Huan Li
Publications
LATTEArena: An Evaluation Framework for LLM-powered Tabular Feature Engineering (Extended Version)
Feature engineering remains essential for tabular data analysis, and Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for automating this process, giving rise to LLM-powered AuTomated Tabular feature Engineering (LATTE). However, the absence of standardized platforms prevents fair, cost-aware comparisons. Furthermore, complex methodological designs obscure the specific contributions of individual components; for example, although LFG integrates Tree-of-Thought, few-shot demonstrations, Monte Carlo Tree Search, and natural language generation, the isolated impact of each technique's competitive edge remains unquantified. To address these challenges, we introduce LATTEArena, the first competitive evaluation framework featuring: (1) a six-dimensional taxonomy decomposing 15 representative methods into reusable components; (2) a standardized modular arena for controlled comparison; (3) multi-dimensional assessments covering performance, cost, and robustness; and (4) component-level ablation quantifying each technique's competitive edge. Through extensive evaluations, we reveal 16 key findings, including: (1) Tree-of-Thought with Monte Carlo Tree Search achieves optimal cost-effectiveness; (2) RPN and Code output formats dominate classification and regression tasks, respectively. We publicly release the modular framework and over 4000 execution logs, enabling researchers to seamlessly pit new techniques against existing ones and advance LATTE.
HybridKV: Hybrid KV Cache Compression for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model Inference
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced unified reasoning over text, images, and videos, but their inference is hindered by the rapid growth of key-value (KV) caches. Each visual input expands into thousands of tokens, causing caches to scale linearly with context length and remain resident in GPU memory throughout decoding, which leads to prohibitive memory overhead and latency even on high-end GPUs. A common solution is to compress caches under a fixed allocated budget at different granularities: token-level uniformly discards less important tokens, layer-level varies retention across layers, and head-level redistributes budgets across heads. Yet these approaches stop at allocation and overlook the heterogeneous behaviors of attention heads that require distinct compression strategies. We propose HybridKV, a hybrid KV cache compression framework that integrates complementary strategies in three stages: heads are first classified into static or dynamic types using text-centric attention; then a top-down budget allocation scheme hierarchically assigns KV budgets; finally, static heads are compressed by text-prior pruning and dynamic heads by chunk-wise retrieval. Experiments on 11 multimodal benchmarks with Qwen2.5-VL-7B show that HybridKV reduces KV cache memory by up to $7.9\times$ and achieves $1.52\times$ faster decoding, with almost no performance drop or even higher relative to the full-cache MLLM.