Tianqi Xu


2025

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pFedGPT: Hierarchically Optimizing LoRA Aggregation Weights for Personalized Federated GPT Models
Zhanming Shen | Tianqi Xu | Hao Wang | Jian Li | Miao Pan
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Federated finetuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) offers computational efficiency and preserves data privacy. However, applying LoRA in federated settings faces significant challenges: standard approaches struggle with data heterogeneity, and existing personalization techniques fail to precisely adapt shared global knowledge to individual client needs. To address these issues, we propose pFedGPT, a framework that leverages Hierarchical Bayesian Optimization (HBO) for fine-grained, personalized LoRA aggregation. pFedGPT intelligently partitions LoRA parameters based on model structure and client information, then employs HBO to hierarchically search for optimal, module-specific weights. This enables a nuanced integration of the downloaded global LoRA state with each client’s local model, precisely capturing client-specific requirements. To manage the optimization cost inherent in HBO, pFedGPT incorporates efficient multi-fidelity evaluations and a curriculum learning strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that pFedGPT achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on personalized FL benchmarks, showcasing robustness and scalability while introducing only minimal (approx. 4%) additional optimization overhead. Our results also underscore the limitations of traditional FL methods for LoRA-based LLM personalization, highlighting the need for tailored approaches like pFedGPT.

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CRAB: Cross-environment Agent Benchmark for Multimodal Language Model Agents
Tianqi Xu | Linyao Chen | Dai-Jie Wu | Yanjun Chen | Zecheng Zhang | Xiang Yao | Zhiqiang Xie | Yongchao Chen | Shilong Liu | Bochen Qian | Anjie Yang | Zhaoxuan Jin | Jianbo Deng | Philip Torr | Bernard Ghanem | Guohao Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

The development of autonomous agents increasingly relies on Multimodal Language Models (MLMs) to perform tasks described in natural language with GUI environments, such as websites, desktop computers, or mobile phones. Existing benchmarks for MLM agents in interactive environments are limited by their focus on a single environment, lack of detailed and generalized evaluation methods, and thecomplexities of constructing tasks and evaluators. To overcome these limitations, we introduce CRAB, the first cross-environment agent benchmark framework, incorporating a graph-based fine-grained evaluation method and an efficient task generation method. Our framework supports multiple devices and can be easily extended to any environment with a Python interface. Leveraging CRAB, we develope CRAB Benchmark-v0 comprising 120 tasks in computer desktop and mobile phone environments. We evaluated 6 advanced MLMs using different single and multi-agent system configurations on this benchmark. The experimental results demonstrate that the single agent with GPT-4o achieves the best completion ratio of 38.01%.