Cheng Li
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2026
Beyond Semantic Organization: Memory as Execution State Management for Long-Horizon Agents
Yaoqi Chen | Haibin Lai | Yuru Feng | Chuyu Han | Qianxi Zhang | Baotong Lu | Menghao Li | Xinjiang Wang | Zewen Jin | Hao Wu | Cheng Li | Qi Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yaoqi Chen | Haibin Lai | Yuru Feng | Chuyu Han | Qianxi Zhang | Baotong Lu | Menghao Li | Xinjiang Wang | Zewen Jin | Hao Wu | Cheng Li | Qi Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
LLM-based agents increasingly tackle long-horizon tasks with interdependent decisions, where each action reshapes future constraints and intermediate errors can cascade. Existing RAG and agent memory systems organize histories by semantic similarity, retrieving content-relevant entries at decision time. We argue that this design mismatches execution-state dependencies: it fragments decision trajectories and mixes valid and erroneous traces, hindering coherent state reconstruction and error isolation. We propose MAGE (**M**emory as **A**gent-**G**uided **E**xploration), an active execution-state manager that stores interactions in a hierarchical state tree. The agent derives its state from the active root-to-current path, combining subgoal summaries, recent traces, and hints from prior branches. Four coupled operations maintain the tree: *Grow* records new traces, *Compress* summarizes completed subgoals, *Maintain* validates summaries, and *Revise* restores a target boundary and resumes on a new branch. This design bounds context growth while preserving state integrity and isolating flawed segments from the active path. Experiments on MemoryArena show that MAGE improves the average task success rate by 7.8–20.4 pp over baselines, while reducing token consumption by 55.1%. Code is available at: https://github.com/Komorebi660/MAGE.
2025
HATA: Trainable and Hardware-Efficient Hash-Aware Top-k Attention for Scalable Large Model Inference
Ping Gong | Jiawei Yi | Shengnan Wang | Juncheng Zhang | Zewen Jin | Ouxiang Zhou | Ruibo Liu | Guanbin Xu | Youhui Bai | Bowen Ye | Kun Yuan | Tong Yang | Gong Zhang | Renhai Chen | Feng Wu | Cheng Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Ping Gong | Jiawei Yi | Shengnan Wang | Juncheng Zhang | Zewen Jin | Ouxiang Zhou | Ruibo Liu | Guanbin Xu | Youhui Bai | Bowen Ye | Kun Yuan | Tong Yang | Gong Zhang | Renhai Chen | Feng Wu | Cheng Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a pivotal research area, yet the attention module remains a critical bottleneck in LLM inference, even with techniques like KVCache to mitigate redundant computations. While various top-k attention mechanisms have been proposed to accelerate LLM inference by exploiting the inherent sparsity of attention, they often struggled to strike a balance between efficiency and accuracy. In this paper, we introduce HATA (Hash-Aware Top-k Attention), a novel approach that systematically integrates low-overhead learning-to-hash techniques into the Top-k attention process. Different from the existing top-k attention methods which are devoted to seeking an absolute estimation of qk score, typically with a great cost, HATA maps queries and keys into binary hash codes, and acquires the relative qk score order with a quite low cost, which is sufficient for realizing top-k attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HATA achieves up to 7.2× speedup compared to vanilla full attention while maintaining model accuracy. In addition, HATA outperforms the state-of-the-art top-k attention methods in both accuracy and efficiency across multiple mainstream LLM models and diverse tasks. HATA is open source at https://github.com/gpzlx1/HATA.
2024
VPTQ: Extreme Low-bit Vector Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models
Yifei Liu | Jicheng Wen | Yang Wang | Shengyu Ye | Li Lyna Zhang | Ting Cao | Cheng Li | Mao Yang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yifei Liu | Jicheng Wen | Yang Wang | Shengyu Ye | Li Lyna Zhang | Ting Cao | Cheng Li | Mao Yang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Scaling model size significantly challenges the deployment and inference of Large Language Models (LLMs). Due to the redundancy in LLM weights, recent research has focused on pushing weight-only quantization to extremely low-bit (even down to 2 bits). It reduces memory requirements, optimizes storage costs, and decreases memory bandwidth needs during inference. However, due to numerical representation limitations, traditional scalar-based weight quantization struggles to achieve such extreme low-bit.Recent research on Vector Quantization (VQ) for LLMs has demonstrated the potential for extremely low-bit model quantization by compressing vectors into indices using lookup tables. In this paper, we introduce Vector Post-Training Quantization (VPTQ) for extremely low-bit quantization of LLMs. We use Second-Order Optimization to formulate the LLM VQ problem and guide our quantization algorithm design by solving the optimization.We further refine the weights using Channel-Independent Second-Order Optimization for a granular VQ.In addition, by decomposing the optimization problem, we propose a brief and effective codebook initialization algorithm. We also extend VPTQ to support residual and outlier quantization, which enhances model accuracy and further compresses the model.Our experimental results show that VPTQ reduces model quantization perplexity by 0.01-0.34 on LLaMA-2, 0.38-0.68 on Mistral-7B, 4.41-7.34 on LLaMA-3 over SOTA at 2-bit, with an average accuracy improvement of 0.79-1.5% on LLaMA-2, 1% on Mistral-7B, 11-22% on LLaMA-3 on QA tasks on average. We only utilize 10.4-18.6% of the quantization algorithm execution time, resulting in a 1.6-1.8× increase in inference throughput compared to SOTA.
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Co-authors
- Zewen Jin 2
- Youhui Bai 1
- Ting Cao 1
- Qi Chen 1
- Renhai Chen 1
- Yaoqi Chen 1
- Yuru Feng 1
- Ping Gong 1
- Chuyu Han 1
- Haibin Lai 1
- Menghao Li 1
- Ruibo Liu 1
- Yifei Liu 1
- Baotong Lu 1
- Shengnan Wang 1
- Xinjiang Wang 1
- Yang Wang 1
- Jicheng Wen 1
- Feng Wu 1
- Hao Wu 1
- Guanbin Xu 1
- Mao Yang 1
- Tong Yang 1
- Bowen Ye 1
- Shengyu Ye 1
- Jiawei Yi 1
- Kun Yuan 1
- Gong Zhang 1
- Juncheng Zhang 1
- Li Lyna Zhang 1
- Qianxi Zhang 1
- Ouxiang Zhou 1