Beidi Chen
Publications
FlashRT: Agent Harness for Guiding Agents to Deploy Real-Time Multimodal Applications
Real-time multimodal applications, including voice agents and interactive video generation, compose heterogeneous models into pipelines whose efficient deployment requires application-specific decisions about placement, streaming, and intra-model parallelism. Existing serving systems and auto-parallelism compilers commit to limited transformations and fixed workload assumptions, so achieving high performance on a new application requires hand-crafting an efficient implementation. We present FlashRT, an agent harness that guides coding agents to lift simple developer-written reference implementations into optimized multi-GPU deployments that flexibly weigh target metrics like latency and throughput. Using a new chain-of-program paradigm, FlashRT directs a generic coding agent through a multi-pass transformation process where an agent transforms the reference into an intermediate representation (IR) to capture data dependencies and persistent-state scopes, validates this IR via a sequential interpreter, and performs static analyses to identify candidate transformations. Then, the agent iteratively implements, verifies, and benchmarks each candidate under a measurement-gated optimization loop to produce effective deployments that span different hardware budgets. Across various applications, including video world models and multimodal LLMs, FlashRT converts reference implementations into highly efficient deployments, delivering up to ~70x latency reduction and 2.8x throughput improvement on NVIDIA B200 GPUs. On AMD MI355X GPUs, FlashRT matches the peak latency reduction while increasing peak throughput improvement to 3.6x, demonstrating that agent-driven optimization can be more scalable on platforms with less mature expert optimization. In fact, for Qwen3-Omni text-to-audio inference, FlashRT reduces response latency by 65% compared to the expert vLLM-Omni implementation on AMD MI355X.
Vortex: Efficient and Programmable Sparse Attention Serving for AI Agents
Sparse attention is becoming increasingly important for serving large language models (LLMs) as generation lengths continue to grow. However, deploying and evaluating new sparse attention algorithms at scale remains highly engineering-intensive, slowing both human researchers and AI agents in exploring the sparse attention design. To address this challenge, we present Vortex, a system that combines a Python-embedded frontend language atop a page-centric tensor abstraction for expressing a broad range of sparse attention algorithms, with an efficient backend tightly integrated into modern LLM serving stacks. Vortex enables rapid prototyping, deployment, and evaluation of sparse attention algorithms, effectively translating their theoretical efficiency gains into real-world throughput improvements. As a result, Vortex substantially accelerates the design and iteration of sparse attention algorithms. First, AI agents use Vortex to automatically generate and refine diverse algorithms, the best reaching up to $3.46\times$ higher throughput than full attention while preserving accuracy. Second, Vortex extends sparse attention to emerging architectures and very large models that are otherwise hard to experiment with, reaching up to $4.7\times$ higher throughput on the MLA-based GLM-4.7-Flash and $1.37\times$ on the 229B-parameter MiniMax-M2.7 on NVIDIA B200 GPUs.
Jackpot: Optimal Budgeted Rejection Sampling for Extreme Actor-Policy Mismatch Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) remains expensive, particularly because the rollout is expensive. Decoupling rollout generation from policy optimization (e.g., leveraging a more efficient model to rollout) could enable substantial efficiency gains, yet doing so introduces a severe distribution mismatch that destabilizes learning. We propose Jackpot, a framework that leverages Optimal Budget Rejection Sampling (OBRS) to directly reduce the discrepancy between the rollout model and the evolving policy. Jackpot integrates a principled OBRS procedure, a unified training objective that jointly updates the policy and rollout models, and an efficient system implementation enabled by top-$k$ probability estimation and batch-level bias correction. Our theoretical analysis shows that OBRS consistently moves the rollout distribution closer to the target distribution under a controllable acceptance budget. Empirically, \sys substantially improves training stability compared to importance-sampling baselines, achieving performance comparable to on-policy RL when training Qwen3-8B-Base for up to 300 update steps of batchsize 64. Taken together, our results show that OBRS-based alignment brings us a step closer to practical and effective decoupling of rollout generation from policy optimization for RL for LLMs.