-shot scenarios, respectively.
Alchemist: Towards the Design of Efficient Online Continual Learning System
Huang, Yuyang, Liu, Yuhan, Gunawi, Haryadi S., Li, Beibin, Hwang, Changho
Continual learning has become a promising solution to refine large language models incrementally by leveraging user feedback. In particular, online continual learning - iteratively training the model with small batches of user feedback - has demonstrated notable performance improvements. However, the existing practice of separating training and serving processes forces the online trainer to recompute the intermediate results already done during serving. Such redundant computations can account for 30%-42% of total training time. In this paper, we propose Alchemist, to the best of our knowledge, the first online continual learning system that efficiently reuses serving activations to increase training throughput. Alchemist introduces two key techniques: (1) recording and storing activations and KV cache only during the prefill phase to minimize latency and memory overhead; and (2) smart activation offloading and hedging. Evaluations with inputs of varied token length sampled from ShareGPT dataset show that compared with a separate training cluster, Alchemist significantly increases training throughput by up to 1.72x, reduces up to 47% memory usage during training, and supports up to 2x more training tokens - all while maintaining negligible impact on serving latency.
Motion Blender Gaussian Splatting for Dynamic Reconstruction
Zhang, Xinyu, Chang, Haonan, Liu, Yuhan, Boularias, Abdeslam
Gaussian splatting has emerged as a powerful tool for high-fidelity reconstruction of dynamic scenes. However, existing methods primarily rely on implicit motion representations, such as encoding motions into neural networks or per-Gaussian parameters, which makes it difficult to further manipulate the reconstructed motions. This lack of explicit controllability limits existing methods to replaying recorded motions only, which hinders a wider application. To address this, we propose Motion Blender Gaussian Splatting (MB-GS), a novel framework that uses motion graph as an explicit and sparse motion representation. The motion of graph links is propagated to individual Gaussians via dual quaternion skinning, with learnable weight painting functions determining the influence of each link. The motion graphs and 3D Gaussians are jointly optimized from input videos via differentiable rendering. Experiments show that MB-GS achieves state-of-the-art performance on the iPhone dataset while being competitive on HyperNeRF. Additionally, we demonstrate the application potential of our method in generating novel object motions and robot demonstrations through motion editing. Video demonstrations can be found at https://mlzxy.github.io/mbgs.
Pastiche Novel Generation Creating: Fan Fiction You Love in Your Favorite Author's Style
Han, Xueran, Liu, Yuhan, Li, Mingzhe, Liu, Wei, Hu, Sen, Yan, Rui, Xu, Zhiqiang, Chen, Xiuying
Great novels create immersive worlds with rich character arcs, well-structured plots, and nuanced writing styles. However, current novel generation methods often rely on brief, simplistic story outlines and generate details using plain, generic language. To bridge this gap, we introduce the task of Pastiche Novel Generation, which requires the generated novels to imitate the distinctive features of the original work, including understanding character profiles, predicting plausible plot developments, and writing concrete details using vivid, expressive language. To achieve this, we propose WriterAgent, a novel generation system designed to master the core aspects of literary pastiche. WriterAgent is trained through a curriculum learning paradigm, progressing from low-level stylistic mastery to high-level narrative coherence. Its key tasks include language style learning, character modeling, plot planning, and stylish writing, ensuring comprehensive narrative control. To support this, WriterAgent leverages the WriterLoRA framework, an extension of LoRA with hierarchical and cumulative task-specific modules, each specializing in a different narrative aspect. We evaluate WriterAgent on multilingual classics like Harry Potter and Dream of the Red Chamber, demonstrating its superiority over baselines in capturing the target author's settings, character dynamics, and writing style to produce coherent, faithful narratives.
Injecting Domain-Specific Knowledge into Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey
Song, Zirui, Yan, Bin, Liu, Yuhan, Fang, Miao, Li, Mingzhe, Yan, Rui, Chen, Xiuying
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various tasks such as natural language understanding, text summarization, and machine translation. However, their general-purpose nature often limits their effectiveness in domain-specific applications that require specialized knowledge, such as healthcare, chemistry, or legal analysis. To address this, researchers have explored diverse methods to enhance LLMs by integrating domain-specific knowledge. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of these methods, which we categorize into four key approaches: dynamic knowledge injection, static knowledge embedding, modular adapters, and prompt optimization. Each approach offers unique mechanisms to equip LLMs with domain expertise, balancing trade-offs between flexibility, scalability, and efficiency. We discuss how these methods enable LLMs to tackle specialized tasks, compare their advantages and disadvantages, evaluate domain-specific LLMs against general LLMs, and highlight the challenges and opportunities in this emerging field. For those interested in delving deeper into this area, we also summarize the commonly used datasets and benchmarks. To keep researchers updated on the latest studies, we maintain an open-source at: https://github.com/abilliyb/Knowledge_Injection_Survey_Papers, dedicated to documenting research in the field of specialized LLM.
More is not always better? Enhancing Many-Shot In-Context Learning with Differentiated and Reweighting Objectives
Zhang, Xiaoqing, Lv, Ang, Liu, Yuhan, Sung, Flood, Liu, Wei, Shang, Shuo, Chen, Xiuying, Yan, Rui
Large language models (LLMs) excel at few-shot in-context learning (ICL) without requiring parameter updates. However, as the number of ICL demonstrations increases from a few to many, performance tends to plateau and eventually decline. We identify two primary causes for this trend: the suboptimal negative log-likelihood (NLL) optimization objective and the incremental data noise. To address these issues, we introduce DrICL, a novel optimization method that enhances model performance through Differentiated Learning and advantage-based Reweighting objectives. Globally, DrICL utilizes differentiated learning to optimize the NLL objective, ensuring that many-shot performance surpasses zero-shot levels. Locally, it dynamically adjusts the weighting of many-shot demonstrations by leveraging cumulative advantages inspired by reinforcement learning, thereby improving generalization. This approach allows the model to handle varying numbers of shots effectively, mitigating the impact of noisy data. Recognizing the lack of multi-task datasets with diverse many-shot distributions, we develop the Many-Shot ICL Benchmark (ICL-50)-a large-scale benchmark of 50 tasks that cover shot numbers from 1 to 350 within sequences of up to 8,000 tokens-for fine-tuning purposes. ICL-50 facilitates the evaluation of many-shot ICL strategies across seven prominent NLP tasks and 50 distinct datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that LLMs enhanced with DrICL achieve significant improvements in many-shot setups across various tasks, including both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. We release the code and benchmark dataset hoping to facilitate further research in many-shot ICL.
Thinking Before Running! Efficient Code Generation with Thorough Exploration and Optimal Refinement
Zhang, Xiaoqing, Liu, Yuhan, Sung, Flood, Chen, Xiuying, Yan, Rui
Code generation is crucial in software engineering for automating the coding process efficiently. While test-time computation methods show promise, they suffer from high latency due to multiple computation rounds. To overcome this, we introduce ThinkCoder, a framework that combines thorough exploration with optimal refinement. The exploration phase diversifies the solution space by searching for potential solutions, followed by a refinement phase that enhances precision. This approach allows us to select the best solution through careful consideration before taking action, avoiding excessive trial and error. To further minimize test-time computation overhead, we introduce preference-driven optimization with Reinforced Self-Training (ReST), which uses exploration trajectories from ThinkCoder to guide LLM's evolution. By learning preferences, this approach improves LLM's exploration efficiency, reducing computational costs while maintaining accuracy. ThinkCoder boosts the performance of multiple base LLMs, excelling on benchmarks like HumanEval and MBPP. Compared to SOTA models, it improves Pass@1 by 1.5\% over MapCoder with just 21.7\% of the computation cost. Against AgentCoder, ThinkCoder achieves a 0.6\% higher Pass@1 after 2 rounds, outperforming AgentCoder's 5 rounds. Additionally, ReST with success trajectories enhances efficiency, allowing models like LLaMA2-7B to achieve competitive results using only 20\% of the computational resources. These results highlight the framework's effectiveness and scalability.
DroidSpeak: KV Cache Sharing for Cross-LLM Communication and Multi-LLM Serving
Liu, Yuhan, Huang, Yuyang, Yao, Jiayi, Gu, Zhuohan, Du, Kuntai, Li, Hanchen, Cheng, Yihua, Jiang, Junchen, Lu, Shan, Musuvathi, Madan, Choukse, Esha
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in complex workflows, where different LLMs and fine-tuned variants collaboratively address complex tasks. However, these systems face significant inefficiencies due to redundant context processing of the shared context. We propose DroidSpeak, a framework that optimizes context sharing between fine-tuned LLMs derived from the same foundational model. DroidSpeak identifies critical layers in the KV cache and selectively recomputes them, enabling effective reuse of intermediate data while maintaining high accuracy. Our approach balances computational efficiency and task fidelity, significantly reducing inference latency and throughput bottlenecks. Experiments on diverse datasets and model pairs demonstrate that DroidSpeak achieves up to 3x higher throughputs and 2.6x faster prefill times with negligible accuracy loss compared to full recomputation.
Autoregressive Action Sequence Learning for Robotic Manipulation
Zhang, Xinyu, Liu, Yuhan, Chang, Haonan, Schramm, Liam, Boularias, Abdeslam
Designing a universal policy architecture that performs well across diverse robots and task configurations remains a key challenge. In this work, we address this by representing robot actions as sequential data and generating actions through autoregressive sequence modeling. Existing autoregressive architectures generate end-effector waypoints sequentially as word tokens in language modeling, which are limited to low-frequency control tasks. Unlike language, robot actions are heterogeneous and often include continuous values -- such as joint positions, 2D pixel coordinates, and end-effector poses -- which are not easily suited for language-based modeling. Based on this insight, we introduce a straightforward enhancement: we extend causal transformers' single-token prediction to support predicting a variable number of tokens in a single step through our Chunking Causal Transformer (CCT). This enhancement enables robust performance across diverse tasks of various control frequencies, greater efficiency by having fewer autoregression steps, and lead to a hybrid action sequence design by mixing different types of actions and using a different chunk size for each action type. Based on CCT, we propose the Autoregressive Policy (ARP) architecture, which solves manipulation tasks by generating hybrid action sequences. We evaluate ARP across diverse robotic manipulation environments, including Push-T, ALOHA, and RLBench, and show that ARP, as a universal architecture, outperforms the environment-specific state-of-the-art in all tested benchmarks, while being more efficient in computation and parameter sizes. Videos of our real robot demonstrations, all source code and the pretrained models of ARP can be found at http://github.com/mlzxy/arp.