Jiaxiang Ren
2026
Adaptive Data Flywheel: Applying MAPE Control Loops to AI Agent Improvement
Aaditya Shukla | Sidney Knowles | Meenakshi Madugula | David Farris | Ryan Angilly | Santiago Pombo | Lu An | Anbang Xu | Abhinav Balasubramanian | Tan Yu | Jiaxiang Ren | Rama Akkiraju
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
Aaditya Shukla | Sidney Knowles | Meenakshi Madugula | David Farris | Ryan Angilly | Santiago Pombo | Lu An | Anbang Xu | Abhinav Balasubramanian | Tan Yu | Jiaxiang Ren | Rama Akkiraju
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
Enterprise AI agents must continuously adapt to maintain accuracy, reduce latency, and remain aligned with user needs. We present a practical implementation of a data flywheel in NVInfo AI, NVIDIA’s Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Knowledge Assistant serving over 30,000 employees. By operationalizing a MAPE-driven data flywheel, we built a closed-loop system that systematically addresses failures in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and enables continuous learning.Over a 3-month post-deployment period, we monitored feedback and collected 495 negative samples. Analysis revealed two major failure modes: routing errors (5.25%) and query rephrasal errors (3.2%). Using NVIDIA NeMo Microservices, we implemented targeted improvements through fine-tuning. For routing, we replaced a Llama 3.1 70B model with a fine-tuned 8B variant, achieving 96% accuracy, a 10× reduction in model size, and 70% latency improvement. For query rephrasal, fine-tuning yielded a 3.7% gain in accuracy and a 40% latency reduction.Our approach demonstrates how human-in-the-loop (HITL) feedback, when structured within a data flywheel, transforms enterprise AI agents into self-improving systems. Key learnings include approaches to ensure agent robustness despite limited user feedback, navigating privacy constraints, and executing staged rollouts in production. This work offers a repeatable blueprint for building robust, adaptive enterprise AI agents capable of learning from real-world usage at scale.
2024
Fisher Information-based Efficient Curriculum Federated Learning with Large Language Models
Ji Liu | Jiaxiang Ren | Ruoming Jin | Zijie Zhang | Yang Zhou | Patrick Valduriez | Dejing Dou
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Ji Liu | Jiaxiang Ren | Ruoming Jin | Zijie Zhang | Yang Zhou | Patrick Valduriez | Dejing Dou
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
As a promising paradigm to collaboratively train models with decentralized data, Federated Learning (FL) can be exploited to fine-tune Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs correspond to huge size, the scale of the training data significantly increases, which leads to tremendous amounts of computation and communication costs. The training data is generally non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID), which requires adaptive data processing within each device. Although Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) can significantly reduce the scale of parameters to update in the fine-tuning process, it still takes unaffordable time to transfer the low-rank parameters of all the layers in LLMs. In this paper, we propose a Fisher Information-based Efficient Curriculum Federated Learning framework (FibecFed) with two novel methods, i.e., adaptive federated curriculum learning and efficient sparse parameter update. First, we propose a fisher information-based method to adaptively sample data within each device to improve the effectiveness of the FL fine-tuning process. Second, we dynamically select the proper layers for global aggregation and sparse parameters for local update with LoRA so as to improve the efficiency of the FL fine-tuning process. Extensive experimental results based on 10 datasets demonstrate that FibecFed yields excellent performance (up to 45.35% in terms of accuracy) and superb fine-tuning speed (up to 98.61% faster) compared with 17 baseline approaches).
2023
Federated Learning of Large Language Models with Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning and Adaptive Optimization
Tianshi Che | Ji Liu | Yang Zhou | Jiaxiang Ren | Jiwen Zhou | Victor Sheng | Huaiyu Dai | Dejing Dou
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Tianshi Che | Ji Liu | Yang Zhou | Jiaxiang Ren | Jiwen Zhou | Victor Sheng | Huaiyu Dai | Dejing Dou
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Federated learning (FL) is a promising paradigm to enable collaborative model training with decentralized data. However, the training process of Large Language Models (LLMs) generally incurs the update of significant parameters, which limits the applicability of FL techniques to tackle the LLMs in real scenarios. Prompt tuning can significantly reduce the number of parameters to update, but it either incurs performance degradation or low training efficiency. The straightforward utilization of prompt tuning in the FL often raises non-trivial communication costs and dramatically degrades performance. In addition, the decentralized data is generally non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID), which brings client drift problems and thus poor performance. This paper proposes a Parameter-efficient prompt Tuning approach with Adaptive Optimization, i.e., FedPepTAO, to enable efficient and effective FL of LLMs. First, an efficient partial prompt tuning approach is proposed to improve performance and efficiency simultaneously. Second, a novel adaptive optimization method is developed to address the client drift problems on both the device and server sides to enhance performance further. Extensive experiments based on 10 datasets demonstrate the superb performance (up to 60.8% in terms of accuracy) and efficiency (up to 97.59% in terms of training time) of FedPepTAO compared with 9 baseline approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/llm-eff/FedPepTAO.