Bowen Bao
Author directory2026
UltraQuant: 4-bit KV Caching for Context-Heavy Agents
Inesh Chakrabarti | David Limpus | Aditi Ghai Rana | Bowen Bao | Spandan Tiwari | Thiago Crepaldi | Ashish Sirasao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Inesh Chakrabarti | David Limpus | Aditi Ghai Rana | Bowen Bao | Spandan Tiwari | Thiago Crepaldi | Ashish Sirasao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Context-heavy agents place substantial pressure on the key–value (KV) cache: long prefixes are reused across many short turns, while concurrency determines whether the serving system can keep GPUs utilized. We study 4-bit KV-cache compression for this setting, using TurboQuant-style rotation and codebook quantization as a quality anchor and vLLM FP8 KV caching as the deployment anchor. We report three contributions. First, we frame 4-bit KV caching around multi-round agent workloads where task quality, cache residency, and serving throughput must be measured jointly. Second, we describe the practical design choices needed to make the 4-bit path robust, including asymmetric K/V treatment, Walsh–Hadamard rotation, QJL removal, and block-scale variants. Third, we present serving optimizations on AMD GPUs, including optimized decode-attention kernels and UltraQuant, an FP4 approximation path that uses FP8 queries, FP4 KV tensors, UE8M0 group scales, and native scaled-MFMA support on CDNA4. On an adaptive-SLO replay of production Claude Code traces, UltraQuant sustains 2.71× (MiniMax-M2.5) and 4.38× (Qwen3-235B) the qualified-request throughput of the BF16 baseline, matching or exceeding hardware FP8 KV while using half the KV bytes. UltraQuant delivers its largest gains in long-context, high-concurrency, memory-constrained serving regimes.
2025
RealHiTBench: A Comprehensive Realistic Hierarchical Table Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-Based Table Analysis
Pengzuo Wu | Yuhang Yang | Guangcheng Zhu | Chao Ye | Hong Gu | Xu Lu | Ruixuan Xiao | Bowen Bao | Yijing He | Liangyu Zha | Wentao Ye | Junbo Zhao | Haobo Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Pengzuo Wu | Yuhang Yang | Guangcheng Zhu | Chao Ye | Hong Gu | Xu Lu | Ruixuan Xiao | Bowen Bao | Yijing He | Liangyu Zha | Wentao Ye | Junbo Zhao | Haobo Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is an increasing need for challenging benchmarks to evaluate their capabilities in handling complex tabular data. However, existing benchmarks are either based on outdated data setups or focus solely on simple, flat table structures. In this paper, we introduce RealHiTBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of both LLMs and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) across a variety of input formats for complex tabular data, including LaTeX, HTML, and PNG. RealHiTBench also includes a diverse collection of tables with intricate structures, spanning a wide range of task types. Our experimental results, using 25 state-of-the-art LLMs, demonstrate that RealHiTBench is indeed a challenging benchmark. Moreover, we also develop TreeThinker, a tree-based agent that organizes hierarchical headers into a tree structure for enhanced tabular reasoning, validating the importance of improving LLMs’ perception of table hierarchies. We hope that our work will inspire further research on tabular data reasoning and the development of more robust models. The code and data are available at https://github.com/cspzyy/RealHiTBench.