Multimodal Large Language Models face severe challenges in computational efficiency and memory consumption due to the substantial expansion of the visual KV cache when processing long visual contexts. Existing KV cache compression methods typically rely on the “persistence of importance” hypothesis to prune tokens. However, this approach proves fragile in multimodal settings due to two key issues: 1) Visual tokens display “deferred importance,” initially exhibiting low salience but becoming pivotal during later decoding, which can lead to premature eviction. 2) Discrete pruning disrupts the inherent spatial continuity of visual cues. To address these challenges, we propose RetentiveKV, an entropy-driven KV cache optimization method that reformulates KV eviction from “discrete context truncation” to “continuous memory evolution” based on State Space Models. Our method leverages information entropy to quantify the information potential of low-attention tokens and integrates tokens scheduled for eviction into a continuous state space through entropy-guided state transitions, enabling their dynamic reactivation when semantic relevance arises during subsequent decoding. Extensive experiments on multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that RetentiveKV achieves 5.0 × KV cache compression and 1.5 × decoding acceleration.

Evaluating the conversational abilities of large language models (LLMs) remains a challenging task. Current mainstream approaches primarily rely on the “LLM-as-a-judge" paradigm, where an LLM is prompted to serve as an evaluator to assess dialogue quality. However, such methods often suffer from various biases, which undermine the reliability and consistency of the evaluation results. To mitigate these biases, recent methods employ multiple LLMs as judges and aggregate their judgments to select the optimal assessment. Although effective, this multi-judge approach incurs significant computational overhead during inference. In this paper, we propose an efficient multi-turn dialogue evaluator that captures the collective wisdom of multiple LLM judges by aggregating their preference knowledge into a single model. Our approach preserves the advantages of diverse multi-judge feedback while drastically reducing the evaluation cost, enabling fast and flexible dialogue quality assessment. Extensive experiments on seven single rating and pairwise comparison dialogue evaluation benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines across diverse scenarios, showcasing its efficiency and robustness.

Traditional KV cache eviction strategies, which discard less critical KV-pairs based on attention scores, often degrade generation quality, causing context loss or hallucinations. Recent efforts shift toward KV merging, merging eviction tokens with retention tokens based on similarity. However, in multimodal scenarios, distributional differences across modality tokens and attentional biases in cross-modal interactions limit its effectiveness. This work introduces FlowMM, an adaptive framework for cross-modal information flow-guided multimodal KV cache merging. FlowMM leverages cross-modal information flow to dynamically apply layer-specific merging strategies, capturing modality-specific patterns while preserving contextual integrity. Furthermore, we introduce a sensitivity-adaptive token matching mechanism that jointly evaluates token similarity and task-critical sensitivity, merging low-risk tokens while safeguarding high-sensitivity ones. Extensive experiments across diverse leading MLLMs show that FlowMM reduces KV cache memory by 80% to 95% and decoding latency by 1.3-1.8×, while maintaining competitive task performance.

This paper introduces MadaKV, a modality-adaptive key-value (KV) cache eviction strategy designed to enhance the efficiency of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in long-context inference. In multimodal scenarios, attention heads exhibit varying preferences for different modalities, resulting in significant disparities in modality importance across attention heads. Traditional KV cache eviction methods, which are tailored for unimodal settings, fail to capture modality-specific information, thereby yielding suboptimal performance. MadaKV addresses these challenges through two key components: modality preference adaptation and hierarchical compression compensation. By dynamically sensing modality information within attention heads and adaptively retaining critical tokens, MadaKV achieves substantial reductions in KV cache memory footprint and model inference decoding latency (1.3 to 1.5 times improvement) while maintaining high accuracy across various multimodal long-context tasks. Extensive experiments on representative MLLMs and the MileBench benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of MadaKV compared to existing KV cache eviction methods.

Tools serve as pivotal interfaces that enable humans to understand and reshape the environment. With the advent of foundation models, AI systems can utilize tools to expand their capabilities and interact with the real world. Existing tool learning methodologies, encompassing supervised fine-tuning and prompt engineering approaches, often induce large language models to utilize tools indiscriminately, as complex tasks often exceed their own competencies. However, introducing tools for simple tasks, which the models themselves can readily resolve, can inadvertently propagate errors rather than enhance performance. This leads to the research question: can we teach language models when and how to use tools? To meet this need, we propose Tool leaRning wIth exeCution fEedback (TRICE), a two-stage end-to-end framework that enables the model to continually learn through feedback derived from tool execution, thereby learning when and how to use tools effectively. Experimental results, backed by further analysis, show that TRICE can make the large language model selectively use tools by improving the accuracy of tool usage while enhancing insufficient tool learning and mitigating excessive reliance on tools.

Adapting pretrained models to downstream tasks is important in practical applications. Existing frameworks adapt from an initial pretrained model to each downstream task directly, but ignore the sequential nature of the downstream tasks and their feedback effect on the pretrained model. In this work, we propose a new framework, called BiKT, to enable bidirectional knowledge transfer between pretrained models and downstream tasks in rounds. We model each downstream task in the current round as a target task for adaptation and treat all the tasks in the previous rounds as source tasks for feedback. We design a feedback algorithm by multi-task learning over the labeled data of the source tasks, where task-specific prompts are plugged into the backbone network for decoupling task-exclusive knowledge from task-shared knowledge. We further utilize the good initiation of the new backbone network updated in the feedback phase and the trained prompts of the source tasks for adaptation. Evaluation over 9 GLUE datasets, 6 SuperGLUE datasets, and 8 other datasets using models with different pretraining levels and different parameter scales shows remarkable improvement in full-shot and few-shot adaptation settings.

Language agents have achieved considerable performance on various complex question-answering tasks by planning with external tools. Despite the incessant exploration in this field, existing language agent systems still struggle with costly, non-reproducible data reliance and face the challenge of compelling a single model for multiple functions. To this end, we introduce AutoAct, an automatic agent learning framework for QA that does not rely on large-scale annotated data and synthetic planning trajectories from closed-source models (e.g., GPT-4). Given limited data with a tool library, AutoAct first automatically synthesizes planning trajectories without any assistance from humans or strong closed-source models. Then, AutoAct leverages a division-of-labor strategy to automatically differentiate based on the target task information and synthesized trajectories, producing a sub-agent group to complete the task. We conduct comprehensive experiments with different LLMs, which demonstrates that AutoAct yields better or parallel performance compared to various strong baselines. Further analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the division-of-labor strategy, with the trajectory quality generated by AutoAct generally outperforming that of others.