LLMs on edge devices are constrained by limited memory and bandwidth. Although 1.58-bit ternary weights greatly reduce model storage, long-context inference is increasingly bottlenecked by KV-cache traffic and attention. Existing accelerators also use separate datapaths for ternary linear layers and attention, incurring hardware and execution overhead. We present SPARTA, a sparse ternary LLM accelerator for efficient long-context edge inference. SPARTA integrates: (1) a phase-aware sparse dataflow exploiting heterogeneous sparsity across compute-bound prefill and memory-bound decode; (2) a unified compute fabric mapping ternary SpMM/SpMV and bit-serial attention onto shared processing elements to exploit zero-weight and zero-bit sparsity; and (3) an adaptive two-stage attention engine combining page-level Top-k selection to reduce K-cache accesses with token-level Top-p pruning to reduce V-cache traffic. SPARTA reduces KV traffic by 4.1-4.8x over full attention and 1.3-1.5x over a state-of-the-art sparse-attention scheme, with task-dependent quality loss. Compared with NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, SPARTA achieves 3.9x higher generation throughput and 8.3x higher end-to-end energy efficiency on average; versus AMD Ryzen 7 9700X, the gains are 5.0x and 81.7x. It also delivers 1.6-12.0x higher throughput, 2.0-4.2x higher energy efficiency, and 1.3-51.4x higher area efficiency than FIGLUT, TeLLMe, and MCBP.
LLM agents that call external tools must decide what to do when a tool call times out: retrying risks duplicate side effects, while not retrying can leave the task incomplete. We present RetryBench, an evaluation protocol for retry decisions and failure recovery in tool-using LLM agents. Each decision is scored on retry permission (is the retry justified by an idempotency-key guarantee or proof of non-execution?), settled effects (duplicates and omissions), and completion, by replaying it across all hidden execution worlds consistent with the observation. On four synthetic software-engineering tasks, we run two controlled prompt-sensitivity studies (1,728 decisions). Study 1 (idempotency-key descriptions): with the contract fixed, GPT-5.6 Luna reuses the valid idempotency key in 10/40 decisions when an extra key is described as a "Candidate recovery key" but in 39/40 when it is an "Alternative key string"; across three further phrasings per family the gap is 27/120 versus 113/120. GPT-5.6 Sol and Terra are at ceiling (40/40). Study 2 (action order): under underspecified lookup guarantees, retry rates are 17-27 points lower for GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-5.4 when retry is listed first (option-order bias), mainly on two tasks; we make no claim about which behavior is better. Findings are limited to researcher-chosen phrasings, four tasks and unpinned model aliases. Code and all model responses are released.
Koutian Wu, You Liu, Yue Liu, Zhiping Li, Ergan Shang
Scientific knowledge gains new uses when ideas, methods, and results move between research contexts. Understanding this process requires a model of both specialized knowledge production and the intermediary activities that connect it. We introduce Scientific Liquidity Agents (SLA), an agent-based model of knowledge arbitrage in scientific communities. SLA represents domain specialists and epistemic arbitrageurs within a shared environment of research problems, researcher interactions, and scientific artifacts. Individual decisions connect to collective state through a belief-desire-intention architecture, a prerequisite-based problem graph, a dynamic interaction network, and a persistent publication registry. The framework makes researcher roles and knowledge-transfer frictions explicit, providing a process-oriented account of scientific production and exchange. Two exploratory simulations with 10 and 18 agents produce 68 and 274 registered papers. In the smaller run, arbitrageurs take part in 16 of the 26 contact pairs that join this community into one connected component, while topical similarity alone splits it into seven. The same run yields three similarity edges, 26 contact pairs, and two coauthorship pairs, so measured community structure depends on what counts as a link. Paper production is abundant, but no recorded replication succeeds, which places the bottleneck in verification rather than production. Solved-problem sets correspond to the prerequisite reachability of the disciplines represented in each community. SLA makes knowledge liquidity, the movement and reuse of artifacts across domains, a quantity that agentic science can simulate and measure.