Daily Papers

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Nonetheless, it is challenging to deploy and fine-tune LLMs on mobile edge devices with limited computing, memory, and energy budgets. In this paper, we propose Confidant, a multi-backend collaborative training framework for customizing state-of-the-art LLMs on commodity mobile devices like smartphones. Confidant partitions an LLM into several sub-models so that each fits into a mobile device's memory. A pipeline parallel training mechanism is further developed to ensure fast and efficient distributed training. In addition, we propose a novel backend scheduler to allocate different attention heads to heterogeneous compute hardware, including mobile CPU and GPUs, to maximize the compute resource utilization on each edge device. Our preliminary experimental results show that Confidant achieves at most 45.3% memory reduction and 8.03x inference speedup in practical settings.

Large language model (LLM) agents need to perform multi-turn interactions in real-world tasks. However, existing multi-turn RL algorithms for optimizing LLM agents fail to perform effective credit assignment over multiple turns while leveraging the generalization capabilities of LLMs and it remains unclear how to develop such algorithms. To study this, we first introduce a new benchmark, ColBench, where an LLM agent interacts with a human collaborator over multiple turns to solve realistic tasks in backend programming and frontend design. Building on this benchmark, we propose a novel RL algorithm, SWEET-RL (RL with Step-WisE Evaluation from Training-time information), that uses a carefully designed optimization objective to train a critic model with access to additional training-time information. The critic provides step-level rewards for improving the policy model. Our experiments demonstrate that SWEET-RL achieves a 6% absolute improvement in success and win rates on ColBench compared to other state-of-the-art multi-turn RL algorithms, enabling Llama-3.1-8B to match or exceed the performance of GPT4-o in realistic collaborative content creation.