Optimizing Agent Reliability and Tool Calling Efficiency for Chip Design Using NVIDIA NeMo Gym
AI agents offer remarkable productivity gains in complex chip design workflows, but their tendency to generate plausible yet incorrect artifacts makes...
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AI agents offer remarkable productivity gains in complex chip design workflows, but their tendency to generate plausible yet incorrect artifacts makes...
Learn how to deploy an available model from Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, run a lightweight and repeatable performance test using the SageMaker Python SDK, and delete the endpoint when testing is complete.
LLM agents are evolving from a single model calling tools to planners that orchestrate multiple expert models whose capabilities live in distinct weights. This shift breaks a hidden assumption of today's serving systems: that the working set of models fits in GPU memory. On the memory-constrained GPUs typical of private and edge deployments, naive whole-model swapping serializes weight transfer with computation and, without host-backed KV restoration, discards session state at a switch. We present JointServe, a serving system that treats weight shards and KV blocks as residency objects competing for one unified memory budget. JointServe exploits three structural properties of agent workloads (directed calls, gapped execution, and dual-state residency) to prepare models before they are called: an intent signal parsed from the caller's own output stream triggers prefetch during generation, partial k* residency reduces switching to incremental layers, and a preemptive transfer scheduler protects live-session KV with a guaranteed bandwidth share. A carve-out control step adjusts the weight/KV allocation as workload demands change. Evaluations show that JointServe reduces session completion time by 21.7% over the strongest whole-model swap baseline and stays usable in a crash regime where every whole-model swap baseline fails to finish (a 46-fold gap). On replayed SWE-bench, tau-bench, and OSWorld traces, it cuts session completion time by up to 49% and lifts SLO attainment from 2.8-24.5% to 76.8-100%.
Multi-zone HVAC control is a shared-resource problem: zones on a floor share one fan and cooling coil, so each zone's demand affects its neighbours and the building's peak power. One controller per zone scales well and isolates faults, but each controller then observes only its own zone, not the shared air loop. In this work, we present a decentralised controller that assigns each zone an independent active-inference agent, which plans by minimising expected free energy and learns its zone dynamics online. The agents exchange no messages, so none depends on peers or a coordinator; each accounts for the unobserved coupling through a latent disturbance and a congestion signal derived from the metered power of the other floors. Fifteen agents are evaluated in EnergyPlus on a Sinergym office building against three rule-based controllers and three MADDPG fleets, one given the same floor meters. On five noisy weather years unseen during training, the fleet attains the lowest mean building peak (88.3 kW, 3 to 17 % below the baselines) and staggers the floor peaks better than any baseline, with a coincidence factor (building peak over the sum of the floor peaks) of 0.929 versus 0.936 to 0.994. Compared with a reactive rule at similar comfort (0.912 versus 0.916), it lowers the sum of monthly peaks, on which demand charges are billed, by 33 kW (4 %) in every year, at the cost of about 10 % more energy. It costs 9% less per year than the proactive rule (at lower comfort) and 1% less than the MADDPG fleet given the same floor meters, in every test year. The whole fleet runs on a single low-cost Raspberry Pi 5, closing the observation-to-action loop over MQTT in 442 ms at p95, far below the 15-minute control step.
Self-distillation in agentic reinforcement learning has produced a growing number of methods. However, existing evaluations often reuse published baseline scores under differing experimental conditions, provide few direct comparisons among contemporaneous methods, and give limited attention to training stability and computational cost. These limitations obscure the source of reported gains and the practical strengths and weaknesses of competing methods. Costly agent training further motivates a common basis for comparison. To address these gaps, we compare ten representative methods against GRPO on ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, Search-QA, and WebShop across three model sizes. Our study comprises 132 training runs totaling 12,124.4 recorded H800 GPU-hours, with repeated evaluations over eight rollout seeds for the pretrained backbones and all eleven trained methods. Beyond final task performance, we examine training progress, stability, and measured computational cost. Our evaluation yields three key findings. First, gains over GRPO remain limited in scope, with no method consistently outperforming it across settings. Second, strong final performance can mask unstable training. Third, additional training cost does not consistently translate into better performance. We establish this benchmark to support fair, comprehensive comparison and guide future research toward reliable and cost-effective improvements in agent training. Project page: https://aim-uofa.github.io/Self-Distillation-AgentRL/
Across industries, the U.K. is putting the full stack to work — and the scale of deployment is growing fast, from enterprises transforming their businesses to startups solving some of the planet’s hardest problems. NVIDIA is putting that principle into practice, including through a five-year, $250 million compute commitment to strengthen the U.K.’s agentic safety […]
Max Hodak, the former president and co-founder of Neuralink, detailed on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt how his company's work with PRIMA is part of its…
Enterprise applications have become increasingly demanding. Agentic AI has compounded the need for vast amounts of enterprise data with frequent, complex...
Residual connections propagate information through a network by additively accumulating layer outputs. Recently proposed alternatives, such as Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) and Attention Residuals (AttnRes), instead use more expressive depth aggregation mechanisms that improve language modeling performance at scale. In this work, we consider the mixing of representations over depth as a problem of storing and retrieving information across layers. Formalizing this perspective, we introduce Depth Memory (DM), a unified framework that describes the standard pre-layer-norm (PreLN) transformer, mHC, and AttnRes in terms of streams that carry representations through the network. One such stream, for example, could be an explicit memory stream that is queried to enrich the input to every layer, and whose output is subsequently written back into the memory for use by later layers. For AttnRes, this memory stream is a growing cache of explicit layer representations. For mHC, it is an expanded residual stream. Building on this view, we propose Linear Depth Memory (LDM), which formulates information retrieval across depth as a regression problem solved using recursive least squares. The resulting architecture propagates three streams across depth: the standard residual stream, a linear associative memory stream, and an inverse covariance stream. For high-throughput training and inference, we propose a hardware-aware implementation of LDM that reduces peak activation memory and memory traffic. LDM consistently achieves the lowest perplexities among PreLN, mHC and AttnRes baselines at the 400M and 1.5B parameter scales, alongside competitive zero-shot accuracy.
Raw image intensities are a poor surrogate for similarity across images in correspondence problems. Further, while auxiliary segmentation labels can provide semantic identification and improve matching, they can assign only coarse identities to fine-grained anatomy and often cover only a subset of structures, particularly in whole-body settings. We present an approach that instead establishes correspondence using complementary representations of anatomy and demonstrate its utility for longitudinal whole-body PET/CT registration in the Learn2Reg 2026 PSMAReg Challenge. Our 3D foundation model, anatomix, is used to derive fine-grained, per-voxel semantic representations that are consistent across volumes, and we further employ off-the-shelf segmentation models to obtain coarse anatomical identities. Together, these representations drive a GPU-accelerated iterative registration solver (FireANTs) in a hybrid multistage framework: the first stage estimates alignment from dense multi-channel features, after which a second refines the deformation using both anatomix- and segmentation-based losses. Lastly, because registration should not introduce non-biological tumor volume changes across time, we develop lesion-specific component-wise volume preservation schemes. Without any task-specific training, our system won first place in the PSMAReg Challenge leaderboard. Code and interactive visualizations are available at http://www.neeldey.com/reps-for-reg.
Manufacturers often need to characterize a new material, process, or product before enough operating data are available to train reliable predictive models for this new, target domain. Existing manufacturing operations contain potentially useful knowledge to accelerate this characterization, but indiscriminate reuse of data from existing source domains can cause negative transfer in learning of the new, target domain when the manufacturing domains differ sufficiently. This work proposes a reinforcement-learning method for selective knowledge transfer, where its reward scores each opportunity to transfer against supervised alternatives, so negative transfer is avoided and controlled during forward prediction instead of being diagnosed afterwards. Given limited data from a new target domain, the learned policy chooses among predictors based on individual source operations, subsets of the sources, or the supervised alternatives: fully pooled sources, or target data alone. A validation gate deploys the transferred prediction only when it improves upon the supervised alternatives. The method is designed for learning variables supporting carbon accounting, as well as performance and quality outcomes. We demonstrate the approach by quantifying the embodied greenhouse-gas emissions of parts produced via material-extrusion additive manufacturing, using data from 729 experiments spanning five materials: ABS, PETG, TPU, PLA, and recycled PLA. The response combines measured fabrication electricity with polymer-specific cradle-to-gate production factors, while 22 material, process, and toolpath features characterize each experiment. In leave-one-material-out evaluation, this method achieves a mean test RMSE of 5.2 g CO2e per part, 20.00% lower than target-only training (32.5% lower when only 5-10% of the target training data are available) and 10.30% lower than indiscriminate source-target pooling.
AWS engineers share kernel optimizations for fused Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models on Amazon SageMaker AI: Swap-AB for WGMMA utilization, Triton backend routing for FP8 quantization, and eliminating Triton JIT recompilation. Together they deliver up to 10% higher throughput and up to 9% faster Time to First Token on H200 GPUs.
Large-scale expert parallelism (EP) has become the standard deployment configuration for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models in production. Meanwhile, the highly dynamic nature of LLM workloads requires providers to continuously adjust serving capacity to match fluctuating demand. Scaling MoE serving cannot be efficiently achieved by simply adding or removing serving instances; instead, it often requires resizing the EP group within an existing instance, which we refer to as intra-instance scaling.Existing inference engines primarily rely on instance-level scaling, which destroys and reconstructs entire serving instances, incurring substantial scaling overhead. We present FastEEP (Fast Elastic Expert Parallel), a fast intra-instance scaling system for MoE serving based on the principle of Partial Reuse. FastEEP reuses existing runtime state across worker execution, GPU memory, and communication by separating reusable execution structures from the resources activated by the current EP configuration. This separation enables coordinated resource reclamation and reconfiguration while preserving costly-to-reconstruct state, allowing fast EP scaling without full instance teardown and reconstruction. Our evaluation shows that FastEEP achieves 4.5x--11.7x faster scaling than the existing vLLM-based approach across different models, enabling efficient, fine-grained scaling of MoE serving.
NVIDIA is making the full NVIDIA Run:ai platform available as open source software, giving customers, developers, and ecosystem partners access to...
NVIDIA RTX Spark is a new beginning for the PC — a reinvention combining the capabilities of a gaming PC, a creative studio and a personal AI supercomputer into a single superchip. With up to 128GB of unified memory and 1 petaflop of AI compute, RTX Spark delivers the full stack of NVIDIA RTX and […]
Companies in France are deploying agentic computing across industries spanning space, financial services, the public sector and scientific research, demonstrating how the country’s ecosystem has moved from ambition to application. France’s progress sits on deliberate groundwork. The AI Action Summit in February 2025 and Choose France Summits in 2025 and 2026 anchored major compute commitments […]
Learn how to deploy decision models with llama.cpp on Amazon SageMaker AI. This technical how-to serves OpenAI-compatible chat completions with the AWS Deep Learning Container for llama.cpp, then extends the runtime with SemIf to return probabilities over declared options on CPU or GPU.