Optimizing distributed training strategies for large-scale deep learning models remains a critical challenge in both industry and academia, demanding extensive domain expertise and manual tuning. Existing automated distributed training frameworks are plagued by over-reliance on prior profiling, poor generalization across models/hardware, and scalability constraints stemming from vast search spaces, impeding real-world applicability. To address these challenges, we propose OptiCo, a model-driven multi-agent framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable automatic and explainable distributed training strategy configuration. OptiCo orchestrates a team of reasoning-driven agents, through a shared Global Message Pool facilitating persistent memory and coordination. By employing inception prompting and Chain-Of-Thought (COT) reasoning, agents iteratively refine configurations, detect bottlenecks, analyze failures, and optimize resource utilization. Evaluated across 25+ configurations spanning diverse model architectures, GPU types and scales, OptiCo outperforms expert-designed strategies within 20 iterations, achieving an average performance improvement of 1.84%, with gains ranging from 0.08% to 8.65%. The source codes are avaiable at https://github.com/TangZhe96/OptiCo-public.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit growing safety and alignment risks, hindering their deployment in high-stakes decision-making scenarios. In this paper, we identify a previously underexplored risk: similar to humans, LLMs can exhibit egoistic decision-making, in which they pursue short-term self-benefits through improper means while disregarding collective welfare and ethical constraints. We term this phenomenon Strategic Egoism (SE). To systematically evaluate SE, we introduce SEBench, a benchmark comprising 880 decision-making scenarios across 11 domains involving explicit profit temptations, which measures egoistic behavior along 6 psychologically grounded dimensions (e.g., rule circumvention). Each scenario adopts a single-role decision-making setting with carefully designed choice options to elicit self-serving strategies. Extensive experiments on 9 proprietary LLMs reveal that SE behaviors are widespread, with an average occurrence rate of 67.96%, and frequently manifest as manipulative coercion. Notably, we find that models more susceptible to profit temptations also exhibit broader safety deficiencies, including higher toxicity, lower truthfulness, increased jailbreak vulnerability, and elevated Dark Triad–style trait scores. Drawing inspiration from psychological interventions, we further propose SEGuard, a lightweight mitigation that reinforces situational constraints and suppresses egoistic tactics.

Deep learning has introduced significant improvements in many software analysis tasks. Although the Large Language Models (LLMs) based neural code models demonstrate commendable performance when trained and tested within the intra-project independent and identically distributed (IID) setting, they often struggle to generalize effectively to real-world inter-project out-of-distribution (OOD) data. In this work, we show that this phenomenon is caused by the heavy reliance on project-specific shortcuts for prediction instead of ground-truth evidence. We propose a Cond-Idf measurement to interpret this behavior, which quantifies the relatedness of a token with a label and its project-specificness. The strong correlation between model behavior and the proposed measurement indicates that without proper regularization, models tend to leverage spurious statistical cues for prediction. Equipped with these observations, we propose a novel bias mitigation mechanism that regularizes the model’s learning behavior by leveraging latent logic relations among samples. Experimental results on two representative program analysis tasks indicate that our mitigation framework can improve both inter-project OOD generalization and adversarial robustness, while not sacrificing accuracy on intra-project IID data.