Yunpeng Hou

Author directory

2026

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) increasingly use latent collaboration to avoid the information loss and repeated encoding-decoding overhead of natural-language communication. However, directly forwarding all sender latents makes the receiver-side context scale with both the number of agents and the reasoning length, increasing computation, memory usage, and collaboration latency. A natural solution is latent compression. But we find that cross-agent redundancy remains unresolved in existing latent compression approaches, which typically compress each sender independently and then concatenate the results. We propose LatCom, a cross-agent latent compression framework for efficient multi-agent latent collaboration. LatCom maps multiple sender latents into a fixed number of receiver-readable and task-relevant slots. Rather than reconstructing all sender hidden states, it optimizes the compressed latents for receiver-side task utility. LatCom trains the compressor in two stages: single-sender readability learning first establishes a latent interface interpretable by the frozen receiver, and multi-sender fusion learning then trains the compressor to fuse complementary evidence and remove redundancy across agents. Experiments on multiple benchmarks with the Qwen-4B model show that LatCom improves average inference speed by 2.46x over LatentMAS, reduces token usage by 70.3%, and increases average accuracy by 0.46%.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) significantly enhances LLMs but faces high prefill latency during long-context processing. While KV cache reuse can mitigate this, current methods relying on shallow features or static heuristics often fail to identify critical tokens for recomputation, resulting in generation quality degradation.We have an insight that KV deviations are more pronounced in deep layers.However, directly extracting deep-layer features from the target model is computationally prohibitive. Crucially, we find that the deep-layer features of a lightweight speculative model exhibit strong consistency with the target model in the selection of critical tokens for recomputation.In light of these insights, we propose SpecCache, which employs deep-layer hidden-state norms from a speculative model as a proxy to guide the critical token selection for target large model.Experiments demonstrate that SpecCache outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. Compared to full KV recomputation, it reduces time-to-first-token (TTFT) by 2.17-3.95× and increases inference throughput by 2.7-5.2×, with negligible degradation in generation quality relative to full recomputation.
Table Question Answering (TableQA) benefits significantly from table pruning, which extracts compact sub-tables by eliminating redundant cells to streamline downstream reasoning. However, existing pruning methods typically rely on sequential revisions driven by unreliable critique signals, often failing to detect the loss of answer-critical data. To address this limitation, we propose TabTrim, a novel table pruning framework which transforms table pruning from sequential revisions to gold trajectory-supervised parallel search. TabTrim derives a gold pruning trajectory using the intermediate sub-tables in the execution process of gold SQL queries, and trains a pruner and a verifier to make the step-wise pruning result align with the gold pruning trajectory. During inference, TabTrim performs parallel search to explore multiple candidate pruning trajectories and identify the optimal sub-table. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TabTrim achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse tabular reasoning tasks: TabTrim-8B reaches 73.5% average accuracy, outperforming the strongest baseline by 3.2%, including 79.4% on WikiTQ and 61.2% on TableBench.
Table question answering (TableQA) is a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP). The strong reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have brought significant advances in this field. However, as real-world applications involve increasingly complex questions and larger tables, substantial noisy data is introduced, which severely degrades reasoning performance. To address this challenge, we focus on improving two core capabilities: Relevance Filtering, which identifies and retains information truly relevant to reasoning, and Table Pruning, which reduces table size while preserving essential content. Based on these principles, we propose EnoTab, a dual denoising framework for complex questions and large-scale tables. Specifically, we first perform Evidence-based Question Denoising by decomposing the question into minimal semantic units and filtering out those irrelevant to answer reasoning based on consistency and usability criteria. Then, we propose Evidence Tree-guided Table Denoising, which constructs an explicit and transparent table pruning path to remove irrelevant data step by step. At each pruning step, we observe the intermediate state of the table and apply a post-order node rollback mechanism to handle abnormal table states, ultimately producing a highly reliable sub-table for final answer reasoning. Finally, extensive experiments show that EnoTab achieves outstanding performance on TableQA tasks with complex questions and large-scale tables, confirming its effectiveness.