Lab · NVIDIA
arxiv arXiv cs.AI · 6d ago

UltraQuant: 4-bit KV Caching for Context-Heavy Agents

UltraQuant enables 4-bit KV caching for context-heavy agents, reducing P50 time-to-first-token by 3.47x in late rounds and boosting output throughput by 1.63x over FP8 KV baseline. It achieves this using FP8 queries, FP4 KV tensors, UE8M0 group scales, and native scaled-MFMA on AMD CDNA4 GPUs, with optimizations for decode-attention kernels and robust design choices like asymmetric K/V treatment and Walsh-Hadamard rotation.

arxiv arXiv cs.LG · 6d ago

Probe-and-Refine Tuning Improves Coding Agent Performance

A new method called probe-and-refine tuning uses synthetic bug-fix probes to iteratively improve repository guidance files with single-shot LLM calls, without agent loops or tool use. On SWE-bench Verified, it achieves a 33.0% mean resolve rate—14.5 percentage points higher than the initial static knowledge base—showing improved coverage rather than patch precision. The method enables agents to use larger step budgets effectively, and performance remains stable across models when diagnostic output is sufficient.

arxiv arXiv cs.LG · 6d ago

Execution-State Capsules for Low-Latency On-Device AI Serving

Execution-state capsules enable graph-bound checkpointing and restoration of complete execution state, including KV, recurrent, and convolution states, for low-latency, small-batch on-device AI serving. On RTX 5090 and Jetson AGX Thor, capsule restore achieves byte-exact and token-identical correctness, with sub-millisecond GPU operations and TTFT speedups up to 27x at 16k tokens, demonstrating significant latency reduction in interactive AI workflows.

arxiv arXiv cs.AI · 6d ago

CRAX: Fast Safe Reinforcement Learning Benchmarking

CRAX introduces a high-fidelity, accelerated safety benchmark for reinforcement learning using MuJoCo XLA. It achieves up to 100x speedups over CPU-based benchmarks via vectorization and hardware acceleration, featuring six environment suites and three agent-specific tasks across three difficulty levels. Evaluation of six safe RL methods shows no single approach dominates, highlighting trade-offs between performance and safety, with curriculum learning and safety transfer improving results.

arxiv arXiv cs.LG · 6d ago

CRAX: Fast Safe Reinforcement Learning Benchmarking

CRAX introduces a high-fidelity, fast safety benchmark for reinforcement learning using MuJoCo XLA. It achieves up to 100x speedups over CPU-based benchmarks via vectorization and hardware acceleration, featuring six environment suites and three agent-specific tasks across three difficulty levels. Evaluation of six safe RL methods shows no single approach dominates, highlighting trade-offs between performance and safety, with curriculum learning and safety transfer improving results.

arxiv arXiv cs.LG · 9d ago

Geometric Action Model for Robot Policy Learning

The Geometric Action Model (GAM) enables robot policies to reason about 3D physical interactions by repurposing a pretrained geometric foundation model. GAM splits the GFM to serve as both an observation encoder and a causal future predictor, then routes predicted future geometry and actions through the same backbone, achieving accurate, robust, and efficient manipulation performance in simulation and real-robot benchmarks.

media r/LocalLLaMA · 5d ago

Fixing Long-Context Decode Cliff on Radeon R9700 with vLLM 0.22.1

A long-context decode performance cliff on AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 (RDNA4) was resolved by enabling AITER Unified Attention in vLLM 0.22.1. The fix involves relaxing a CDNA gate to include RDNA4, disabling other attention backends, and using bf16 KV cache, resulting in significant speedups across all context lengths. FP8 KV is ineffective on this hardware, and the model's native 262K context is fully achievable with bf16, offering ~2.9× concurrency without needing FP8.

arxiv arXiv cs.AI · 6d ago

UFP4: Uniform 4-Bit Training Overcomes Shrinkage Bias in LLM Pretraining

A study identifies shrinkage bias in E2M1-based FP4 formats due to geometric asymmetry, causing multiplicative error accumulation and training instability. The proposed UFP4 recipe uses uniform E1M2/INT4 grids and applies Random Hadamard Transform to all GEMMs, achieving lower loss degradation than E2M1 baselines in large-scale LLM pretraining. The authors recommend E1M2/INT4 as a first-class training primitive for future accelerators.