Less Is More: Tuning Configurable Systems with Imperfect Fidelity

Configuration tuning is essential for optimizing the performance of highly configurable systems, e.g., throughput or runtime, under a given environment. Yet, this is a challenging process as there can be many options to tune, and configuration measurement is often highly expensive. In this paper, we demonstrate the phenomenon of ``less can be more'': system configuration tuning can be greatly improved with much superior budget utilization by partially tuning under the imperfect-fidelity---an environment that is similar, but cheaper to measure, compared with the concerned perfect-fidelity of environment under which the system should be tuned. We codify a conceptual framework of fidelity for configurable systems, drawing on which allows us to propose MFTune, a tuner that proactively explores in the space of $>10^4$ possible imperfect-fidelity settings to approximate a useful one, which strikes for the wideness of tuning. This creates high-quality seeds for the perfect-fidelity, which in turn ensures the tuning depth. Experiment results against $10$ state-of-the-art tuners, obtained from running diverse real-world systems for $19$ months $24 \times 7$, show that MFTune performs considerably better on $83.33$\% cases with up to $19.34\%$ improvement while achieving hours of budget saving in general.

IDP AutoOpt: Agent-Driven Optimization of Document Processing Pipeline Configurations

We present IDP AutoOpt, an autonomous LLM agent that discovers high-performing configurations for intelligent document processing (IDP) pipelines. Tuning IDP prompts, models, OCR settings, and schemas jointly currently costs domain specialists 20 to 80+ person-hours per document type and does not scale as enterprises add document classes. IDP AutoOpt runs a closed loop: it scores a configuration on a small labeled set, diagnoses field-level errors, generates targeted edits, and re-evaluates, guided by human-authored domain skills that encode production expertise. Across extraction, classification, and packet-splitting tasks deployed in healthcare, marketing-intelligence, and financial-services settings, IDP AutoOpt matches or exceeds human-expert accuracy at equal or lower cost (on an extraction benchmark, 90.2% vs 81.6% at 4.6 x lower per-page cost), cutting configuration time from weeks to under two hours. We further show that agent LLM capability has a hard threshold below which optimization fails, and that curated domain skills outperform raw source-code access, which can degrade performance when provided without structure. We also share practical lessons on context management and variance mitigation. Requiring only a configurable pipeline, a scoring function, and a small labeled set, the approach extends beyond IDP to other enterprise AI systems, such as RAG and multi-agent workflows, where configuration bottlenecks deployment.

Attention to Detail: Evaluating Energy, Performance, and Accuracy Trade-offs Across vLLM Configurations

Large Language Models are reshaping how software is developed and maintained. They are typically deployed in production using inference engines such as vLLM, which can efficiently serve pre-trained, highly configurable models. While prior work has focused on model architectures and hardware acceleration, the impact of inference engine configuration on energy consumption, performance, and output quality remains poorly understood. In this paper, we present a large-scale controlled study of three selected vLLM configuration options: attention kernel type, prefix caching, and chunked prefill. We evaluate all combinations of these configurations across 5 open-weight LLMs and 5 diverse inference tasks, totaling $9,000$ runs and $93,600$ measures. We analyze energy consumption, latency, and accuracy, and examine both main effects and interaction effects between configuration options and tasks. Our results show that the studied configuration options significantly impact energy and performance, mainly driven by attention type and prefix caching, while chunked prefill has a limited effect under the default vLLM serving configuration and evaluated workloads. These effects are highly model- and workload-dependent, and no configuration is universally optimal. We further show that model choice dominates global trade-offs, while configuration tuning provides local improvements along the Pareto frontier. Unexpectedly, inference options can also affect model accuracy.