Daily Papers

Large language models have transformed natural language processing, yet supervised fine-tuning (SFT) remains computationally intensive. This paper formally proves that capabilities acquired through SFT can be approximated by a base transformer model using inference-time techniques, specifically in-context learning (ICL), without altering model parameters, under idealized assumptions including unbounded computational resources and access to the fine-tuning dataset. We extend these results to practical scenarios with finite context lengths and partial dataset access. For text generation tasks with fixed output length l, datasets of size Oleft( m V{varepsilon^2} log m{delta} right) or, with bounded context, Oleft( l log V{varepsilon^2} log 1{delta} right) suffice to approximate fine-tuned behavior across m contexts within error varepsilon, where V is the vocabulary size and delta is the failure probability. For linear classification, datasets of size Oleft( d{varepsilon} right) or, with fixed context, Oleft( 1{varepsilon^2} log 1{delta} right) are sufficient, where d is the input dimension. Grounded in the Turing completeness of transformers, these results provide a theoretical foundation for resource-efficient deployment of large language models, with practical techniques like retrieval-augmented generation bridging theory to real-world applications.

Post-training compression reduces the computational and memory costs of large language models (LLMs), enabling resource-efficient deployment. However, existing compression benchmarks only focus on language modeling (e.g., perplexity) and natural language understanding tasks (e.g., GLUE accuracy), ignoring the agentic capabilities - workflow, tool use/function call, long-context understanding and real-world application. We introduce the Agent Compression Benchmark (ACBench), the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating how compression impacts LLMs' agentic abilities. ACBench spans (1) 12 tasks across 4 capabilities (e.g., WorfBench for workflow generation, Needle-in-Haystack for long-context retrieval), (2) quantization (GPTQ, AWQ) and pruning (Wanda, SparseGPT), and (3) 15 models, including small (Gemma-2B), standard (Qwen2.5 7B-32B), and distilled reasoning LLMs (DeepSeek-R1-Distill). Our experiments reveal compression tradeoffs: 4-bit quantization preserves workflow generation and tool use (1%-3% drop) but degrades real-world application accuracy by 10%-15%. We introduce ERank, Top-k Ranking Correlation and Energy to systematize analysis. ACBench provides actionable insights for optimizing LLM compression in agentic scenarios. The code can be found in https://github.com/pprp/ACBench.

We present Bielik 11B v2, a state-of-the-art language model optimized for Polish text processing. Built on the Mistral 7B v0.2 architecture and scaled to 11B parameters using depth up-scaling, this model demonstrates exceptional performance across Polish language benchmarks while maintaining strong cross-lingual capabilities. We introduce two key technical innovations: Weighted Instruction Cross-Entropy Loss, which optimizes learning across diverse instruction types by assigning quality-based weights to training examples, and Adaptive Learning Rate, which dynamically adjusts based on context length. Comprehensive evaluation across multiple benchmarks demonstrates that Bielik 11B v2 outperforms many larger models, including those with 2-6 times more parameters, and significantly surpasses other specialized Polish language models on tasks ranging from linguistic understanding to complex reasoning. The model's parameter efficiency and extensive quantization options enable deployment across various hardware configurations, advancing Polish language AI capabilities and establishing new benchmarks for resource-efficient language modeling in less-represented languages.

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on resource-constrained (or weak) devices presents significant challenges due to limited resources and heterogeneous data distribution. To address the data concern, it is necessary to fine-tune LLMs using on-device private data for various downstream tasks. While Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising privacy-preserving solution, existing fine-tuning methods retain the original LLM size, leaving issues of high inference latency and excessive memory demands unresolved. Hence, we design FedSpine, an FL framework that combines Parameter- Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) with structured pruning for efficient deployment of LLMs on resource-constrained devices. Specifically, FedSpine introduces an iterative process to prune and tune the parameters of LLMs. To mitigate the impact of device heterogeneity, an online Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithm is employed to adaptively determine different pruning ratios and LoRA ranks for heterogeneous devices without any prior knowledge of their computing and communication capabilities. As a result, FedSpine maintains higher inference accuracy while improving fine-tuning efficiency. Experimental results conducted on a physical platform with 80 devices demonstrate that FedSpine can speed up fine-tuning by 1.4times-6.9times and improve final accuracy by 0.4%-4.5% under the same sparsity level compared to other baselines.

Extensive compute and memory requirements limit the deployment of large language models (LLMs) on any hardware. Compression methods, such as pruning, can reduce model size, which in turn reduces resource requirements. State-of-the-art pruning is based on coarse-grained methods. They are time-consuming and inherently remove critical model parameters, adversely impacting the quality of the pruned model. This paper introduces projection pruning, a novel fine-grained method for pruning LLMs. In addition, LLM projection pruning is enhanced by a new approach we refer to as composite projection pruning - the synergistic combination of unstructured pruning that retains accuracy and structured pruning that reduces model size. We develop Mosaic, a novel system to create and deploy pruned LLMs using composite projection pruning. Mosaic is evaluated using a range of performance and quality metrics on multiple hardware platforms, LLMs, and datasets. Mosaic is 7.19x faster in producing models than existing approaches. Mosaic models achieve up to 84.2% lower perplexity and 31.4% higher accuracy than models obtained from coarse-grained pruning. Up to 67% faster inference and 68% lower GPU memory use is noted for Mosaic models.

In addressing the computational and memory demands of fine-tuning Large Language Models(LLMs), we propose LoRA-SP(Streamlined Partial Parameter Adaptation), a novel approach utilizing randomized half-selective parameter freezing within the Low-Rank Adaptation(LoRA)framework. This method efficiently balances pre-trained knowledge retention and adaptability for task-specific optimizations. Through a randomized mechanism, LoRA-SP determines which parameters to update or freeze, significantly reducing computational and memory requirements without compromising model performance. We evaluated LoRA-SP across several benchmark NLP tasks, demonstrating its ability to achieve competitive performance with substantially lower resource consumption compared to traditional full-parameter fine-tuning and other parameter-efficient techniques. LoRA-SP innovative approach not only facilitates the deployment of advanced NLP models in resource-limited settings but also opens new research avenues into effective and efficient model adaptation strategies.

We address the challenging problem of efficient inference across many devices and resource constraints, especially on edge devices. Conventional approaches either manually design or use neural architecture search (NAS) to find a specialized neural network and train it from scratch for each case, which is computationally prohibitive (causing CO_2 emission as much as 5 cars' lifetime) thus unscalable. In this work, we propose to train a once-for-all (OFA) network that supports diverse architectural settings by decoupling training and search, to reduce the cost. We can quickly get a specialized sub-network by selecting from the OFA network without additional training. To efficiently train OFA networks, we also propose a novel progressive shrinking algorithm, a generalized pruning method that reduces the model size across many more dimensions than pruning (depth, width, kernel size, and resolution). It can obtain a surprisingly large number of sub-networks (> 10^{19}) that can fit different hardware platforms and latency constraints while maintaining the same level of accuracy as training independently. On diverse edge devices, OFA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) NAS methods (up to 4.0% ImageNet top1 accuracy improvement over MobileNetV3, or same accuracy but 1.5x faster than MobileNetV3, 2.6x faster than EfficientNet w.r.t measured latency) while reducing many orders of magnitude GPU hours and CO_2 emission. In particular, OFA achieves a new SOTA 80.0% ImageNet top-1 accuracy under the mobile setting (<600M MACs). OFA is the winning solution for the 3rd Low Power Computer Vision Challenge (LPCVC), DSP classification track and the 4th LPCVC, both classification track and detection track. Code and 50 pre-trained models (for many devices & many latency constraints) are released at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/once-for-all.

Large foundation models, including large language models (LLMs), vision transformers (ViTs), diffusion, and LLM-based multimodal models, are revolutionizing the entire machine learning lifecycle, from training to deployment. However, the substantial advancements in versatility and performance these models offer come at a significant cost in terms of hardware resources. To support the growth of these large models in a scalable and environmentally sustainable way, there has been a considerable focus on developing resource-efficient strategies. This survey delves into the critical importance of such research, examining both algorithmic and systemic aspects. It offers a comprehensive analysis and valuable insights gleaned from existing literature, encompassing a broad array of topics from cutting-edge model architectures and training/serving algorithms to practical system designs and implementations. The goal of this survey is to provide an overarching understanding of how current approaches are tackling the resource challenges posed by large foundation models and to potentially inspire future breakthroughs in this field.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly but face significant memory demands. While quantization has shown promise for LLMs, current methods typically require lengthy training to alleviate the performance degradation from quantization loss. However, deploying LLMs across diverse scenarios with different resource constraints, e.g., servers and personal computers, requires repeated training per application, which amplifies the lengthy training problem. Given that, it is advantageous to train a once-for-all (OFA) supernet capable of yielding diverse optimal subnets for downstream applications through one-shot training. Nonetheless, the scale of current language models impedes efficiency and amplifies interference from weight sharing between subnets. We make an initial attempt to extend the once-for-all framework to large language models. Specifically, we decouple shared weights to eliminate the interference and incorporate Low-Rank adapters for training efficiency. Furthermore, we observe the imbalance allocation of training resources from the traditional uniform sampling. A non-parametric scheduler is introduced to adjust the sampling rate for each quantization configuration, achieving a more balanced allocation among subnets with varying demands. We validate the approach on LLaMA2 families, and downstream evaluation confirms our ability to maintain high performance while significantly reducing deployment time faced with multiple scenarios.

During crises, social media serves as a crucial coordination tool, but the vast influx of posts--from "actionable" requests and offers to generic content like emotional support, behavioural guidance, or outdated information--complicates effective classification. Although generative LLMs (Large Language Models) can address this issue with few-shot classification, their high computational demands limit real-time crisis response. While fine-tuning encoder-only models (e.g., BERT) is a popular choice, these models still exhibit higher inference times in resource-constrained environments. Moreover, although distilled variants (e.g., DistilBERT) exist, they are not tailored for the crisis domain. To address these challenges, we make two key contributions. First, we present CrisisHelpOffer, a novel dataset of 101k tweets collaboratively labelled by generative LLMs and validated by humans, specifically designed to distinguish actionable content from noise. Second, we introduce the first crisis-specific mini models optimized for deployment in resource-constrained settings. Across 13 crisis classification tasks, our mini models surpass BERT (also outperform or match the performance of RoBERTa, MPNet, and BERTweet), offering higher accuracy with significantly smaller sizes and faster speeds. The Medium model is 47% smaller with 3.8% higher accuracy at 3.5x speed, the Small model is 68% smaller with a 1.8% accuracy gain at 7.7x speed, and the Tiny model, 83% smaller, matches BERT's accuracy at 18.6x speed. All models outperform existing distilled variants, setting new benchmarks. Finally, as a case study, we analyze social media posts from a global crisis to explore help-seeking and assistance-offering behaviours in selected developing and developed countries.

The rapid growth of large models has raised concerns about their environmental impact and equity in accessibility due to significant computational costs. Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA) offer a lightweight solution for finetuning large models, resulting in an abundance of publicly available adapters tailored to diverse domains. We ask: Can these pretrained adapters be leveraged to further streamline adaptation to new tasks while addressing these challenges? We introduce EigenLoRAx, a parameter-efficient finetuning method that recycles existing adapters to create a principal subspace aligned with their shared domain knowledge which can be further augmented with orthogonal basis vectors in low-resource scenarios. This enables rapid adaptation to new tasks by learning only lightweight coefficients on the principal components of the subspace - eliminating the need to finetune entire adapters. EigenLoRAx requires significantly fewer parameters and memory, improving efficiency for both training and inference. Our method demonstrates strong performance across diverse domains and tasks, offering a scalable for edge-based applications, personalization, and equitable deployment of large models in resource-constrained environments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have grown rapidly in size, creating significant challenges for efficient deployment on resource-constrained hardware. In this paper, we introduce Dynamic-Length Float (DFloat11), a lossless compression framework that reduces LLM size by 30% while preserving outputs that are bit-for-bit identical to the original model. DFloat11 is motivated by the low entropy in the BFloat16 weight representation of LLMs, which reveals significant inefficiency in existing storage format. By applying entropy coding, DFloat11 assigns dynamic-length encodings to weights based on frequency, achieving near information-optimal compression without any loss of precision. To facilitate efficient inference with dynamic-length encodings, we develop a custom GPU kernel for fast online decompression. Our design incorporates the following: (i) decomposition of memory-intensive lookup tables (LUTs) into compact LUTs that fit in GPU SRAM, (ii) a two-phase kernel for coordinating thread read/write positions using lightweight auxiliary variables, and (iii) transformer-block-level decompression to minimize latency. Experiments on recent models, including Llama-3.1, Qwen-2.5, and Gemma-3, validates our hypothesis that DFloat11 achieves around 30% model size reduction while preserving bit-for-bit exact outputs. Compared to a potential alternative of offloading parts of an uncompressed model to the CPU to meet memory constraints, DFloat11 achieves 1.9-38.8x higher throughput in token generation. With a fixed GPU memory budget, DFloat11 enables 5.3-13.17x longer context lengths than uncompressed models. Notably, our method enables lossless inference of Llama-3.1-405B, an 810GB model, on a single node equipped with 8x80GB GPUs. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/LeanModels/DFloat11.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have become a key approach for scaling large language models efficiently by activating only a subset of experts during training and inference. Typically, the number of activated experts presents a trade-off: fewer experts reduce computational costs, while more experts improve performance. Recent studies reveal that not all activated experts contribute equally to model performance, with some providing minimal utility, particularly when finetuning pretrained MoE models for specialized downstream tasks. The co-existence of significant and redundant parameters in experts provides us an opportunity to reduce the number of activated experts while maintaining model performance. In this work, we propose the concept of compressed experts, lightweight modules that serve as compact representations of full experts. Our approach preserves the most important experts while replacing other auxiliary activated experts with compressed experts. The reduction of active parameters significantly lowers inference costs while achieving comparable performance. Extensive experiments on models including Phi-MoE and OLMoE demonstrate that compressed experts recover over 90% of full expert performance across various tasks while reducing more than 30% active parameters and saving 20% in inference costs. This approach enables efficient deployment of MoE models in resource-constrained settings and facilitates scaling to larger models with manageable overhead. Our code is available at https://github.com/yifei-he/Compressed-Experts.

With the success of Vision Transformers (ViTs) in computer vision tasks, recent arts try to optimize the performance and complexity of ViTs to enable efficient deployment on mobile devices. Multiple approaches are proposed to accelerate attention mechanism, improve inefficient designs, or incorporate mobile-friendly lightweight convolutions to form hybrid architectures. However, ViT and its variants still have higher latency or considerably more parameters than lightweight CNNs, even true for the years-old MobileNet. In practice, latency and size are both crucial for efficient deployment on resource-constraint hardware. In this work, we investigate a central question, can transformer models run as fast as MobileNet and maintain a similar size? We revisit the design choices of ViTs and propose an improved supernet with low latency and high parameter efficiency. We further introduce a fine-grained joint search strategy that can find efficient architectures by optimizing latency and number of parameters simultaneously. The proposed models, EfficientFormerV2, achieve about 4% higher top-1 accuracy than MobileNetV2 and MobileNetV2times1.4 on ImageNet-1K with similar latency and parameters. We demonstrate that properly designed and optimized vision transformers can achieve high performance with MobileNet-level size and speed.

Recently, the efficient deployment and acceleration of powerful vision transformers (ViTs) on resource-limited edge devices for providing multimedia services have become attractive tasks. Although early exiting is a feasible solution for accelerating inference, most works focus on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformer models in natural language processing (NLP).Moreover, the direct application of early exiting methods to ViTs may result in substantial performance degradation. To tackle this challenge, we systematically investigate the efficacy of early exiting in ViTs and point out that the insufficient feature representations in shallow internal classifiers and the limited ability to capture target semantic information in deep internal classifiers restrict the performance of these methods. We then propose an early exiting framework for general ViTs termed LGViT, which incorporates heterogeneous exiting heads, namely, local perception head and global aggregation head, to achieve an efficiency-accuracy trade-off. In particular, we develop a novel two-stage training scheme, including end-to-end training and self-distillation with the backbone frozen to generate early exiting ViTs, which facilitates the fusion of global and local information extracted by the two types of heads. We conduct extensive experiments using three popular ViT backbones on three vision datasets. Results demonstrate that our LGViT can achieve competitive performance with approximately 1.8 times speed-up.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing with their exceptional capabilities. However, deploying LLMs on resource-constrained edge devices presents significant challenges due to computational limitations, memory constraints, and edge hardware heterogeneity. This survey summarizes recent developments in edge LLMs across their lifecycle, examining resource-efficient designs from pre-deployment techniques to runtime optimizations. Additionally, it explores on-device LLM applications in personal, enterprise, and industrial scenarios. By synthesizing advancements and identifying future directions, this survey aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of state-of-the-art methods for deploying LLMs on edge devices, bridging the gap between their immense potential and edge computing limitations.

Deep learning algorithms are increasingly employed at the edge. However, edge devices are resource constrained and thus require efficient deployment of deep neural networks. Pruning methods are a key tool for edge deployment as they can improve storage, compute, memory bandwidth, and energy usage. In this paper we propose a novel accurate pruning technique that allows precise control over the output network size. Our method uses an efficient optimal transportation scheme which we make end-to-end differentiable and which automatically tunes the exploration-exploitation behavior of the algorithm to find accurate sparse sub-networks. We show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to previous pruning methods on 3 different datasets, using 5 different models, across a wide range of pruning ratios, and with two types of sparsity budgets and pruning granularities.

In recent years, compression of large language models (LLMs) has emerged as an important problem to allow language model deployment on resource-constrained devices, reduce computational costs, and mitigate the environmental footprint of large-scale AI infrastructure. In this paper, we present the foundations of LLM quantization from a convex optimization perspective and propose a quantization method that builds on these foundations and outperforms previous methods. Our quantization framework, CVXQ, scales to models containing hundreds of billions of weight parameters and provides users with the flexibility to compress models to any specified model size, post-training. A reference implementation of CVXQ can be obtained from https://github.com/seannz/cvxq.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently garnered considerable attention, emerging as a promising alternative to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in several vision-related applications. However, their large model sizes and high computational and memory demands hinder deployment, especially on resource-constrained devices. This underscores the necessity of algorithm-hardware co-design specific to ViTs, aiming to optimize their performance by tailoring both the algorithmic structure and the underlying hardware accelerator to each other's strengths. Model quantization, by converting high-precision numbers to lower-precision, reduces the computational demands and memory needs of ViTs, allowing the creation of hardware specifically optimized for these quantized algorithms, boosting efficiency. This article provides a comprehensive survey of ViTs quantization and its hardware acceleration. We first delve into the unique architectural attributes of ViTs and their runtime characteristics. Subsequently, we examine the fundamental principles of model quantization, followed by a comparative analysis of the state-of-the-art quantization techniques for ViTs. Additionally, we explore the hardware acceleration of quantized ViTs, highlighting the importance of hardware-friendly algorithm design. In conclusion, this article will discuss ongoing challenges and future research paths. We consistently maintain the related open-source materials at https://github.com/DD-DuDa/awesome-vit-quantization-acceleration.

The advent of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized various natural language processing tasks. These models predominantly employ an auto-regressive decoding mechanism that utilizes Key-Value (KV) caches to eliminate redundant calculations for previous tokens. Nevertheless, as context lengths and batch sizes increase, the linear expansion in memory footprint of KV caches becomes a key bottleneck of LLM deployment, which decreases generation speeds significantly. To mitigate this issue, previous techniques like multi-query attention (MQA) and grouped-query attention (GQA) have been developed, in order to reduce KV heads to accelerate inference with comparable accuracy to multi-head attention (MHA). Despite their effectiveness, existing strategies for compressing MHA often overlook the intrinsic properties of the KV caches. In this work, we explore the low-rank characteristics of the KV caches and propose a novel approach for compressing KV heads. In particular, we carefully optimize the MHA-to-GQA transformation to minimize compression error, and to remain compatible with rotary position embeddings (RoPE), we also introduce specialized strategies for key caches with RoPE. We demonstrate that our method can compress half or even three-quarters of KV heads while maintaining performance comparable to the original LLMs, which presents a promising direction for more efficient LLM deployment in resource-constrained environments.

The field of efficient Large Language Model (LLM) inference is rapidly evolving, presenting a unique blend of opportunities and challenges. Although the field has expanded and is vibrant, there hasn't been a concise framework that analyzes the various methods of LLM Inference to provide a clear understanding of this domain. Our survey stands out from traditional literature reviews by not only summarizing the current state of research but also by introducing a framework based on roofline model for systematic analysis of LLM inference techniques. This framework identifies the bottlenecks when deploying LLMs on hardware devices and provides a clear understanding of practical problems, such as why LLMs are memory-bound, how much memory and computation they need, and how to choose the right hardware. We systematically collate the latest advancements in efficient LLM inference, covering crucial areas such as model compression (e.g., Knowledge Distillation and Quantization), algorithm improvements (e.g., Early Exit and Mixture-of-Expert), and both hardware and system-level enhancements. Our survey stands out by analyzing these methods with roofline model, helping us understand their impact on memory access and computation. This distinctive approach not only showcases the current research landscape but also delivers valuable insights for practical implementation, positioning our work as an indispensable resource for researchers new to the field as well as for those seeking to deepen their understanding of efficient LLM deployment. The analyze tool, LLM-Viewer, is open-sourced.

Motivated by the transformative capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across various natural language tasks, there has been a growing demand to deploy these models effectively across diverse real-world applications and platforms. However, the challenge of efficiently deploying LLMs has become increasingly pronounced due to the varying application-specific performance requirements and the rapid evolution of computational platforms, which feature diverse resource constraints and deployment flows. These varying requirements necessitate LLMs that can adapt their structures (depth and width) for optimal efficiency across different platforms and application specifications. To address this critical gap, we propose AmoebaLLM, a novel framework designed to enable the instant derivation of LLM subnets of arbitrary shapes, which achieve the accuracy-efficiency frontier and can be extracted immediately after a one-time fine-tuning. In this way, AmoebaLLM significantly facilitates rapid deployment tailored to various platforms and applications. Specifically, AmoebaLLM integrates three innovative components: (1) a knowledge-preserving subnet selection strategy that features a dynamic-programming approach for depth shrinking and an importance-driven method for width shrinking; (2) a shape-aware mixture of LoRAs to mitigate gradient conflicts among subnets during fine-tuning; and (3) an in-place distillation scheme with loss-magnitude balancing as the fine-tuning objective. Extensive experiments validate that AmoebaLLM not only sets new standards in LLM adaptability but also successfully delivers subnets that achieve state-of-the-art trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency.

For the deployment of neural networks in resource-constrained environments, prior works have built lightweight architectures with convolution and attention for capturing local and global dependencies, respectively. Recently, the state space model has emerged as an effective global token interaction with its favorable linear computational cost in the number of tokens. Yet, efficient vision backbones built with SSM have been explored less. In this paper, we introduce Efficient Vision Mamba (EfficientViM), a novel architecture built on hidden state mixer-based state space duality (HSM-SSD) that efficiently captures global dependencies with further reduced computational cost. In the HSM-SSD layer, we redesign the previous SSD layer to enable the channel mixing operation within hidden states. Additionally, we propose multi-stage hidden state fusion to further reinforce the representation power of hidden states, and provide the design alleviating the bottleneck caused by the memory-bound operations. As a result, the EfficientViM family achieves a new state-of-the-art speed-accuracy trade-off on ImageNet-1k, offering up to a 0.7% performance improvement over the second-best model SHViT with faster speed. Further, we observe significant improvements in throughput and accuracy compared to prior works, when scaling images or employing distillation training. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/EfficientViM.

The rise of billion-parameter diffusion models like Stable Diffusion XL, Imagen, and Dall-E3 markedly advances the field of generative AI. However, their large-scale nature poses challenges in fine-tuning and deployment due to high resource demands and slow inference speed. This paper ventures into the relatively unexplored yet promising realm of fine-tuning quantized diffusion models. We establish a strong baseline by customizing three models: PEQA for fine-tuning quantization parameters, Q-Diffusion for post-training quantization, and DreamBooth for personalization. Our analysis reveals a notable trade-off between subject and prompt fidelity within the baseline model. To address these issues, we introduce two strategies, inspired by the distinct roles of different timesteps in diffusion models: S1 optimizing a single set of fine-tuning parameters exclusively at selected intervals, and S2 creating multiple fine-tuning parameter sets, each specialized for different timestep intervals. Our approach not only enhances personalization but also upholds prompt fidelity and image quality, significantly outperforming the baseline qualitatively and quantitatively. The code will be made publicly available.

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has set a new standard in interactive image segmentation, offering robust performance across various tasks. However, its significant computational requirements limit its deployment in real-time or resource-constrained environments. To address these challenges, we propose a novel knowledge distillation approach, KD SAM, which incorporates both encoder and decoder optimization through a combination of Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Perceptual Loss. This dual-loss framework captures structural and semantic features, enabling the student model to maintain high segmentation accuracy while reducing computational complexity. Based on the model evaluation on datasets, including Kvasir-SEG, ISIC 2017, Fetal Head Ultrasound, and Breast Ultrasound, we demonstrate that KD SAM achieves comparable or superior performance to the baseline models, with significantly fewer parameters. KD SAM effectively balances segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency, making it well-suited for real-time medical image segmentation applications in resource-constrained environments.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are pivotal in image classification tasks due to their robust feature extraction capabilities. However, their high computational and memory requirements pose challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments. This paper introduces a methodology to construct lightweight CNNs while maintaining competitive accuracy. The approach integrates two stages of training; dual-input-output model and transfer learning with progressive unfreezing. The dual-input-output model train on original and augmented datasets, enhancing robustness. Progressive unfreezing is applied to the unified model to optimize pre-learned features during fine-tuning, enabling faster convergence and improved model accuracy. The methodology was evaluated on three benchmark datasets; handwritten digit MNIST, fashion MNIST, and CIFAR-10. The proposed model achieved a state-of-the-art accuracy of 99% on the handwritten digit MNIST and 89% on fashion MNIST, with only 14,862 parameters and a model size of 0.17 MB. While performance on CIFAR-10 was comparatively lower (65% with less than 20,00 parameters), the results highlight the scalability of this method. The final model demonstrated fast inference times and low latency, making it suitable for real-time applications. Future directions include exploring advanced augmentation techniques, improving architectural scalability for complex datasets, and extending the methodology to tasks beyond classification. This research underscores the potential for creating efficient, scalable, and task-specific CNNs for diverse applications.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted extensive attention due to their remarkable performance across various tasks. However, the substantial computational and memory requirements of LLM inference pose challenges for deployment in resource-constrained scenarios. Efforts within the field have been directed towards developing techniques aimed at enhancing the efficiency of LLM inference. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the existing literature on efficient LLM inference. We start by analyzing the primary causes of the inefficient LLM inference, i.e., the large model size, the quadratic-complexity attention operation, and the auto-regressive decoding approach. Then, we introduce a comprehensive taxonomy that organizes the current literature into data-level, model-level, and system-level optimization. Moreover, the paper includes comparative experiments on representative methods within critical sub-fields to provide quantitative insights. Last but not least, we provide some knowledge summary and discuss future research directions.

Self-attention has become a defacto choice for capturing global context in various vision applications. However, its quadratic computational complexity with respect to image resolution limits its use in real-time applications, especially for deployment on resource-constrained mobile devices. Although hybrid approaches have been proposed to combine the advantages of convolutions and self-attention for a better speed-accuracy trade-off, the expensive matrix multiplication operations in self-attention remain a bottleneck. In this work, we introduce a novel efficient additive attention mechanism that effectively replaces the quadratic matrix multiplication operations with linear element-wise multiplications. Our design shows that the key-value interaction can be replaced with a linear layer without sacrificing any accuracy. Unlike previous state-of-the-art methods, our efficient formulation of self-attention enables its usage at all stages of the network. Using our proposed efficient additive attention, we build a series of models called "SwiftFormer" which achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both accuracy and mobile inference speed. Our small variant achieves 78.5% top-1 ImageNet-1K accuracy with only 0.8 ms latency on iPhone 14, which is more accurate and 2x faster compared to MobileViT-v2. Code: https://github.com/Amshaker/SwiftFormer

Causal language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their size poses significant challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments. Knowledge distillation, a widely-used technique for transferring knowledge from a large teacher model to a small student model, presents a promising approach for model compression. A significant remaining issue lies in the major differences between teacher and student models, namely the substantial capacity gap, mode averaging, and mode collapse, which pose barriers during distillation. To address these issues, we introduce Temporally Adaptive Interpolated Distillation (TAID), a novel knowledge distillation approach that dynamically interpolates student and teacher distributions through an adaptive intermediate distribution, gradually shifting from the student's initial distribution towards the teacher's distribution. We provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating TAID's ability to prevent mode collapse and empirically show its effectiveness in addressing the capacity gap while balancing mode averaging and mode collapse. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate TAID's superior performance across various model sizes and architectures in both instruction tuning and pre-training scenarios. Furthermore, we showcase TAID's practical impact by developing two state-of-the-art compact foundation models: TAID-LLM-1.5B for language tasks and TAID-VLM-2B for vision-language tasks. These results demonstrate TAID's effectiveness in creating high-performing and efficient models, advancing the development of more accessible AI technologies.

General-purpose large language models (LLMs), despite their broad capabilities accrued from open-world data, frequently exhibit suboptimal performance when confronted with the nuanced and specialized demands inherent in real-time telecommunications applications. This investigation addresses this critical limitation through the meticulous fine-tuning of TSLAM-Mini developed by NetoAI, a compact (3.8-billion parameter) causal language model architecturally derived from Phi-4 Mini Instruct 4B. The fine-tuning regimen leverages a bespoke dataset comprising 100,000 samples, strategically engineered to address 20 pivotal telecommunications use-cases, encompassing domains such as Network Fundamentals, IP Routing, MPLS, Network Security, Automation, OSS/BSS, RAN, Mobile Core, Satellite Communications, and Ethical AI. This dataset was curated utilizing NetoAI's DigiTwin platform, enriched with granular insights from venerated network Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and authoritative RFC documents, thereby capturing high-fidelity representations of real-world network dynamics through simulations inspired by digital twin paradigms. Employing Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA), a state-of-the-art Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) technique, we achieved substantial training efficiency and enabled prospective deployment on resource-constrained hardware. A novel evaluation framework, predicated on a high-capacity LLM (Qwen3-235B-A22B) functioning as an automated adjudicator, was instituted to rigorously assess instruction-following fidelity and response quality across the specified telecom use-cases. Empirical results unequivocally demonstrate TSLAM-Mini's superior aptitude in telecom-centric applications, underscoring the profound efficacy of domain-specific datasets and PEFT methodologies for advancing intelligent network management.

Deep learning drives a new wave in computing systems and triggers the automation of increasingly complex problems. In particular, Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced cognitive tasks, often matching or even surpassing human-level performance. However, their extensive parameters result in high computational costs and slow inference, posing challenges for deployment in resource-limited settings. Among the strategies to overcome the aforementioned challenges, pruning emerges as a successful mechanism since it reduces model size while maintaining predictive ability. In this paper, we introduce AMP: Attention Heads and MLP Pruning, a novel structured pruning method that efficiently compresses LLMs by removing less critical structures within Multi-Head Attention (MHA) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP). By projecting the input data onto weights, AMP assesses structural importance and overcomes the limitations of existing techniques, which often fall short in flexibility or efficiency. In particular, AMP surpasses the current state-of-the-art on commonsense reasoning tasks by up to 1.49 percentage points, achieving a 30% pruning ratio with minimal impact on zero-shot task performance. Moreover, AMP also improves inference speeds, making it well-suited for deployment in resource-constrained environments. We confirm the flexibility of AMP on different families of LLMs, including LLaMA and Phi.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) mark a revolutionary advance in neural networks with their token mixer's powerful global context capability. However, the pairwise token affinity and complex matrix operations limit its deployment on resource-constrained scenarios and real-time applications, such as mobile devices, although considerable efforts have been made in previous works. In this paper, we introduce CAS-ViT: Convolutional Additive Self-attention Vision Transformers, to achieve a balance between efficiency and performance in mobile applications. Firstly, we argue that the capability of token mixers to obtain global contextual information hinges on multiple information interactions, such as spatial and channel domains. Subsequently, we construct a novel additive similarity function following this paradigm and present an efficient implementation named Convolutional Additive Token Mixer (CATM). This simplification leads to a significant reduction in computational overhead. We evaluate CAS-ViT across a variety of vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Our experiments, conducted on GPUs, ONNX, and iPhones, demonstrate that CAS-ViT achieves a competitive performance when compared to other state-of-the-art backbones, establishing it as a viable option for efficient mobile vision applications. Our code and model are available at: https://github.com/Tianfang-Zhang/CAS-ViT

The efficiency of large language models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge, particularly in contexts where computational resources are limited. Traditional attention mechanisms in these models, while powerful, require significant computational and memory resources due to the necessity of recalculating and storing attention weights across different layers. This paper introduces a novel Shared Attention (SA) mechanism, designed to enhance the efficiency of LLMs by directly sharing computed attention weights across multiple layers. Unlike previous methods that focus on sharing intermediate Key-Value (KV) caches, our approach utilizes the isotropic tendencies of attention distributions observed in advanced LLMs post-pretraining to reduce both the computational flops and the size of the KV cache required during inference. We empirically demonstrate that implementing SA across various LLMs results in minimal accuracy loss on standard benchmarks. Our findings suggest that SA not only conserves computational resources but also maintains robust model performance, thereby facilitating the deployment of more efficient LLMs in resource-constrained environments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) face challenges for on-device inference due to high memory demands. Traditional methods to reduce memory usage often compromise performance and lack adaptability. We propose FlexInfer, an optimized offloading framework for on-device inference, addressing these issues with techniques like asynchronous prefetching, balanced memory locking, and flexible tensor preservation. These strategies enhance memory efficiency and mitigate I/O bottlenecks, ensuring high performance within user-specified resource constraints. Experiments demonstrate that FlexInfer significantly improves throughput under limited resources, achieving up to 12.5 times better performance than existing methods and facilitating the deployment of large models on resource-constrained devices.

Recent progress in single-image super-resolution (SISR) has achieved remarkable performance, yet the computational costs of these methods remain a challenge for deployment on resource-constrained devices. Especially for transformer-based methods, the self-attention mechanism in such models brings great breakthroughs while incurring substantial computational costs. To tackle this issue, we introduce the Convolutional Transformer layer (ConvFormer) and the ConvFormer-based Super-Resolution network (CFSR), which offer an effective and efficient solution for lightweight image super-resolution tasks. In detail, CFSR leverages the large kernel convolution as the feature mixer to replace the self-attention module, efficiently modeling long-range dependencies and extensive receptive fields with a slight computational cost. Furthermore, we propose an edge-preserving feed-forward network, simplified as EFN, to obtain local feature aggregation and simultaneously preserve more high-frequency information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CFSR can achieve an advanced trade-off between computational cost and performance when compared to existing lightweight SR methods. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, e.g. ShuffleMixer, the proposed CFSR achieves 0.39 dB gains on Urban100 dataset for x2 SR task while containing 26% and 31% fewer parameters and FLOPs, respectively. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Aitical/CFSR.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have promoted remarkable advances in single-image super-resolution (SR) by recovering photo-realistic images. However, high memory consumption of GAN-based SR (usually generators) causes performance degradation and more energy consumption, hindering the deployment of GAN-based SR into resource-constricted mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a novel compression framework Multi-scale Feature Aggregation Net based GAN (MFAGAN) for reducing the memory access cost of the generator. First, to overcome the memory explosion of dense connections, we utilize a memory-efficient multi-scale feature aggregation net as the generator. Second, for faster and more stable training, our method introduces the PatchGAN discriminator. Third, to balance the student discriminator and the compressed generator, we distill both the generator and the discriminator. Finally, we perform a hardware-aware neural architecture search (NAS) to find a specialized SubGenerator for the target mobile phone. Benefiting from these improvements, the proposed MFAGAN achieves up to 8.3times memory saving and 42.9times computation reduction, with only minor visual quality degradation, compared with ESRGAN. Empirical studies also show sim70 milliseconds latency on Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chipset.

In this work, we present INTACT, a novel two-phase framework designed to enhance the robustness of deep neural networks (DNNs) against noisy LiDAR data in safety-critical perception tasks. INTACT combines meta-learning with adversarial curriculum training (ACT) to systematically address challenges posed by data corruption and sparsity in 3D point clouds. The meta-learning phase equips a teacher network with task-agnostic priors, enabling it to generate robust saliency maps that identify critical data regions. The ACT phase leverages these saliency maps to progressively expose a student network to increasingly complex noise patterns, ensuring targeted perturbation and improved noise resilience. INTACT's effectiveness is demonstrated through comprehensive evaluations on object detection, tracking, and classification benchmarks using diverse datasets, including KITTI, Argoverse, and ModelNet40. Results indicate that INTACT improves model robustness by up to 20% across all tasks, outperforming standard adversarial and curriculum training methods. This framework not only addresses the limitations of conventional training strategies but also offers a scalable and efficient solution for real-world deployment in resource-constrained safety-critical systems. INTACT's principled integration of meta-learning and adversarial training establishes a new paradigm for noise-tolerant 3D perception in safety-critical applications. INTACT improved KITTI Multiple Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) by 9.6% (64.1% -> 75.1%) and by 12.4% under Gaussian noise (52.5% -> 73.7%). Similarly, KITTI mean Average Precision (mAP) rose from 59.8% to 69.8% (50% point drop) and 49.3% to 70.9% (Gaussian noise), highlighting the framework's ability to enhance deep learning model resilience in safety-critical object tracking scenarios.

Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as one of the most widely adopted methods for Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) of Large Language Models (LLMs). LoRA reduces the number of trainable parameters and memory usage while achieving comparable performance to full fine-tuning. We aim to assess the viability of training and serving LLMs fine-tuned with LoRA in real-world applications. First, we measure the quality of LLMs fine-tuned with quantized low rank adapters across 10 base models and 31 tasks for a total of 310 models. We find that 4-bit LoRA fine-tuned models outperform base models by 34 points and GPT-4 by 10 points on average. Second, we investigate the most effective base models for fine-tuning and assess the correlative and predictive capacities of task complexity heuristics in forecasting the outcomes of fine-tuning. Finally, we evaluate the latency and concurrency capabilities of LoRAX, an open-source Multi-LoRA inference server that facilitates the deployment of multiple LoRA fine-tuned models on a single GPU using shared base model weights and dynamic adapter loading. LoRAX powers LoRA Land, a web application that hosts 25 LoRA fine-tuned Mistral-7B LLMs on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU with 80GB memory. LoRA Land highlights the quality and cost-effectiveness of employing multiple specialized LLMs over a single, general-purpose LLM.

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) deliver exceptional performance but require significant computational resources, limiting their deployment on mobile and edge devices. Smaller VLMs typically mirror design choices of larger models, such as extensive image tokenization, leading to inefficient GPU memory usage and constrained practicality for on-device applications. We introduce SmolVLM, a series of compact multimodal models specifically engineered for resource-efficient inference. We systematically explore architectural configurations, tokenization strategies, and data curation optimized for low computational overhead. Through this, we identify key design choices that yield substantial performance gains on image and video tasks with minimal memory footprints. Our smallest model, SmolVLM-256M, uses less than 1GB GPU memory during inference and outperforms the 300-times larger Idefics-80B model, despite an 18-month development gap. Our largest model, at 2.2B parameters, rivals state-of-the-art VLMs consuming twice the GPU memory. SmolVLM models extend beyond static images, demonstrating robust video comprehension capabilities. Our results emphasize that strategic architectural optimizations, aggressive yet efficient tokenization, and carefully curated training data significantly enhance multimodal performance, facilitating practical, energy-efficient deployments at significantly smaller scales.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various tasks. However their huge model size and the consequent demand for computational and memory resources also pose challenges to model deployment. Currently, 4-bit post-training quantization (PTQ) has achieved some success in LLMs, reducing the memory footprint by approximately 75% compared to FP16 models, albeit with some accuracy loss. In this paper, we propose SmoothQuant+, an accurate and efficient 4-bit weight-only PTQ that requires no additional training, which enables lossless in accuracy for LLMs for the first time. Based on the fact that the loss of weight quantization is amplified by the activation outliers, SmoothQuant+ smoothes the activation outliers by channel before quantization, while adjusting the corresponding weights for mathematical equivalence, and then performs group-wise 4-bit weight quantization for linear layers. We have integrated SmoothQuant+ into the vLLM framework, an advanced high-throughput inference engine specially developed for LLMs, and equipped it with an efficient W4A16 CUDA kernels, so that vLLM can seamlessly support SmoothQuant+ 4-bit weight quantization. Our results show that, with SmoothQuant+, the Code Llama-34B model can be quantized and deployed on a A100 40GB GPU, achieving lossless accuracy and a throughput increase of 1.9 to 4.0 times compared to the FP16 model deployed on two A100 40GB GPUs. Moreover, the latency per token is only 68% of the FP16 model deployed on two A100 40GB GPUs. This is the state-of-the-art 4-bit weight quantization for LLMs as we know.

Federated learning (FL) emerges as a decentralized learning framework which trains models from multiple distributed clients without sharing their data to preserve privacy. Recently, large-scale pre-trained models (e.g., Vision Transformer) have shown a strong capability of deriving robust representations. However, the data heterogeneity among clients, the limited computation resources, and the communication bandwidth restrict the deployment of large-scale models in FL frameworks. To leverage robust representations from large-scale models while enabling efficient model personalization for heterogeneous clients, we propose a novel personalized FL framework of client-specific Prompt Generation (pFedPG), which learns to deploy a personalized prompt generator at the server for producing client-specific visual prompts that efficiently adapts frozen backbones to local data distributions. Our proposed framework jointly optimizes the stages of personalized prompt adaptation locally and personalized prompt generation globally. The former aims to train visual prompts that adapt foundation models to each client, while the latter observes local optimization directions to generate personalized prompts for all clients. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, we show that our pFedPG is favorable against state-of-the-art personalized FL methods under various types of data heterogeneity, allowing computation and communication efficient model personalization.

Recent advancements in code large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation and understanding. It is still challenging to build a code LLM with comprehensive performance yet ultimate efficiency. Many attempts have been released in the open source community to break the trade-off between performance and efficiency, such as the Qwen Coder series and the DeepSeek Coder series. This paper introduces yet another attempt in this area, namely Ling-Coder-Lite. We leverage the efficient Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture along with a set of high-quality data curation methods (especially those based on program analytics) to build an efficient yet powerful code LLM. Ling-Coder-Lite exhibits on-par performance on 12 representative coding benchmarks compared to state-of-the-art models of similar size, such as Qwen2.5-Coder-7B and DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite, while offering competitive latency and throughput. In practice, we achieve a 50\% reduction in deployment resources compared to the similar-sized dense model without performance loss. To facilitate further research and development in this area, we open-source our models as well as a substantial portion of high-quality data for the annealing and post-training stages. The models and data can be accessed at~https://huggingface.co/inclusionAI/Ling-Coder-lite.

Foundation model development attracts a rapidly expanding body of contributors, scientists, and applications. To help shape responsible development practices, we introduce the Foundation Model Development Cheatsheet: a growing collection of 250+ tools and resources spanning text, vision, and speech modalities. We draw on a large body of prior work to survey resources (e.g. software, documentation, frameworks, guides, and practical tools) that support informed data selection, processing, and understanding, precise and limitation-aware artifact documentation, efficient model training, advance awareness of the environmental impact from training, careful model evaluation of capabilities, risks, and claims, as well as responsible model release, licensing and deployment practices. We hope this curated collection of resources helps guide more responsible development. The process of curating this list, enabled us to review the AI development ecosystem, revealing what tools are critically missing, misused, or over-used in existing practices. We find that (i) tools for data sourcing, model evaluation, and monitoring are critically under-serving ethical and real-world needs, (ii) evaluations for model safety, capabilities, and environmental impact all lack reproducibility and transparency, (iii) text and particularly English-centric analyses continue to dominate over multilingual and multi-modal analyses, and (iv) evaluation of systems, rather than just models, is needed so that capabilities and impact are assessed in context.

Training modern LLMs is extremely resource intensive, and customizing them for various deployment scenarios characterized by limited compute and memory resources through repeated training is impractical. In this paper, we introduce Flextron, a network architecture and post-training model optimization framework supporting flexible model deployment. The Flextron architecture utilizes a nested elastic structure to rapidly adapt to specific user-defined latency and accuracy targets during inference with no additional fine-tuning required. It is also input-adaptive, and can automatically route tokens through its sub-networks for improved performance and efficiency. We present a sample-efficient training method and associated routing algorithms for systematically transforming an existing trained LLM into a Flextron model. We evaluate Flextron on the GPT-3 and LLama-2 family of LLMs, and demonstrate superior performance over multiple end-to-end trained variants and other state-of-the-art elastic networks, all with a single pretraining run that consumes a mere 7.63% tokens compared to original pretraining.

In the complex domain of large language models (LLMs), striking a balance between computational efficiency and maintaining model quality is a formidable challenge. Navigating the inherent limitations of uniform quantization, particularly when dealing with outliers, and motivated by the launch of NVIDIA's H100 hardware, this study delves into the viability of floating-point (FP) quantization, particularly focusing on FP8 and FP4, as a potential solution. Our comprehensive investigation reveals that for LLMs, FP8 activation consistently outshines its integer (INT8) equivalent, with the performance edge becoming more noticeable in models possessing parameters beyond one billion. For weight quantization, our findings indicate that FP4 exhibits comparable, if not superior, performance to INT4, simplifying deployment on FP-supported hardware like H100. To mitigate the overhead from precision alignment caused by the disparity between weights and activations, we propose two scaling constraints for weight quantization that negligibly impact the performance compared to the standard W4A8 model. We additionally enhance our quantization methods by integrating the Low Rank Compensation (LoRC) strategy, yielding improvements especially in smaller models. The results of our investigation emphasize the immense potential of FP quantization for LLMs, paving the way for high-efficiency deployment in resource-limited settings.

This paper presents Tiny-toxic-detector, a compact transformer-based model designed for toxic content detection. Despite having only 2.1 million parameters, Tiny-toxic-detector achieves competitive performance on benchmark datasets, with 90.97% accuracy on ToxiGen and 86.98% accuracy on the Jigsaw dataset, rivaling models over 50 times its size. This efficiency enables deployment in resource-constrained environments, addressing the need for effective content moderation tools that balance performance with computational efficiency. The model architecture features 4 transformer encoder layers, each with 2 attention heads, an embedding dimension of 64, and a feedforward dimension of 128. Trained on both public and private datasets, Tiny-toxic-detector demonstrates the potential of efficient, task-specific models for addressing online toxicity. The paper covers the model architecture, training process, performance benchmarks, and limitations, underscoring its suitability for applications such as social media monitoring and content moderation. By achieving results comparable to much larger models while significantly reducing computational demands, Tiny-toxic-detector represents progress toward more sustainable and scalable AI-driven content moderation solutions.

Enhancing computational efficiency and reducing deployment costs for large language models (LLMs) have become critical challenges in various resource-constrained scenarios. In this work, we present DistilQwen2.5, a family of distilled, lightweight LLMs derived from the public Qwen2.5 models. These distilled models exhibit enhanced instruction-following capabilities compared to the original models based on a series of distillation techniques that incorporate knowledge from much larger LLMs. In our industrial practice, we first leverage powerful proprietary LLMs with varying capacities as multi-agent teachers to select, rewrite, and refine instruction-response pairs that are more suitable for student LLMs to learn. After standard fine-tuning, we further leverage a computationally efficient model fusion approach that enables student models to progressively integrate fine-grained hidden knowledge from their teachers. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the distilled models possess significantly stronger capabilities than their original checkpoints. Additionally, we present use cases to illustrate the applications of our framework in real-world scenarios. To facilitate practical use, we have released all the DistilQwen2.5 models to the open-source community.

The growing demand for Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse applications has prompted a paradigm shift in the design of deep learning serving systems. Deploying LLMs, especially in multi-tenant environments, presents considerable challenges due to their high computational and memory demands. We present BlockLLM, a serving system that exploits the potential of sharing components among fine-tuned LLM models to offer an efficient and flexible solution for LLM workloads. BlockLLM partitions the models into finer-grained blocks to enable the reuse of model components and independent provisioning to improve the computation efficiency. BlockLLM consists of an offline block zoo, for storing the blocks, and an online system to serve the requests through chains of blocks. It offers multi-fold flexibility: (1) Adaptive assembly of block chains on-the-fly is achieved with the help of equivalence evaluation among blocks in the zoo. (2) We enable per-block batch size and configure best-effort KV cache coordination at individual block level. (3) We adopt speculative execution and locality-aware block placement to mitigate the communication costs from dynamic block resource allocation. Our evaluation demonstrates that BlockLLM reduces memory and storage footprints and improves computation efficiency, outperforming existing serving approach in 95\%ile latency and GPU utilization by 33.5\% and 20.1\%, respectively.

Many applications must provide low-latency LLM service to users or risk unacceptable user experience. However, over-provisioning resources to serve fluctuating request patterns is often prohibitively expensive. In this work, we present a best-effort serving system that employs deep reinforcement learning to adjust service quality based on the task distribution and system load. Our best-effort system can maintain availability with over 10x higher client request rates, serves above 96% of peak performance 4.1x more often, and serves above 98% of peak performance 2.3x more often than static serving on unpredictable workloads. Our learned router is robust to shifts in both the arrival and task distribution. Compared to static serving, learned best-effort serving allows for cost-efficient serving through increased hardware utility. Additionally, we argue that learned best-effort LLM serving is applicable in wide variety of settings and provides application developers great flexibility to meet their specific needs.

There has been much interest in deploying deep learning algorithms on low-powered devices, including smartphones, drones, and medical sensors. However, full-scale deep neural networks are often too resource-intensive in terms of energy and storage. As a result, the bulk part of the machine learning operation is therefore often carried out on an edge server, where the data is compressed and transmitted. However, compressing data (such as images) leads to transmitting information irrelevant to the supervised task. Another popular approach is to split the deep network between the device and the server while compressing intermediate features. To date, however, such split computing strategies have barely outperformed the aforementioned naive data compression baselines due to their inefficient approaches to feature compression. This paper adopts ideas from knowledge distillation and neural image compression to compress intermediate feature representations more efficiently. Our supervised compression approach uses a teacher model and a student model with a stochastic bottleneck and learnable prior for entropy coding (Entropic Student). We compare our approach to various neural image and feature compression baselines in three vision tasks and found that it achieves better supervised rate-distortion performance while maintaining smaller end-to-end latency. We furthermore show that the learned feature representations can be tuned to serve multiple downstream tasks.

To deploy LLMs on resource-contained platforms such as mobile robots and smartphones, non-transformers LLMs have achieved major breakthroughs. Recently, a novel RNN-based LLM family, Repentance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) has shown strong computational efficiency; nevertheless, RWKV models still have high parameter counts which limited their deployment. In this paper, we propose a suite of compression techniques, ranging from model architecture optimizations to post-training compression, tailored to the RWKV architecture. Combined, our techniques reduce the memory footprint of RWKV models by 3.4x -- 5x with only negligible degradation in accuracy; compared to transformer LLMs with similar accuracy, our models require 4x less memory footprint.

Deep learning models like Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have revolutionized various domains, but their parameter-intensive nature hampers deployment in resource-constrained settings. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept utilizes column space and row space of weight matrices, which allows for a substantial reduction in model parameters without compromising performance. Leveraging this paradigm, we achieve parameter-efficient deep learning models.. Our approach applies to both Bottleneck and Attention layers, effectively halving the parameters while incurring only minor performance degradation. Extensive experiments conducted on the ImageNet dataset with ViT and ResNet50 demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showcasing competitive performance when compared to traditional models. This approach not only addresses the pressing demand for parameter efficient deep learning solutions but also holds great promise for practical deployment in real-world scenarios.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities across various domains. Accompanying the evolving capabilities and expanding deployment scenarios of LLMs, their deployment challenges escalate due to their sheer scale and the advanced yet complex activation designs prevalent in notable model series, such as Llama, Gemma, and Mistral. These challenges have become particularly pronounced in resource-constrained deployment scenarios, where mitigating inference efficiency bottlenecks is imperative. Among various recent efforts, activation approximation has emerged as a promising avenue for pursuing inference efficiency, sometimes considered indispensable in applications such as private inference. Despite achieving substantial speedups with minimal impact on utility, even appearing sound and practical for real-world deployment, the safety implications of activation approximations remain unclear. In this work, we fill this critical gap in LLM safety by conducting the first systematic safety evaluation of activation approximations. Our safety vetting spans seven sota techniques across three popular categories, revealing consistent safety degradation across ten safety-aligned LLMs.

Remote sensing object detection (RSOD) faces formidable challenges in complex visual environments. Aerial and satellite images inherently suffer from limitations such as low spatial resolution, sensor noise, blurred objects, low-light degradation, and partial occlusions. These degradation factors collectively compromise the feature discriminability in detection models, resulting in three key issues: (1) reduced contrast that hampers foreground-background separation, (2) structural discontinuities in edge representations, and (3) ambiguous feature responses caused by variations in illumination. These collectively weaken model robustness and deployment feasibility. To address these challenges, we propose LEGNet, a lightweight network that incorporates a novel edge-Gaussian aggregation (EGA) module specifically designed for low-quality remote sensing images. Our key innovation lies in the synergistic integration of Scharr operator-based edge priors with uncertainty-aware Gaussian modeling: (a) The orientation-aware Scharr filters preserve high-frequency edge details with rotational invariance; (b) The uncertainty-aware Gaussian layers probabilistically refine low-confidence features through variance estimation. This design enables precision enhancement while maintaining architectural simplicity. Comprehensive evaluations across four RSOD benchmarks (DOTA-v1.0, v1.5, DIOR-R, FAIR1M-v1.0) and a UAV-view dataset (VisDrone2019) demonstrate significant improvements. LEGNet achieves state-of-the-art performance across five benchmark datasets while ensuring computational efficiency, making it well-suited for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices in real-world remote sensing applications. The code is available at https://github.com/lwCVer/LEGNet.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have prompted interest in deploying these models on mobile devices to enable new applications without relying on cloud connectivity. However, the efficiency constraints of deploying LLMs on resource-limited devices present significant challenges. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive measurement study to evaluate the efficiency tradeoffs between mobile-based, edge-based, and cloud-based deployments for LLM applications. We implement AutoLife-Lite, a simplified LLM-based application that analyzes smartphone sensor data to infer user location and activity contexts. Our experiments reveal that: (1) Only small-size LLMs (<4B parameters) can run successfully on powerful mobile devices, though they exhibit quality limitations compared to larger models; (2) Model compression is effective in lower the hardware requirement, but may lead to significant performance degradation; (3) The latency to run LLMs on mobile devices with meaningful output is significant (>30 seconds), while cloud services demonstrate better time efficiency (<10 seconds); (4) Edge deployments offer intermediate tradeoffs between latency and model capabilities, with different results on CPU-based and GPU-based settings. These findings provide valuable insights for system designers on the current limitations and future directions for on-device LLM applications.

This paper releases and analyzes a month-long trace of 85 billion user requests and 11.9 million cold starts from Huawei's serverless cloud platform. Our analysis spans workloads from five data centers. We focus on cold starts and provide a comprehensive examination of the underlying factors influencing the number and duration of cold starts. These factors include trigger types, request synchronicity, runtime languages, and function resource allocations. We investigate components of cold starts, including pod allocation time, code and dependency deployment time, and scheduling delays, and examine their relationships with runtime languages, trigger types, and resource allocation. We introduce pod utility ratio to measure the pod's useful lifetime relative to its cold start time, giving a more complete picture of cold starts, and see that some pods with long cold start times have longer useful lifetimes. Our findings reveal the complexity and multifaceted origins of the number, duration, and characteristics of cold starts, driven by differences in trigger types, runtime languages, and function resource allocations. For example, cold starts in Region 1 take up to 7 seconds, dominated by dependency deployment time and scheduling. In Region 2, cold starts take up to 3 seconds and are dominated by pod allocation time. Based on this, we identify opportunities to reduce the number and duration of cold starts using strategies for multi-region scheduling. Finally, we suggest directions for future research to address these challenges and enhance the performance of serverless cloud platforms. Our datasets and code are available here https://github.com/sir-lab/data-release

With the ubiquitous use of modern large language models (LLMs) across industries, the inference serving for these models is ever expanding. Given the high compute and memory requirements of modern LLMs, more and more top-of-the-line GPUs are being deployed to serve these models. Energy availability has come to the forefront as the biggest challenge for data center expansion to serve these models. In this paper, we present the trade-offs brought up by making energy efficiency the primary goal of LLM serving under performance SLOs. We show that depending on the inputs, the model, and the service-level agreements, there are several knobs available to the LLM inference provider to use for being energy efficient. We characterize the impact of these knobs on the latency, throughput, as well as the energy. By exploring these trade-offs, we offer valuable insights into optimizing energy usage without compromising on performance, thereby paving the way for sustainable and cost-effective LLM deployment in data center environments.

The surge in generative AI workloads has created a need for scalable inference systems that can flexibly harness both GPUs and specialized accelerators while containing operational costs. This paper proposes a hardware-agnostic control loop that adaptively allocates requests across heterogeneous accelerators based on real-time cost and capacity signals. The approach sustains low latency and high throughput by dynamically shifting between cost-optimized and capacity-optimized modes, ensuring the most efficient use of expensive compute resources under fluctuating availability. Evaluated using the Stable Diffusion model, the framework consistently meets latency targets, automatically redirects traffic during capacity shortfalls, and capitalizes on lower-cost accelerators when possible. These results highlight how a feedback-driven deployment strategy, spanning the entire software and hardware stack, can help organizations efficiently scale generative AI workloads while maintaining resilience in the face of limited accelerator capacity.

Catalyzed by the popularity of blockchain technology, there has recently been a renewed interest in the design, implementation and evaluation of decentralized systems. Most of these systems are intended to be deployed at scale and in heterogeneous environments with real users and unpredictable workloads. Nevertheless, most research in this field evaluates such systems in controlled environments that poorly reflect the complex conditions of real-world environments. In this work, we argue that deployment is crucial to understanding decentralized mechanisms in a real-world environment and an enabler to building more robust and sustainable systems. We highlight the merits of deployment by comparing this approach with other experimental setups and show how our lab applied a deployment-first methodology. We then outline how we use Tribler, our peer-to-peer file-sharing application, to deploy and monitor decentralized mechanisms at scale. We illustrate the application of our methodology by describing a deployment trial in experimental tokenomics. Finally, we summarize four lessons learned from multiple deployment trials where we applied our methodology.

The emergence of large-scale Mixture of Experts (MoE) models has marked a significant advancement in artificial intelligence, offering enhanced model capacity and computational efficiency through conditional computation. However, the deployment and inference of these models present substantial challenges in terms of computational resources, latency, and energy efficiency. This comprehensive survey systematically analyzes the current landscape of inference optimization techniques for MoE models across the entire system stack. We first establish a taxonomical framework that categorizes optimization approaches into model-level, system-level, and hardware-level optimizations. At the model level, we examine architectural innovations including efficient expert design, attention mechanisms, various compression techniques such as pruning, quantization, and knowledge distillation, as well as algorithm improvement including dynamic routing strategies and expert merging methods. At the system level, we investigate distributed computing approaches, load balancing mechanisms, and efficient scheduling algorithms that enable scalable deployment. Furthermore, we delve into hardware-specific optimizations and co-design strategies that maximize throughput and energy efficiency. This survey not only provides a structured overview of existing solutions but also identifies key challenges and promising research directions in MoE inference optimization. Our comprehensive analysis serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working on large-scale deployment of MoE models in resource-constrained environments. To facilitate ongoing updates and the sharing of cutting-edge advances in MoE inference optimization research, we have established a repository accessible at https://github.com/MoE-Inf/awesome-moe-inference/.

Federated Learning (FL) typically involves a large-scale, distributed system with individual user devices/servers training models locally and then aggregating their model updates on a trusted central server. Existing systems for FL often use an always-on server for model aggregation, which can be inefficient in terms of resource utilization. They may also be inelastic in their resource management. This is particularly exacerbated when aggregating model updates at scale in a highly dynamic environment with varying numbers of heterogeneous user devices/servers. We present LIFL, a lightweight and elastic serverless cloud platform with fine-grained resource management for efficient FL aggregation at scale. LIFL is enhanced by a streamlined, event-driven serverless design that eliminates the individual heavy-weight message broker and replaces inefficient container-based sidecars with lightweight eBPF-based proxies. We leverage shared memory processing to achieve high-performance communication for hierarchical aggregation, which is commonly adopted to speed up FL aggregation at scale. We further introduce locality-aware placement in LIFL to maximize the benefits of shared memory processing. LIFL precisely scales and carefully reuses the resources for hierarchical aggregation to achieve the highest degree of parallelism while minimizing the aggregation time and resource consumption. Our experimental results show that LIFL achieves significant improvement in resource efficiency and aggregation speed for supporting FL at scale, compared to existing serverful and serverless FL systems.

We survey the large language model (LLM) serving area to understand the intricate dynamics between cost-efficiency and accuracy, which is magnified by the growing need for longer contextual understanding when deploying models at a massive scale. Our findings reveal that works in this space optimize along three distinct but conflicting goals: improving serving context length (C), improving serving accuracy (A), and improving serving performance (P). Drawing inspiration from the CAP theorem in databases, we propose a CAP principle for LLM serving, which suggests that any optimization can improve at most two of these three goals simultaneously. Our survey categorizes existing works within this framework. We find the definition and continuity of user-perceived measurement metrics are crucial in determining whether a goal has been met, akin to prior CAP databases in the wild. We recognize the CAP principle for LLM serving as a guiding principle, rather than a formal theorem, to inform designers of the inherent and dynamic trade-offs in serving models. As serving accuracy and performance have been extensively studied, this survey focuses on works that extend serving context length and address the resulting challenges.

With the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), serving LLM inference requests has become an increasingly important task, attracting active research advancements. Practical workloads play an essential role in this process: they are critical for motivating and benchmarking serving techniques and systems. However, the existing understanding of real-world LLM serving workloads is limited due to the lack of a comprehensive workload characterization. Prior analyses remain insufficient in scale and scope, thus failing to fully capture intricate workload characteristics. In this paper, we fill the gap with an in-depth characterization of LLM serving workloads collected from our worldwide cloud inference serving service, covering not only language models but also emerging multimodal and reasoning models, and unveiling important new findings in each case. Moreover, based on our findings, we propose ServeGen, a principled framework for generating realistic LLM serving workloads by composing them on a per-client basis. A practical use case in production validates that ServeGen avoids 50% under-provisioning compared to naive workload generation, demonstrating ServeGen's advantage in performance benchmarking. We will open-source ServeGen to foster future research.

Generative AI release decisions determine whether system components are made available, but release does not address many other elements that change how users and stakeholders are able to engage with a system. Beyond release, access to system components informs potential risks and benefits. Access refers to practical needs, infrastructurally, technically, and societally, in order to use available components in some way. We deconstruct access along three axes: resourcing, technical usability, and utility. Within each category, a set of variables per system component clarify tradeoffs. For example, resourcing requires access to computing infrastructure to serve model weights. We also compare the accessibility of four high performance language models, two open-weight and two closed-weight, showing similar considerations for all based instead on access variables. Access variables set the foundation for being able to scale or increase access to users; we examine the scale of access and how scale affects ability to manage and intervene on risks. This framework better encompasses the landscape and risk-benefit tradeoffs of system releases to inform system release decisions, research, and policy.

The increasing usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) has resulted in a surging demand for planet-scale serving systems, where tens of thousands of GPUs continuously serve hundreds of millions of users. Consequently, throughput (under reasonable latency constraints) has emerged as a key metric that determines serving systems' performance. To boost throughput, various methods of inter-device parallelism (e.g., data, tensor, pipeline) have been explored. However, existing methods do not consider overlapping the utilization of different resources within a single device, leading to underutilization and sub-optimal performance. We propose NanoFlow, a novel serving framework that exploits intra-device parallelism, which overlaps the usage of resources including compute, memory, and network within a single device through operation co-scheduling. To exploit intra-device parallelism, NanoFlow introduces two key innovations: First, NanoFlow splits requests into nano-batches at the granularity of operations, which breaks the dependency of sequential operations in LLM inference and enables overlapping; then, to get benefit from overlapping, NanoFlow uses an operation-level pipeline with execution unit scheduling, which partitions the device's functional units and simultaneously executes different operations in each unit. NanoFlow automates the pipeline setup using a parameter search algorithm, which enables easily porting NanoFlow to different models. We implement NanoFlow on NVIDIA GPUs and evaluate end-to-end serving throughput on several popular models such as LLaMA-2-70B, Mixtral 8x7B, LLaMA-3-8B, etc.. With practical workloads, NanoFlow provides 1.91x throughput boost compared to state-of-the-art serving systems achieving 59% to 72% of optimal throughput across ported models.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a laborious process. Prior work on automated NAS targets mainly on improving accuracy, but lacks consideration of computational resource use. We propose the Resource-Efficient Neural Architect (RENA), an efficient resource-constrained NAS using reinforcement learning with network embedding. RENA uses a policy network to process the network embeddings to generate new configurations. We demonstrate RENA on image recognition and keyword spotting (KWS) problems. RENA can find novel architectures that achieve high performance even with tight resource constraints. For CIFAR10, it achieves 2.95% test error when compute intensity is greater than 100 FLOPs/byte, and 3.87% test error when model size is less than 3M parameters. For Google Speech Commands Dataset, RENA achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy without resource constraints, and it outperforms the optimized architectures with tight resource constraints.

The integration and deployment of large language model (LLM)-based intelligent agents have been fraught with challenges that compromise their efficiency and efficacy. Among these issues are sub-optimal scheduling and resource allocation of agent requests over the LLM, the difficulties in maintaining context during interactions between agent and LLM, and the complexities inherent in integrating heterogeneous agents with different capabilities and specializations. The rapid increase of agent quantity and complexity further exacerbates these issues, often leading to bottlenecks and sub-optimal utilization of resources. Inspired by these challenges, this paper presents AIOS, an LLM agent operating system, which embeds large language model into operating systems (OS). Specifically, AIOS is designed to optimize resource allocation, facilitate context switch across agents, enable concurrent execution of agents, provide tool service for agents, and maintain access control for agents. We present the architecture of such an operating system, outline the core challenges it aims to resolve, and provide the basic design and implementation of the AIOS. Our experiments on concurrent execution of multiple agents demonstrate the reliability and efficiency of our AIOS modules. Through this, we aim to not only improve the performance and efficiency of LLM agents but also to pioneer for better development and deployment of the AIOS ecosystem in the future. The project is open-source at https://github.com/agiresearch/AIOS.

The burgeoning field of Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by sophisticated models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence. These models, however, bring forth substantial challenges in the high consumption of computational, memory, energy, and financial resources, especially in environments with limited resource capabilities. This survey aims to systematically address these challenges by reviewing a broad spectrum of techniques designed to enhance the resource efficiency of LLMs. We categorize methods based on their optimization focus: computational, memory, energy, financial, and network resources and their applicability across various stages of an LLM's lifecycle, including architecture design, pretraining, finetuning, and system design. Additionally, the survey introduces a nuanced categorization of resource efficiency techniques by their specific resource types, which uncovers the intricate relationships and mappings between various resources and corresponding optimization techniques. A standardized set of evaluation metrics and datasets is also presented to facilitate consistent and fair comparisons across different models and techniques. By offering a comprehensive overview of the current sota and identifying open research avenues, this survey serves as a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners, aiding them in developing more sustainable and efficient LLMs in a rapidly evolving landscape.

An important concept in the fifth generation of mobile networks is multitenancy, which allows diverse operators sharing the same wireless infrastructure. To support this feature in conjunction with the challenging performance requirements of future networks, more automated and faster planning of the required radio capacity is needed. Likewise, installing small cells is an effective resource to provide greater performance and capacity to both indoor and outdoor places. This paper proposes a new framework for automated cell planning in multitenant small cell networks. In particular, taking advantage of the available network data, a set of detailed planning specifications over time and space domains are generated in order to meet the contracted capacity by each tenant. Then, the network infrastructure and configuration are updated according to an algorithm that considers different actions such as adding/removing channels and adding or relocating small cells. The simulation results show the effectiveness of various methods to derive the planning specifications depending on the correlation between the tenant's and network's traffic demands.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) revolutionized natural language processing applications, and running LLMs on edge devices has become increasingly attractive for reasons including reduced latency, data localization, and personalized user experiences. This comprehensive review examines the challenges of deploying computationally expensive LLMs on resource-constrained devices and explores innovative solutions across multiple domains. The paper investigates the development of on-device language models, their efficient architectures, including parameter sharing and modular designs, as well as state-of-the-art compression techniques like quantization, pruning, and knowledge distillation. Hardware acceleration strategies and collaborative edge-cloud deployment approaches are analyzed, highlighting the intricate balance between performance and resource utilization. Case studies of on-device language models from major mobile manufacturers demonstrate real-world applications and potential benefits. The review also addresses critical aspects such as adaptive learning, multi-modal capabilities, and personalization. By identifying key research directions and open challenges, this paper provides a roadmap for future advancements in on-device language models, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary efforts to realize the full potential of ubiquitous, intelligent computing while ensuring responsible and ethical deployment. For a comprehensive review of research work and educational resources on on-device large language models (LLMs), please visit https://github.com/NexaAI/Awesome-LLMs-on-device. To download and run on-device LLMs, visit https://www.nexaai.com/models.

DistServe improves the performance of large language models (LLMs) serving by disaggregating the prefill and decoding computation. Existing LLM serving systems colocate the two phases and batch the computation of prefill and decoding across all users and requests. We find that this strategy not only leads to strong prefill-decoding interferences but also couples the resource allocation and parallelism plans for both phases. LLM applications often emphasize individual latency for each phase: time to first token (TTFT) for the prefill phase and time per output token (TPOT) of each request for the decoding phase. In the presence of stringent latency requirements, existing systems have to prioritize one latency over the other, or over-provision compute resources to meet both. DistServe assigns prefill and decoding computation to different GPUs, hence eliminating prefill-decoding interferences. Given the application's TTFT and TPOT requirements, DistServe co-optimizes the resource allocation and parallelism strategy tailored for each phase. DistServe also places the two phases according to the serving cluster's bandwidth to minimize the communication caused by disaggregation. As a result, DistServe significantly improves LLM serving performance in terms of the maximum rate that can be served within both TTFT and TPOT constraints on each GPU. Our evaluations show that on various popular LLMs, applications, and latency requirements, DistServe can serve 4.48x more requests or 10.2x tighter SLO, compared to state-of-the-art systems, while staying within latency constraints for > 90% of requests.

Many applications need up-to-date copies of collections of changing Web resources. Such synchronization is currently achieved using ad-hoc or proprietary solutions. We propose ResourceSync, a general Web resource synchronization protocol that leverages XML Sitemaps. It provides a set of capabilities that can be combined in a modular manner to meet local or community requirements. We report on work to implement this protocol for arXiv.org and also provide an experimental prototype for the English Wikipedia as well as a client API.

Inference serving for large language models (LLMs) is the key to unleashing their potential in people's daily lives. However, efficient LLM serving remains challenging today because the requests are inherently heterogeneous and unpredictable in terms of resource and latency requirements, as a result of the diverse applications and the dynamic execution nature of LLMs. Existing systems are fundamentally limited in handling these characteristics and cause problems such as severe queuing delays, poor tail latencies, and SLO violations. We introduce Llumnix, an LLM serving system that reacts to such heterogeneous and unpredictable requests by runtime rescheduling across multiple model instances. Similar to context switching across CPU cores in modern operating systems, Llumnix reschedules requests to improve load balancing and isolation, mitigate resource fragmentation, and differentiate request priorities and SLOs. Llumnix implements the rescheduling with an efficient and scalable live migration mechanism for requests and their in-memory states, and exploits it in a dynamic scheduling policy that unifies the multiple rescheduling scenarios elegantly. Our evaluations show that Llumnix improves tail latencies by an order of magnitude, accelerates high-priority requests by up to 1.5x, and delivers up to 36% cost savings while achieving similar tail latencies, compared against state-of-the-art LLM serving systems. Llumnix is publicly available at https://github.com/AlibabaPAI/llumnix.

CodeLLMs have demonstrated remarkable advancements in software engineering tasks. However, while these models can generate functionally correct code, they often produce code that is inefficient in terms of runtime. This inefficiency is particularly problematic in resource-constrained environments, impacting software performance and sustainability. Existing approaches for optimizing code efficiency for CodeLLMs like SOAP and PIE exhibit certain limitations. SOAP requires a compatible execution environment and predefined test cases for iterative code modification, while PIE focuses on instruction tuning, improving efficiency but compromising correctness. These shortcomings highlight the need for a fine-tuning framework that optimizes both efficiency and correctness without relying on predefined test cases or specific execution environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce ACECode, a reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning framework that aligns CodeLLMs with dual objectives of efficiency and correctness. ACECode combines three key steps: (1) generating code with an actor CodeLLM, (2) calculating a training-free reward signal derived from code execution feedback for each generated code, and (3) optimizing the CodeLLM via Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. This reward signal enables joint assessment of efficiency and correctness without manual labeling. We evaluate ACECode by fine-tuning four SOTA (state-of-the-art) CodeLLMs and comparing their code with three baselines: original, instruction-tuned, and PIE-tuned CodeLLMs. Extensive experiment results suggest that significantly improves the efficiency and correctness of generated code against all baselines for all CodeLLMs. Specifically, CodeLLMs fine-tuned with ACECode improve pass@1 by 1.84% to 14.51% and reduce runtime in 65% to 72% of cases compared to original CodeLLMs.

Recent innovation in large language models (LLMs), and their myriad use-cases have rapidly driven up the compute capacity demand for datacenter GPUs. Several cloud providers and other enterprises have made substantial plans of growth in their datacenters to support these new workloads. One of the key bottleneck resources in datacenters is power, and given the increasing model sizes of LLMs, they are becoming increasingly power intensive. In this paper, we show that there is a significant opportunity to oversubscribe power in LLM clusters. Power oversubscription improves the power efficiency of these datacenters, allowing more deployable servers per datacenter, and reduces the deployment time, since building new datacenters is slow. We extensively characterize the power consumption patterns of a variety of LLMs and their configurations. We identify the differences between the inference and training power consumption patterns. Based on our analysis of these LLMs, we claim that the average and peak power utilization in LLM clusters for inference should not be very high. Our deductions align with the data from production LLM clusters, revealing that inference workloads offer substantial headroom for power oversubscription. However, the stringent set of telemetry and controls that GPUs offer in a virtualized environment, makes it challenging to have a reliable and robust power oversubscription mechanism. We propose POLCA, our framework for power oversubscription that is robust, reliable, and readily deployable for GPU clusters. Using open-source models to replicate the power patterns observed in production, we simulate POLCA and demonstrate that we can deploy 30% more servers in the same GPU cluster for inference, with minimal performance loss

Monolithic large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have paved the way for modern generative AI applications. Training, serving, and maintaining monolithic LLMs at scale, however, remains prohibitively expensive and challenging. The disproportionate increase in compute-to-memory ratio of modern AI accelerators have created a memory wall, necessitating new methods to deploy AI. Composition of Experts (CoE) is an alternative modular approach that lowers the cost and complexity of training and serving. However, this approach presents two key challenges when using conventional hardware: (1) without fused operations, smaller models have lower operational intensity, which makes high utilization more challenging to achieve; and (2) hosting a large number of models can be either prohibitively expensive or slow when dynamically switching between them. In this paper, we describe how combining CoE, streaming dataflow, and a three-tier memory system scales the AI memory wall. We describe Samba-CoE, a CoE system with 150 experts and a trillion total parameters. We deploy Samba-CoE on the SambaNova SN40L Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU) - a commercial dataflow accelerator architecture that has been co-designed for enterprise inference and training applications. The chip introduces a new three-tier memory system with on-chip distributed SRAM, on-package HBM, and off-package DDR DRAM. A dedicated inter-RDU network enables scaling up and out over multiple sockets. We demonstrate speedups ranging from 2x to 13x on various benchmarks running on eight RDU sockets compared with an unfused baseline. We show that for CoE inference deployments, the 8-socket RDU Node reduces machine footprint by up to 19x, speeds up model switching time by 15x to 31x, and achieves an overall speedup of 3.7x over a DGX H100 and 6.6x over a DGX A100.

In the context of Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) clouds, the extensive use of Large Language Models (LLMs) often requires efficient management of significant query loads. When providing real-time inference services, several challenges arise. Firstly, increasing the number of GPUs may lead to a decrease in inference speed due to heightened communication overhead, while an inadequate number of GPUs can lead to out-of-memory errors. Secondly, different deployment strategies need to be evaluated to guarantee optimal utilization and minimal inference latency. Lastly, inefficient orchestration of inference queries can easily lead to significant Service Level Objective (SLO) violations. Lastly, inefficient orchestration of inference queries can easily lead to significant Service Level Objective (SLO) violations. To address these challenges, we propose a Unified and Efficient approach for Large Language Model inference serving (UELLM), which consists of three main components: 1) resource profiler, 2) batch scheduler, and 3) LLM deployer. UELLM minimizes resource overhead, reduces inference latency, and lowers SLO violation rates. Compared with state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques, UELLM reduces the inference latency by 72.3% to 90.3%, enhances GPU utilization by 1.2X to 4.1X, and increases throughput by 1.92X to 4.98X, it can also serve without violating the inference latency SLO.

Microsoft Azure is dedicated to guarantee high quality of service to its customers, in particular, during periods of high customer activity, while controlling cost. We employ a Data Science (DS) driven solution to predict user load and leverage these predictions to optimize resource allocation. To this end, we built the Seagull infrastructure that processes per-server telemetry, validates the data, trains and deploys ML models. The models are used to predict customer load per server (24h into the future), and optimize service operations. Seagull continually re-evaluates accuracy of predictions, fallback to previously known good models and triggers alerts as appropriate. We deployed this infrastructure in production for PostgreSQL and MySQL servers across all Azure regions, and applied it to the problem of scheduling server backups during low-load time. This minimizes interference with user-induced load and improves customer experience.

Network densification is a promising cellular deployment technique that leverages spatial reuse to enhance coverage and throughput. Recent work has identified that at some point ultra-densification will no longer be able to deliver significant throughput gains. In this paper, we provide a unified treatment of the performance limits of network densification. We develop a general framework, which incorporates multi-slope pathloss and the entire space of shadowing and small scale fading distributions, under strongest cell association in a Poisson field of interferers. First, our results show that there are three scaling regimes for the downlink signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), coverage probability, and average per-user rate. Specifically, depending on the near-field pathloss and the fading distribution, the user performance of 5G ultra dense networks (UDNs) would either monotonically increase, saturate, or decay with increasing network density. Second, we show that network performance in terms of coverage density and area spectral efficiency can scale with the network density better than the user performance does. Furthermore, we provide ordering results for both coverage and average rate as a means to qualitatively compare different transmission techniques that may exhibit the same performance scaling. Our results, which are verified by simulations, provide succinct insights and valuable design guidelines for the deployment of 5G UDNs.

Large-scale distributed training in production datacenters constitutes a challenging workload bottlenecked by network communication. In response, both major industry players (e.g., Ultra Ethernet Consortium) and parts of academia have surprisingly, and almost unanimously, agreed that packet spraying is necessary to improve the performance of large-scale distributed training workloads. In this paper, we challenge this prevailing belief and pose the question: How close can a singlepath transport approach an optimal multipath transport? We demonstrate that singlepath transport (from a NIC's perspective) is sufficient and can perform nearly as well as an ideal multipath transport with packet spraying, particularly in the context of distributed training in leaf-spine topologies. Our assertion is based on four key observations about workloads driven by collective communication patterns: (i) flows within a collective start almost simultaneously, (ii) flow sizes are nearly equal, (iii) the completion time of a collective is more crucial than individual flow completion times, and (iv) flows can be split upon arrival. We analytically prove that singlepath transport, using minimal flow splitting (at the application layer), is equivalent to an ideal multipath transport with packet spraying in terms of maximum congestion. Our preliminary evaluations support our claims. This paper suggests an alternative agenda for developing next-generation transport protocols tailored for large-scale distributed training.

The Internet of Things is an example domain where data is perpetually generated in ever-increasing quantities, reflecting the proliferation of connected devices and the formation of continuous data streams over time. Consequently, the demand for ad-hoc, cost-effective machine learning solutions must adapt to this evolving data influx. This study tackles the task of offloading in small gateways, exacerbated by their dynamic availability over time. An approach leveraging CPU utilization metrics using online and continual machine learning techniques is proposed to predict gateway availability. These methods are compared to popular machine learning algorithms and a recent time-series foundation model, Lag-Llama, for fine-tuned and zero-shot setups. Their performance is benchmarked on a dataset of CPU utilization measurements over time from an IoT gateway and focuses on model metrics such as prediction errors, training and inference times, and memory consumption. Our primary objective is to study new efficient ways to predict CPU performance in IoT environments. Across various scenarios, our findings highlight that ensemble and online methods offer promising results for this task in terms of accuracy while maintaining a low resource footprint.

The rapid advancement of ML models in critical sectors such as healthcare, finance, and security has intensified the need for robust data security, model integrity, and reliable outputs. Large multimodal foundational models, while crucial for complex tasks, present challenges in scalability, reliability, and potential misuse. Decentralized systems offer a solution by distributing workload and mitigating central points of failure, but they introduce risks of unauthorized access to sensitive data across nodes. We address these challenges with a comprehensive framework designed for responsible AI development. Our approach incorporates: 1) Zero-knowledge proofs for secure model verification, enhancing trust without compromising privacy. 2) Consensus-based verification checks to ensure consistent outputs across nodes, mitigating hallucinations and maintaining model integrity. 3) Split Learning techniques that segment models across different nodes, preserving data privacy by preventing full data access at any point. 4) Hardware-based security through trusted execution environments (TEEs) to protect data and computations. This framework aims to enhance security and privacy and improve the reliability and fairness of multimodal AI systems. Promoting efficient resource utilization contributes to more sustainable AI development. Our state-of-the-art proofs and principles demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in responsibly democratizing artificial intelligence, offering a promising approach for building secure and private foundational models.

The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been a driving force in the growth of cloud-based LLM services, which are now integral to advancing AI applications. However, the dynamic auto-regressive nature of LLM service, along with the need to support exceptionally long context lengths, demands the flexible allocation and release of substantial resources. This presents considerable challenges in designing cloud-based LLM service systems, where inefficient management can lead to performance degradation or resource wastage. In response to these challenges, this work introduces DistAttention, a novel distributed attention algorithm that segments the KV Cache into smaller, manageable units, enabling distributed processing and storage of the attention module. Based on that, we propose DistKV-LLM, a distributed LLM serving system that dynamically manages KV Cache and effectively orchestrates all accessible GPU and CPU memories spanning across the data center. This ensures a high-performance LLM service on the cloud, adaptable to a broad range of context lengths. Validated in a cloud environment with 32 NVIDIA A100 GPUs in configurations from 2 to 32 instances, our system exhibited 1.03-2.4x end-to-end throughput improvements and supported context lengths 2-19x longer than current state-of-the-art LLM service systems, as evidenced by extensive testing across 18 datasets with context lengths up to 1,900K.

Efficient network management is one of the key challenges of the constantly growing and increasingly complex wide area networks (WAN). The paradigm shift towards virtualized (NFV) and software defined networks (SDN) in the next generation of mobile networks (5G), as well as the latest scientific insights in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) enable the transition from manually managed networks nowadays to fully autonomic and dynamic self-organized networks (SON). This helps to meet the KPIs and reduce at the same time operational costs (OPEX). In this paper, an AI driven concept is presented for the malfunction detection in NFV applications with the help of semi-supervised learning. For this purpose, a profile of the application under test is created. This profile then is used as a reference to detect abnormal behaviour. For example, if there is a bug in the updated version of the app, it is now possible to react autonomously and roll-back the NFV app to a previous version in order to avoid network outages.

Large language models (LLMs) have surged in popularity and are extensively used in commercial applications, where the efficiency of model serving is crucial for the user experience. Most current research focuses on optimizing individual sub-procedures, e.g. local inference and communication, however, there is no comprehensive framework that provides a holistic system view for optimizing LLM serving in an end-to-end manner. In this work, we conduct a detailed analysis to identify major bottlenecks that impact end-to-end latency in LLM serving systems. Our analysis reveals that a comprehensive LLM serving endpoint must address a series of efficiency bottlenecks that extend beyond LLM inference. We then propose ScaleLLM, an optimized system for resource-efficient LLM serving. Our extensive experiments reveal that with 64 concurrent requests, ScaleLLM achieves a 4.3x speed up over vLLM and outperforms state-of-the-arts with 1.5x higher throughput.

The environmental impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging as a significant global concern, particularly regarding model training. In this paper, we introduce GREEN (Guided Recommendations of Energy-Efficient Networks), a novel, inference-time approach for recommending Pareto-optimal AI model configurations that optimize validation performance and energy consumption across diverse AI domains and tasks. Our approach directly addresses the limitations of current eco-efficient neural architecture search methods, which are often restricted to specific architectures or tasks. Central to this work is EcoTaskSet, a dataset comprising training dynamics from over 1767 experiments across computer vision, natural language processing, and recommendation systems using both widely used and cutting-edge architectures. Leveraging this dataset and a prediction model, our approach demonstrates effectiveness in selecting the best model configuration based on user preferences. Experimental results show that our method successfully identifies energy-efficient configurations while ensuring competitive performance.

Serving numerous users and requests concurrently requires good fairness in Large Language Models (LLMs) serving system. This ensures that, at the same cost, the system can meet the Service Level Objectives (SLOs) of more users , such as time to first token (TTFT) and time between tokens (TBT), rather than allowing a few users to experience performance far exceeding the SLOs. To achieve better fairness, the preemption-based scheduling policy dynamically adjusts the priority of each request to maintain balance during runtime. However, existing systems tend to overly prioritize throughput, overlooking the overhead caused by preemption-induced context switching, which is crucial for maintaining fairness through priority adjustments. In this work, we identify three main challenges that result in this overhead. 1) Inadequate I/O utilization. 2) GPU idleness. 3) Unnecessary I/O transmission during multi-turn conversations. Our key insight is that the block-based KV cache memory policy in existing systems, while achieving near-zero memory waste, leads to discontinuity and insufficient granularity in the KV cache memory. To respond, we introduce FastSwitch, a fairness-aware serving system that not only aligns with existing KV cache memory allocation policy but also mitigates context switching overhead. Our evaluation shows that FastSwitch outperforms the state-of-the-art LLM serving system vLLM with speedups of 1.4-11.2x across different tail TTFT and TBT.

LLMs have seen rapid adoption in all domains. They need to be trained on high-end high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructures and ingest massive amounts of input data. Unsurprisingly, at such a large scale, unexpected events (e.g., failures of components, instability of the software, undesirable learning patterns, etc.), are frequent and typically impact the training in a negative fashion. Thus, LLMs need to be checkpointed frequently so that they can be rolled back to a stable state and subsequently fine-tuned. However, given the large sizes of LLMs, a straightforward checkpointing solution that directly writes the model parameters and optimizer state to persistent storage (e.g., a parallel file system), incurs significant I/O overheads. To address this challenge, in this paper we study how to reduce the I/O overheads for enabling fast and scalable checkpointing for LLMs that can be applied at high frequency (up to the granularity of individual iterations) without significant impact on the training process. Specifically, we introduce a lazy asynchronous multi-level approach that takes advantage of the fact that the tensors making up the model and optimizer state shards remain immutable for extended periods of time, which makes it possible to copy their content in the background with minimal interference during the training process. We evaluate our approach at scales of up to 180 GPUs using different model sizes, parallelism settings, and checkpointing frequencies. The results show up to 48times faster checkpointing and 2.2times faster end-to-end training runtime compared with the state-of-art checkpointing approaches.

Extensive system scales (i.e. thousands of GPU/TPUs) and prolonged training periods (i.e. months of pretraining) significantly escalate the probability of failures when training large language models (LLMs). Thus, efficient and reliable fault-tolerance methods are in urgent need. Checkpointing is the primary fault-tolerance method to periodically save parameter snapshots from GPU memory to disks via CPU memory. In this paper, we identify the frequency of existing checkpoint-based fault-tolerance being significantly limited by the storage I/O overheads, which results in hefty re-training costs on restarting from the nearest checkpoint. In response to this gap, we introduce an in-memory fault-tolerance framework for large-scale LLM pretraining. The framework boosts the efficiency and reliability of fault tolerance from three aspects: (1) Reduced Data Transfer and I/O: By asynchronously caching parameters, i.e., sharded model parameters, optimizer states, and RNG states, to CPU volatile memory, Our framework significantly reduces communication costs and bypasses checkpoint I/O. (2) Enhanced System Reliability: Our framework enhances parameter protection with a two-layer hierarchy: snapshot management processes (SMPs) safeguard against software failures, together with Erasure Coding (EC) protecting against node failures. This double-layered protection greatly improves the survival probability of the parameters compared to existing checkpointing methods. (3) Improved Snapshotting Frequency: Our framework achieves more frequent snapshotting compared with asynchronous checkpointing optimizations under the same saving time budget, which improves the fault tolerance efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that Our framework minimizes the overhead of fault tolerance of LLM pretraining by effectively leveraging redundant CPU resources.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into many online services. However, a major challenge in deploying LLMs is their high cost, due primarily to the use of expensive GPU instances. To address this problem, we find that the significant heterogeneity of GPU types presents an opportunity to increase GPU cost efficiency and reduce deployment costs. The broad and growing market of GPUs creates a diverse option space with varying costs and hardware specifications. Within this space, we show that there is not a linear relationship between GPU cost and performance, and identify three key LLM service characteristics that significantly affect which GPU type is the most cost effective: model request size, request rate, and latency service-level objective (SLO). We then present M\'elange, a framework for navigating the diversity of GPUs and LLM service specifications to derive the most cost-efficient set of GPUs for a given LLM service. We frame the task of GPU selection as a cost-aware bin-packing problem, where GPUs are bins with a capacity and cost, and items are request slices defined by a request size and rate. Upon solution, M\'elange derives the minimal-cost GPU allocation that adheres to a configurable latency SLO. Our evaluations across both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that M\'elange can reduce deployment costs by up to 77% as compared to utilizing only a single GPU type, highlighting the importance of making heterogeneity-aware GPU provisioning decisions for LLM serving. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/tyler-griggs/melange-release.

In this study, we introduce a novel platform Resource-Aware AutoML (RA-AutoML) which enables flexible and generalized algorithms to build machine learning models subjected to multiple objectives, as well as resource and hard-ware constraints. RA-AutoML intelligently conducts Hyper-Parameter Search(HPS) as well as Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to build models optimizing predefined objectives. RA-AutoML is a versatile framework that allows user to prescribe many resource/hardware constraints along with objectives demanded by the problem at hand or business requirements. At its core, RA-AutoML relies on our in-house search-engine algorithm,MOBOGA, which combines a modified constraint-aware Bayesian Optimization and Genetic Algorithm to construct Pareto optimal candidates. Our experiments on CIFAR-10 dataset shows very good accuracy compared to results obtained by state-of-art neural network models, while subjected to resource constraints in the form of model size.

The interest in developing small language models (SLM) for on-device deployment is fast growing. However, the existing SLM design hardly considers the device hardware characteristics. Instead, this work presents a simple yet effective principle for SLM design: architecture searching for (near-)optimal runtime efficiency before pre-training. Guided by this principle, we develop PhoneLM SLM family (currently with 0.5B and 1.5B versions), that acheive the state-of-the-art capability-efficiency tradeoff among those with similar parameter size. We fully open-source the code, weights, and training datasets of PhoneLM for reproducibility and transparency, including both base and instructed versions. We also release a finetuned version of PhoneLM capable of accurate Android Intent invocation, and an end-to-end Android demo. All materials are available at https://github.com/UbiquitousLearning/PhoneLM.

Enterprise data lakes often suffer from substantial amounts of duplicate and redundant data, with data volumes ranging from terabytes to petabytes. This leads to both increased storage costs and unnecessarily high maintenance costs for these datasets. In this work, we focus on identifying and reducing redundancy in enterprise data lakes by addressing the problem of 'dataset containment'. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first works that addresses table-level containment at a large scale. We propose R2D2: a three-step hierarchical pipeline that efficiently identifies almost all instances of containment by progressively reducing the search space in the data lake. It first builds (i) a schema containment graph, followed by (ii) statistical min-max pruning, and finally, (iii) content level pruning. We further propose minimizing the total storage and access costs by optimally identifying redundant datasets that can be deleted (and reconstructed on demand) while respecting latency constraints. We implement our system on Azure Databricks clusters using Apache Spark for enterprise data stored in ADLS Gen2, and on AWS clusters for open-source data. In contrast to existing modified baselines that are inaccurate or take several days to run, our pipeline can process an enterprise customer data lake at the TB scale in approximately 5 hours with high accuracy. We present theoretical results as well as extensive empirical validation on both enterprise (scale of TBs) and open-source datasets (scale of MBs - GBs), which showcase the effectiveness of our pipeline.

The increasing versatility of language models LMs has given rise to a new class of benchmarks that comprehensively assess a broad range of capabilities. Such benchmarks are associated with massive computational costs reaching thousands of GPU hours per model. However the efficiency aspect of these evaluation efforts had raised little discussion in the literature. In this work we present the problem of Efficient Benchmarking namely intelligently reducing the computation costs of LM evaluation without compromising reliability. Using the HELM benchmark as a test case we investigate how different benchmark design choices affect the computation-reliability tradeoff. We propose to evaluate the reliability of such decisions by using a new measure Decision Impact on Reliability DIoR for short. We find for example that the current leader on HELM may change by merely removing a low-ranked model from the benchmark and observe that a handful of examples suffice to obtain the correct benchmark ranking. Conversely a slightly different choice of HELM scenarios varies ranking widely. Based on our findings we outline a set of concrete recommendations for more efficient benchmark design and utilization practices leading to dramatic cost savings with minimal loss of benchmark reliability often reducing computation by x100 or more.

Training large-scale language models is increasingly critical in various domains, but it is hindered by frequent failures, leading to significant time and economic costs. Current failure recovery methods in cloud-based settings inadequately address the diverse and complex scenarios that arise, focusing narrowly on erasing downtime for individual tasks without considering the overall cost impact on a cluster. We introduce Unicron, a workload manager designed for efficient self-healing in large-scale language model training. Unicron optimizes the training process by minimizing failure-related costs across multiple concurrent tasks within a cluster. Its key features include in-band error detection for real-time error identification without extra overhead, a dynamic cost-aware plan generation mechanism for optimal reconfiguration, and an efficient transition strategy to reduce downtime during state changes. Deployed on a 128-GPU distributed cluster, Unicron demonstrates up to a 1.9x improvement in training efficiency over state-of-the-art methods, significantly reducing failure recovery costs and enhancing the reliability of large-scale language model training.

Large Language Models increasingly rely on distributed techniques for their training and inference. These techniques require communication across devices which can reduce scaling efficiency as the number of devices increases. While some distributed techniques can overlap, and thus, hide this communication with independent computations, techniques such as Tensor Parallelism (TP) inherently serialize communication with model execution. One approach to hide this serialized communication is to interleave it with the producer operation (of the communicated data) in a fine-grained manner. However, this fine-grained interleaving of communication and computation in software can be difficult. Furthermore, as with any concurrent execution, it requires compute and memory resources to be shared between computation and communication, causing resource contention that reduces overlapping efficacy. To overcome these challenges, we propose T3 which applies hardware-software co-design to transparently overlap serialized communication while minimizing resource contention with compute. T3 transparently fuses producer operations with the subsequent communication via a simple configuration of the producer's output address space and requires minor software changes. At the hardware level, T3 adds a lightweight track and trigger mechanism to orchestrate the producer's compute, and communication. It further uses compute-enhanced memories for communication's attendant compute. As a result, T3 reduces resource contention, and efficiently overlaps serialized communication with computation. For important Transformer models like T-NLG, T3 speeds up communication-heavy sublayers by 30% geomean (max 47%) and reduces data movement by 22% geomean (max 36%). Furthermore, T3's benefits persist as models scale: geomean 29% for sublayers in sim500-billion parameter models, PALM and MT-NLG.

Recent advancements in software engineering agents have demonstrated promising capabilities in automating program improvements. However, their reliance on closed-source or resource-intensive models introduces significant deployment challenges in private environments, prompting a critical question: How can personally deployable open-source LLMs achieve comparable code reasoning performance? To this end, we propose a unified Test-Time Compute scaling framework that leverages increased inference-time computation instead of larger models. Our framework incorporates two complementary strategies: internal TTC and external TTC. Internally, we introduce a development-contextualized trajectory synthesis method leveraging real-world software repositories to bootstrap multi-stage reasoning processes, such as fault localization and patch generation. We further enhance trajectory quality through rejection sampling, rigorously evaluating trajectories along accuracy and complexity. Externally, we propose a novel development-process-based search strategy guided by reward models and execution verification. This approach enables targeted computational allocation at critical development decision points, overcoming limitations of existing "end-point only" verification methods. Evaluations on SWE-bench Verified demonstrate our 32B model achieves a 46\% issue resolution rate, surpassing significantly larger models such as DeepSeek R1 671B and OpenAI o1. Additionally, we provide the empirical validation of the test-time scaling phenomenon within SWE agents, revealing that models dynamically allocate more tokens to increasingly challenging problems, effectively enhancing reasoning capabilities. We publicly release all training data, models, and code to facilitate future research. https://github.com/yingweima2022/SWE-Reasoner

As mobile networks proliferate, we are experiencing a strong diversification of services, which requires greater flexibility from the existing network. Network slicing is proposed as a promising solution for resource utilization in 5G and future networks to address this dire need. In network slicing, dynamic resource orchestration and network slice management are crucial for maximizing resource utilization. Unfortunately, this process is too complex for traditional approaches to be effective due to a lack of accurate models and dynamic hidden structures. We formulate the problem as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) without knowing models and hidden structures. Additionally, we propose to solve the problem using CLARA, a Constrained reinforcement LeArning based Resource Allocation algorithm. In particular, we analyze cumulative and instantaneous constraints using adaptive interior-point policy optimization and projection layer, respectively. Evaluations show that CLARA clearly outperforms baselines in resource allocation with service demand guarantees.

With the advent of 6G, Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) architectures are evolving to support intelligent, adaptive, and automated network orchestration. This paper proposes a novel Edge AI and Network Service Orchestration framework that leverages Large Language Model (LLM) agents deployed as O-RAN rApps. The proposed LLM-agent-powered system enables interactive and intuitive orchestration by translating the user's use case description into deployable AI services and corresponding network configurations. The LLM agent automates multiple tasks, including AI model selection from repositories (e.g., Hugging Face), service deployment, network adaptation, and real-time monitoring via xApps. We implement a prototype using open-source O-RAN projects (OpenAirInterface and FlexRIC) to demonstrate the feasibility and functionality of our framework. Our demonstration showcases the end-to-end flow of AI service orchestration, from user interaction to network adaptation, ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) compliance. This work highlights the potential of integrating LLM-driven automation into 6G O-RAN ecosystems, paving the way for more accessible and efficient edge AI ecosystems.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled researchers to focus on practical repository-level tasks in software engineering domain. In this work, we consider a cornerstone task for automating work with software repositories-environment setup, i.e., a task of configuring a repository-specific development environment on a system. Existing studies on environment setup introduce innovative agentic strategies, but their evaluation is often based on small datasets that may not capture the full range of configuration challenges encountered in practice. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive environment setup benchmark EnvBench. It encompasses 329 Python and 665 JVM-based (Java, Kotlin) repositories, with a focus on repositories that present genuine configuration challenges, excluding projects that can be fully configured by simple deterministic scripts. To enable further benchmark extension and usage for model tuning, we implement two automatic metrics: a static analysis check for missing imports in Python and a compilation check for JVM languages. We demonstrate the applicability of our benchmark by evaluating three environment setup approaches, including a simple zero-shot baseline and two agentic workflows, that we test with two powerful LLM backbones, GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. The best approach manages to successfully configure 6.69% repositories for Python and 29.47% repositories for JVM, suggesting that EnvBench remains challenging for current approaches. Our benchmark suite is publicly available at https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/EnvBench. The dataset and experiment trajectories are available at https://jb.gg/envbench.

Data sharding, a technique for partitioning and distributing data among multiple servers or nodes, offers enhancements in the scalability, performance, and fault tolerance of extensive distributed systems. Nonetheless, this strategy introduces novel challenges, including load balancing among shards, management of node failures and data loss, and adaptation to evolving data and workload patterns. This paper proposes an innovative approach to tackle these challenges by empowering self-healing nodes with adaptive data sharding. Leveraging concepts such as self-replication, fractal regeneration, sentient data sharding, and symbiotic node clusters, our approach establishes a dynamic and resilient data sharding scheme capable of addressing diverse scenarios and meeting varied requirements. Implementation and evaluation of our approach involve a prototype system simulating a large-scale distributed database across various data sharding scenarios. Comparative analyses against existing data sharding techniques highlight the superior scalability, performance, fault tolerance, and adaptability of our approach. Additionally, the paper delves into potential applications and limitations, providing insights into the future research directions that can further advance this innovative approach.

The surging demand for cloud computing resources, driven by the rapid growth of sophisticated large-scale models and data centers, underscores the critical importance of efficient and adaptive resource allocation. As major tech enterprises deploy massive infrastructures with thousands of GPUs, existing cloud platforms still struggle with low resource utilization due to key challenges: capturing hierarchical indicator structures, modeling non-Gaussian distributions, and decision-making under uncertainty. To address these challenges, we propose HRAMONY, an adaptive Hierarchical Attention-based Resource Modeling and Decision-Making System. HARMONY combines hierarchical multi-indicator distribution forecasting and uncertainty-aware Bayesian decision-making. It introduces a novel hierarchical attention mechanism that comprehensively models complex inter-indicator dependencies, enabling accurate predictions that can adapt to evolving environment states. By transforming Gaussian projections into adaptive non-Gaussian distributions via Normalizing Flows. Crucially, HARMONY leverages the full predictive distributions in an adaptive Bayesian process, proactively incorporating uncertainties to optimize resource allocation while robustly meeting SLA constraints under varying conditions. Extensive evaluations across four large-scale cloud datasets demonstrate HARMONY's state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming nine established methods. A month-long real-world deployment validated HARMONY's substantial practical impact, realizing over 35,000 GPU hours in savings and translating to $100K+ in cost reduction, showcasing its remarkable economic value through adaptive, uncertainty-aware scaling. Our code is available at https://github.com/Floating-LY/HARMONY1.

Pipeline parallelism (PP) is widely used for training large language models (LLMs), yet its scalability is often constrained by high activation memory consumption as the number of in-flight microbatches grows with the degree of PP. In this paper, we focus on addressing this challenge by leveraging the under-explored memory offload strategy in PP. With empirical study, we discover that in the majority of standard configurations, at least half, and potentially all, of the activations can be offloaded with negligible overhead. In the cases where full overload is not possible, we introduce a novel selective offload strategy that decreases peak activation memory in a better-than-linear manner. Furthermore, we integrate memory offload with other techniques to jointly consider overall throughput and memory limitation. Our experiments proves that the per-device activation memory effectively reduces with the total number of stages, making PP a stronger alternative than TP, offering up to a 19\% acceleration with even lower memory consumption. The implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/sail-sg/zero-bubble-pipeline-parallelism{this url}.

As computational work becomes more and more integral to many aspects of scientific research, computational reproducibility has become an issue of increasing importance to computer systems researchers and domain scientists alike. Though computational reproducibility seems more straight forward than replicating physical experiments, the complex and rapidly changing nature of computer environments makes being able to reproduce and extend such work a serious challenge. In this paper, I explore common reasons that code developed for one research project cannot be successfully executed or extended by subsequent researchers. I review current approaches to these issues, including virtual machines and workflow systems, and their limitations. I then examine how the popular emerging technology Docker combines several areas from systems research - such as operating system virtualization, cross-platform portability, modular re-usable elements, versioning, and a `DevOps' philosophy, to address these challenges. I illustrate this with several examples of Docker use with a focus on the R statistical environment.

High throughput serving of large language models (LLMs) requires batching sufficiently many requests at a time. However, existing systems struggle because the key-value cache (KV cache) memory for each request is huge and grows and shrinks dynamically. When managed inefficiently, this memory can be significantly wasted by fragmentation and redundant duplication, limiting the batch size. To address this problem, we propose PagedAttention, an attention algorithm inspired by the classical virtual memory and paging techniques in operating systems. On top of it, we build vLLM, an LLM serving system that achieves (1) near-zero waste in KV cache memory and (2) flexible sharing of KV cache within and across requests to further reduce memory usage. Our evaluations show that vLLM improves the throughput of popular LLMs by 2-4times with the same level of latency compared to the state-of-the-art systems, such as FasterTransformer and Orca. The improvement is more pronounced with longer sequences, larger models, and more complex decoding algorithms. vLLM's source code is publicly available at https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm

This paper presents MoE-Infinity, a cost-efficient mixture-of-expert (MoE) serving system that realizes activation-aware expert offloading. MoE-Infinity features sequence-level expert activation tracing, a new approach adept at identifying sparse activations and capturing the temporal locality of MoE inference. By analyzing these traces, MoE-Infinity performs novel activation-aware expert prefetching and caching, substantially reducing the latency overheads usually associated with offloading experts for improved cost performance. Extensive experiments in a cluster show that MoE-Infinity outperforms numerous existing systems and approaches, reducing latency by 4 - 20X and decreasing deployment costs by over 8X for various MoEs. MoE-Infinity's source code is publicly available at https://github.com/TorchMoE/MoE-Infinity

This report presents the Prime Collective Communications Library (PCCL), a novel fault-tolerant collective communication library designed for distributed ML workloads over the public internet. PCCL introduces a new programming model that enables dynamic peer joining and failure recovery. The library implements efficient collective operations like all-reduce while providing robust fault tolerance mechanisms that allow the system to continue operating even when peers fail or join during ongoing operations. We demonstrate that PCCL's design enables practical solutions to dynamic membership challenges in workloads with repeated operations and deterministic state advancement. Our implementation passes extensive stress tests across all major operating systems, showing reliable operation even under rapid peer churn and concurrent collective operations. By dispatching to multiple connections, we can efficiently utilize cross-continental long-fat-pipe TCP WAN links, in our experiments achieving up to 45 Gbit/s of bandwidth utilization across Europe and 25 Gbit/s across North America and Europe. PCCL's architecture enables easy implementation of distributed low-communication optimization strategies like DiLoCo, which significantly reduce communication frequency. Combined with quantization, this leads to a significant reduction in the bandwidth required for distributed training workloads. PCCL also allows for concurrent collective operations, which enables optimization strategies like async DiLoCo, which can completely hide communication overhead by implementing one-step delayed parameter updates. PCCL can facilitate exact bit-parity of the shared state across peers in all cases induced by graceful or abrupt peer churn. While PCCL exposes a C99 API, Python bindings are available which are compatible with PyTorch alongside FSDP. PCCL is available under the open source MIT license.

Training transformer models requires substantial GPU compute and memory resources. In homogeneous clusters, distributed strategies allocate resources evenly, but this approach is inefficient for heterogeneous clusters, where GPUs differ in power and memory. As high-end GPUs are costly and limited in availability, heterogeneous clusters with diverse GPU types are becoming more common. Existing methods attempt to balance compute across GPUs based on capacity but often underutilize compute due to memory constraints. We present Cephalo, a system that optimizes compute and memory usage by decoupling compute distribution from training state assignment. Cephalo outperforms state-of-the-art methods by achieving significantly higher training throughput while supporting larger models and batch sizes.

"Bigger the better" has been the predominant trend in recent Large Language Models (LLMs) development. However, LLMs do not suit well for scenarios that require on-device processing, energy efficiency, low memory footprint, and response efficiency. These requisites are crucial for privacy, security, and sustainable deployment. This paper explores the "less is more" paradigm by addressing the challenge of designing accurate yet efficient Small Language Models (SLMs) for resource constrained devices. Our primary contribution is the introduction of an accurate and fully transparent open-source 0.5 billion (0.5B) parameter SLM, named MobiLlama, catering to the specific needs of resource-constrained computing with an emphasis on enhanced performance with reduced resource demands. MobiLlama is a SLM design that initiates from a larger model and applies a careful parameter sharing scheme to reduce both the pre-training and the deployment cost. Our work strives to not only bridge the gap in open-source SLMs but also ensures full transparency, where complete training data pipeline, training code, model weights, and over 300 checkpoints along with evaluation codes is available at : https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/MobiLlama.

Multi-agent frameworks powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great success in automated planning and task execution. However, the effective adjustment of Agentic workflows during execution has not been well-studied. A effective workflow adjustment is crucial, as in many real-world scenarios, the initial plan must adjust to unforeseen challenges and changing conditions in real-time to ensure the efficient execution of complex tasks. In this paper, we define workflows as an activity-on-vertex (AOV) graphs. We continuously refine the workflow by dynamically adjusting task allocations based on historical performance and previous AOV with LLM agents. To further enhance system performance, we emphasize modularity in workflow design based on measuring parallelism and dependence complexity. Our proposed multi-agent framework achieved efficient sub-task concurrent execution, goal achievement, and error tolerance. Empirical results across different practical tasks demonstrate dramatic improvements in the efficiency of multi-agent frameworks through dynamic workflow updating and modularization.

Resource scheduling and allocation is a critical component of many high impact systems ranging from congestion control to cloud computing. Finding more optimal solutions to these problems often has significant impact on resource and time savings, reducing device wear-and-tear, and even potentially improving carbon emissions. In this paper, we focus on a specific instance of a scheduling problem, namely the memory mapping problem that occurs during compilation of machine learning programs: That is, mapping tensors to different memory layers to optimize execution time. We introduce an approach for solving the memory mapping problem using Reinforcement Learning. RL is a solution paradigm well-suited for sequential decision making problems that are amenable to planning, and combinatorial search spaces with high-dimensional data inputs. We formulate the problem as a single-player game, which we call the mallocGame, such that high-reward trajectories of the game correspond to efficient memory mappings on the target hardware. We also introduce a Reinforcement Learning agent, mallocMuZero, and show that it is capable of playing this game to discover new and improved memory mapping solutions that lead to faster execution times on real ML workloads on ML accelerators. We compare the performance of mallocMuZero to the default solver used by the Accelerated Linear Algebra (XLA) compiler on a benchmark of realistic ML workloads. In addition, we show that mallocMuZero is capable of improving the execution time of the recently published AlphaTensor matrix multiplication model.

Large Language Models (LLM)-based systems, i.e. interconnected elements that include an LLM as a central component (e.g., conversational agents), are typically monolithic static architectures that rely on a single LLM for all user queries. However, they often require different preprocessing strategies, levels of reasoning, or knowledge. Generalist LLMs (i.e. GPT-4), trained on very large multi-topic corpora, can perform well in a variety of tasks. However, they require significant financial, energy, and hardware resources that may not be justified for basic tasks. This implies potentially investing in unnecessary costs for a given query. To overcome this problem, a routing mechanism routes user queries to the most suitable components, such as smaller LLMs or experts in specific topics. This approach may improve response quality while minimising costs. Routing can be expanded to other components of the conversational agent architecture, such as the selection of optimal embedding strategies. This paper explores key considerations for integrating routing into LLM-based systems, focusing on resource management, cost definition, and strategy selection. Our main contributions include a formalisation of the problem, a novel taxonomy of existing approaches emphasising relevance and resource efficiency, and a comparative analysis of these strategies in relation to industry practices. Finally, we identify critical challenges and directions for future research.

Neural information retrieval (IR) systems have progressed rapidly in recent years, in large part due to the release of publicly available benchmarking tasks. Unfortunately, some dimensions of this progress are illusory: the majority of the popular IR benchmarks today focus exclusively on downstream task accuracy and thus conceal the costs incurred by systems that trade away efficiency for quality. Latency, hardware cost, and other efficiency considerations are paramount to the deployment of IR systems in user-facing settings. We propose that IR benchmarks structure their evaluation methodology to include not only metrics of accuracy, but also efficiency considerations such as a query latency and the corresponding cost budget for a reproducible hardware setting. For the popular IR benchmarks MS MARCO and XOR-TyDi, we show how the best choice of IR system varies according to how these efficiency considerations are chosen and weighed. We hope that future benchmarks will adopt these guidelines toward more holistic IR evaluation.

This paper introduces DeepFlow, a scalable and serverless AI platform designed to efficiently serve large language models (LLMs) at scale in cloud environments. DeepFlow addresses key challenges such as resource allocation, serving efficiency, and cold start latencies through four main design components. First, it uses a simple serverless abstraction called the request-job-task model, which helps manage AI workloads across post-training and model serving tasks. Second, it builds an in-house serving engine FlowServe using a microkernel-inspired design, NPU-centric execution, and SPMD-based parallelism to optimize LLM serving. The system also includes novel scheduling policies tailored for both PD-disaggregated and PD-colocated configurations. With optimizations like pre-warmed pods, DRAM pre-loading, and NPU-fork, DeepFlow can scale up to 64 instances in seconds. DeepFlow has been in production for over a year, operating on a large Ascend NPU cluster and providing industrystandard APIs for fine-tuning, agent serving, and model serving to our customers.

Offline batch inference, which leverages the flexibility of request batching to achieve higher throughput and lower costs, is becoming more popular for latency-insensitive applications. Meanwhile, recent progress in model capability and modality makes requests more diverse in compute and memory demands, creating unique opportunities for throughput improvement by resource overlapping. However, a request schedule that maximizes resource overlapping can conflict with the schedule that maximizes prefix sharing, a widely-used performance optimization, causing sub-optimal inference throughput. We present BlendServe, a system that maximizes resource utilization of offline batch inference by combining the benefits of resource overlapping and prefix sharing using a resource-aware prefix tree. BlendServe exploits the relaxed latency requirements in offline batch inference to reorder and overlap requests with varied resource demands while ensuring high prefix sharing. We evaluate BlendServe on a variety of synthetic multi-modal workloads and show that it provides up to 1.44times throughput boost compared to widely-used industry standards, vLLM and SGLang.

Efficiently training large language models requires parallelizing across hundreds of hardware accelerators and invoking various compute and memory optimizations. When combined, many of these strategies have complex interactions regarding the final training efficiency. Prior work tackling this problem did not have access to the latest set of optimizations, such as FlashAttention or sequence parallelism. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study of possible training configurations for large language models. We distill this large study into several key recommendations for the most efficient training. For instance, we find that using a micro-batch size of 1 usually enables the most efficient training layouts. Larger micro-batch sizes necessitate activation checkpointing or higher degrees of model parallelism and also lead to larger pipeline bubbles. Our most efficient configurations enable us to achieve state-of-the-art training efficiency results over a range of model sizes, most notably a Model FLOPs utilization of 70.5% when training a Llama 13B model.

With contributions from the open-source community, a vast amount of instruction tuning (IT) data has emerged. Given the significant resource allocation required for training and evaluating models, it is advantageous to have an efficient method for selecting high-quality IT data. However, existing methods for instruction data selection have limitations such as relying on fragile external APIs, being affected by biases in GPT models, or reducing the diversity of the selected instruction dataset. In this paper, we propose an industrial-friendly, expert-aligned and diversity-preserved instruction data selection method: Clustering and Ranking (CaR). CaR employs a two-step process: first, it ranks instruction pairs using a high-accuracy (84.25%) scoring model aligned with expert preferences; second, it preserves dataset diversity through clustering. In our experiment, CaR efficiently selected a mere 1.96% of Alpaca's IT data, yet the resulting AlpaCaR model surpassed Alpaca's performance by an average of 32.1% in GPT-4 evaluations. Moreover, we find that data selecting is a consistent paradigm whether the pre-trained model is more capable or the model parameters scaling up. Our approach employs compact models with 550M parameters and incurs just 11.2% of the financial outlay of current methods, enhancing its industrial deployability.

Modern deep learning applications require increasingly more compute to train state-of-the-art models. To address this demand, large corporations and institutions use dedicated High-Performance Computing clusters, whose construction and maintenance are both environmentally costly and well beyond the budget of most organizations. As a result, some research directions become the exclusive domain of a few large industrial and even fewer academic actors. To alleviate this disparity, smaller groups may pool their computational resources and run collaborative experiments that benefit all participants. This paradigm, known as grid- or volunteer computing, has seen successful applications in numerous scientific areas. However, using this approach for machine learning is difficult due to high latency, asymmetric bandwidth, and several challenges unique to volunteer computing. In this work, we carefully analyze these constraints and propose a novel algorithmic framework designed specifically for collaborative training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for SwAV and ALBERT pretraining in realistic conditions and achieve performance comparable to traditional setups at a fraction of the cost. Finally, we provide a detailed report of successful collaborative language model pretraining with 40 participants.

The Neural Architecture Search (NAS) problem is typically formulated as a graph search problem where the goal is to learn the optimal operations over edges in order to maximise a graph-level global objective. Due to the large architecture parameter space, efficiency is a key bottleneck preventing NAS from its practical use. In this paper, we address the issue by framing NAS as a multi-agent problem where agents control a subset of the network and coordinate to reach optimal architectures. We provide two distinct lightweight implementations, with reduced memory requirements (1/8th of state-of-the-art), and performances above those of much more computationally expensive methods. Theoretically, we demonstrate vanishing regrets of the form O(sqrt(T)), with T being the total number of rounds. Finally, aware that random search is an, often ignored, effective baseline we perform additional experiments on 3 alternative datasets and 2 network configurations, and achieve favourable results in comparison.

This paper proposes a novel admission and routing scheme which takes into account arbitrarily assigned priorities for network flows. The presented approach leverages the centralized Software Defined Networking (SDN) capabilities in order to do so. Exact and heuristic approaches to the stated Priority Flow Admission and Routing (PFAR) problem are provided. The exact approach which provides an optimal solution is based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP). Given the potentially long running time required to find an exact and optimal solution, a heuristic approach is proposed; this approach is based on Genetic Algorithms (GAs). In order to effectively estimate the performance of the proposed approaches, a simulator that is capable of generating semi-random network topologies and flows has been developed. Experimental results for large problem instances (up 50 network nodes and thousands of network flows), show that: i) an optimal solution can be often found in few seconds (even milliseconds), and ii) the heuristic approach yields close-to-optimal solutions (approximately 95\% of the optimal) in a fixed amount of time; these experimental results demonstrate the pertinence of the proposed approaches.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown remarkable capabilities in various software engineering tasks, spurring the rapid growth of the Large Language Models for Software Engineering (LLM4SE) area. However, limited attention has been paid to developing efficient LLM4SE techniques that demand minimal computational cost, time, and memory resources, as well as green LLM4SE solutions that reduce energy consumption, water usage, and carbon emissions. This paper aims to redirect the focus of the research community towards the efficiency and greenness of LLM4SE, while also sharing potential research directions to achieve this goal. It commences with a brief overview of the significance of LLM4SE and highlights the need for efficient and green LLM4SE solutions. Subsequently, the paper presents a vision for a future where efficient and green LLM4SE revolutionizes the LLM-based software engineering tool landscape, benefiting various stakeholders, including industry, individual practitioners, and society. The paper then delineates a roadmap for future research, outlining specific research paths and potential solutions for the research community to pursue. While not intended to be a definitive guide, the paper aims to inspire further progress, with the ultimate goal of establishing efficient and green LLM4SE as a central element in the future of software engineering.

Production deployments in complex systems require ML architectures to be highly efficient and usable against multiple tasks. Particularly demanding are classification problems in which data arrives in a streaming fashion and each class is presented separately. Recent methods with stochastic gradient learning have been shown to struggle in such setups or have limitations like memory buffers, and being restricted to specific domains that disable its usage in real-world scenarios. For this reason, we present a fully differentiable architecture based on the Mixture of Experts model, that enables the training of high-performance classifiers when examples from each class are presented separately. We conducted exhaustive experiments that proved its applicability in various domains and ability to learn online in production environments. The proposed technique achieves SOTA results without a memory buffer and clearly outperforms the reference methods.

Large language model (LLM) serving has transformed from stateless to stateful systems, utilizing techniques like context caching and disaggregated inference. These optimizations extend the lifespan and domain of the KV cache, necessitating a new architectural approach. We present MemServe, a unified system that integrates both inter-request and intra-request optimizations. MemServe introduces MemPool, an elastic memory pool managing distributed memory and KV caches across serving instances. Using MemPool APIs, MemServe combines context caching with disaggregated inference for the first time, supported by a global scheduler that enhances cache reuse through a global prompt tree-based locality-aware policy. Tests show that MemServe significantly improves job completion time and time-to-first-time.

Existing checkpointing approaches seem ill-suited for distributed training even though hardware limitations make model parallelism, i.e., sharding model state across multiple accelerators, a requirement for model scaling. Consolidating distributed model state into a single checkpoint unacceptably slows down training, and is impractical at extreme scales. Distributed checkpoints, in contrast, are tightly coupled to the model parallelism and hardware configurations of the training run, and thus unusable on different configurations. To address this problem, we propose Universal Checkpointing, a technique that enables efficient checkpoint creation while providing the flexibility of resuming on arbitrary parallelism strategy and hardware configurations. Universal Checkpointing unlocks unprecedented capabilities for large-scale training such as improved resilience to hardware failures through continued training on remaining healthy hardware, and reduced training time through opportunistic exploitation of elastic capacity. The key insight of Universal Checkpointing is the selection of the optimal representation in each phase of the checkpointing life cycle: distributed representation for saving, and consolidated representation for loading. This is achieved using two key mechanisms. First, the universal checkpoint format, which consists of a consolidated representation of each model parameter and metadata for mapping parameter fragments into training ranks of arbitrary model-parallelism configuration. Second, the universal checkpoint language, a simple but powerful specification language for converting distributed checkpoints into the universal checkpoint format. Our evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and generality of Universal Checkpointing on state-of-the-art model architectures and a wide range of parallelism techniques.

This paper presents EasyRAG, a simple, lightweight, and efficient retrieval-augmented generation framework for automated network operations. Our framework has three advantages. The first is accurate question answering. We designed a straightforward RAG scheme based on (1) a specific data processing workflow (2) dual-route sparse retrieval for coarse ranking (3) LLM Reranker for reranking (4) LLM answer generation and optimization. This approach achieved first place in the GLM4 track in the preliminary round and second place in the GLM4 track in the semifinals. The second is simple deployment. Our method primarily consists of BM25 retrieval and BGE-reranker reranking, requiring no fine-tuning of any models, occupying minimal VRAM, easy to deploy, and highly scalable; we provide a flexible code library with various search and generation strategies, facilitating custom process implementation. The last one is efficient inference. We designed an efficient inference acceleration scheme for the entire coarse ranking, reranking, and generation process that significantly reduces the inference latency of RAG while maintaining a good level of accuracy; each acceleration scheme can be plug-and-play into any component of the RAG process, consistently enhancing the efficiency of the RAG system. Our code and data are released at https://github.com/BUAADreamer/EasyRAG.

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, OPT, and LLaMA have demonstrated remarkable accuracy in a wide range of tasks. However, training these models can incur significant expenses, often requiring tens of thousands of GPUs for months of continuous operation. Typically, this training is carried out in specialized GPU clusters equipped with homogeneous high-speed Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network interface cards (NICs). The acquisition and maintenance of such dedicated clusters is challenging. Current LLM training frameworks, like Megatron-LM and Megatron-DeepSpeed, focus primarily on optimizing training within homogeneous cluster settings. In this paper, we introduce Holmes, a training framework for LLMs that employs thoughtfully crafted data and model parallelism strategies over the heterogeneous NIC environment. Our primary technical contribution lies in a novel scheduling method that intelligently allocates distinct computational tasklets in LLM training to specific groups of GPU devices based on the characteristics of their connected NICs. Furthermore, our proposed framework, utilizing pipeline parallel techniques, demonstrates scalability to multiple GPU clusters, even in scenarios without high-speed interconnects between nodes in distinct clusters. We conducted comprehensive experiments that involved various scenarios in the heterogeneous NIC environment. In most cases, our framework achieves performance levels close to those achievable with homogeneous RDMA-capable networks (InfiniBand or RoCE), significantly exceeding training efficiency within the pure Ethernet environment. Additionally, we verified that our framework outperforms other mainstream LLM frameworks under heterogeneous NIC environment in terms of training efficiency and can be seamlessly integrated with them.

Code coverage is a widely used metric for quantifying the extent to which program elements, such as statements or branches, are executed during testing. Calculating code coverage is resource-intensive, requiring code building and execution with additional overhead for the instrumentation. Furthermore, computing coverage of any snippet of code requires the whole program context. Using Machine Learning to amortize this expensive process could lower the cost of code coverage by requiring only the source code context, and the task of code coverage prediction can be a novel benchmark for judging the ability of models to understand code. We propose a novel benchmark task called Code Coverage Prediction for Large Language Models (LLMs). We formalize this task to evaluate the capability of LLMs in understanding code execution by determining which lines of a method are executed by a given test case and inputs. We curate and release a dataset we call COVERAGEEVAL by executing tests and code from the HumanEval dataset and collecting code coverage information. We report the performance of four state-of-the-art LLMs used for code-related tasks, including OpenAI's GPT-4 and GPT-3.5-Turbo, Google's BARD, and Anthropic's Claude, on the Code Coverage Prediction task. Finally, we argue that code coverage as a metric and pre-training data source are valuable for overall LLM performance on software engineering tasks.

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in tackling a broad range of tasks. However, existing methods are mainly restricted to specifically designed tools and fail to fulfill complex instructions, having great limitations when confronted with real-world scenarios. In this paper, we explore a more realistic scenario by connecting LLMs with RESTful APIs, which adhere to the widely adopted REST software architectural style for web service development. To address the practical challenges of tackling complex instructions, we propose RestGPT, which exploits the power of LLMs and conducts a coarse-to-fine online planning mechanism to enhance the abilities of task decomposition and API selection. RestGPT also contains an API executor tailored for calling RESTful APIs, which can meticulously formulate parameters and parse API responses. To fully evaluate the performance of RestGPT, we propose RestBench, a high-quality benchmark which consists of two real-world scenarios and human-annotated instructions with gold solution paths. Experiments show that RestGPT is able to achieve impressive results in complex tasks and has strong robustness, which paves a new way towards AGI. RestGPT and RestBench is publicly available at https://restgpt.github.io/.

Scaling up Large Language Model(LLM) training involves fitting a tremendous amount of training parameters across a limited number of workers. However, methods like ZeRO-3 that drastically reduce GPU memory pressure often incur heavy communication to ensure global synchronization and consistency. Established efforts such as ZeRO++ use secondary partitions to avoid inter-node communications, given that intra-node GPU-GPU transfer generally has more bandwidth and lower latency than inter-node connections. However, as more capable infrastructure like Frontier, equipped with AMD GPUs, emerged with impressive computing capability, there is a need for investigations on the hardware topology and to develop targeted strategies to improve training efficiency. In this work, we propose a collection of communication and optimization strategies for ZeRO++ to reduce communication costs and improve memory utilization. In this paper, we propose a 3-level hierarchical partitioning specifically for the current Top-1 supercomputing cluster, Frontier, which aims at leveraging various bandwidths across layers of communications (GCD-GCD, GPU-GPU, and inter-node) to reduce communication overhead. For a 20B GPT model, we observe a 1.71x increase in TFLOPS per GPU when compared with ZeRO++ up to 384 GCDs and a scaling efficiency of 0.94 for up to 384 GCDs. To the best of our knowledge, our work is also the first effort to efficiently optimize LLM workloads on Frontier AMD GPUs.

Large language models (LLMs) power many state-of-the-art systems in natural language processing. However, these models are extremely computationally expensive, even at inference time, raising the natural question: when is the extra cost of deploying a larger model worth the anticipated boost in capabilities? Better understanding this tradeoff fundamentally could benefit from an inference efficiency metric that is both (i) easily comparable across models from different providers, and (ii) representative of the true cost of running queries in an isolated performance environment. Unfortunately, access to LLMs today is largely restricted to black-box text generation APIs and raw runtimes measured through this interface do not satisfy these desiderata: model providers can apply various software and hardware optimizations orthogonal to the model, and models served on shared infrastructure are susceptible to performance contention. To circumvent these problems, we propose a new metric for comparing inference efficiency across models. This metric puts models on equal footing as though they were served (i) on uniform hardware and software, and (ii) without performance contention. We call this metric the idealized runtime, and we propose a methodology to efficiently estimate this metric for autoregressive Transformer models. We also propose cost-aware variants that incorporate the number of accelerators needed to serve the model. Using these metrics, we compare ten state-of-the-art LLMs to provide the first analysis of inference efficiency-capability tradeoffs; we make several observations from this analysis, including the fact that the superior inference runtime performance of certain APIs is often a byproduct of optimizations within the API rather than the underlying model. Our methodology also facilitates the efficient comparison of different software and hardware stacks.

We present GSPMD, an automatic, compiler-based parallelization system for common machine learning computations. It allows users to write programs in the same way as for a single device, then give hints through a few annotations on how to distribute tensors, based on which GSPMD will parallelize the computation. Its representation of partitioning is simple yet general, allowing it to express different or mixed paradigms of parallelism on a wide variety of models. GSPMD infers the partitioning for every operator based on limited user annotations, making it convenient to scale existing single-device programs. It solves several technical challenges for production usage, allowing GSPMD to achieve 50% to 62% compute utilization on up to 2048 Cloud TPUv3 cores for models with up to one trillion parameters.

Large language models (LLMs) are useful in many NLP tasks and become more capable with size, with the best open-source models having over 50 billion parameters. However, using these 50B+ models requires high-end hardware, making them inaccessible to most researchers. In this work, we investigate methods for cost-efficient inference and fine-tuning of LLMs, comparing local and distributed strategies. We observe that a large enough model (50B+) can run efficiently even on geodistributed devices in a consumer-grade network. This could allow running LLM efficiently by pooling together idle compute resources of multiple research groups and volunteers. We address two open problems: (1) how to perform inference and fine-tuning reliably if any device can disconnect abruptly and (2) how to partition LLMs between devices with uneven hardware, joining and leaving at will. In order to do that, we develop special fault-tolerant inference algorithms and load-balancing protocols that automatically assign devices to maximize the total system throughput. We showcase these algorithms in Petals - a decentralized system that runs Llama 2 (70B) and BLOOM (176B) over the Internet up to 10x faster than offloading for interactive generation. We evaluate the performance of our system in simulated conditions and a real-world setup spanning two continents.

Text-to-SQL automatically translates natural language queries to SQL, allowing non-technical users to retrieve data from databases without specialized SQL knowledge. Despite the success of advanced LLM-based Text-to-SQL approaches on leaderboards, their unsustainable computational costs--often overlooked--stand as the "elephant in the room" in current leaderboard-driven research, limiting their economic practicability for real-world deployment and widespread adoption. To tackle this, we exploratively propose EllieSQL, a complexity-aware routing framework that assigns queries to suitable SQL generation pipelines based on estimated complexity. We investigate multiple routers to direct simple queries to efficient approaches while reserving computationally intensive methods for complex cases. Drawing from economics, we introduce the Token Elasticity of Performance (TEP) metric, capturing cost-efficiency by quantifying the responsiveness of performance gains relative to token investment in SQL generation. Experiments show that compared to always using the most advanced methods in our study, EllieSQL with the Qwen2.5-0.5B-DPO router reduces token use by over 40% without compromising performance on Bird development set, achieving more than a 2x boost in TEP over non-routing approaches. This not only advances the pursuit of cost-efficient Text-to-SQL but also invites the community to weigh resource efficiency alongside performance, contributing to progress in sustainable Text-to-SQL.

With the development of LLMs as agents, there is a growing interest in connecting multiple agents into multi-agent systems to solve tasks concurrently, focusing on their role in task assignment and coordination. This paper explores how LLMs can effectively allocate computational tasks among multiple agents, considering factors such as cost, efficiency, and performance. In this work, we address key questions, including the effectiveness of LLMs as orchestrators and planners, comparing their effectiveness in task assignment and coordination. Our experiments demonstrate that LLMs can achieve high validity and accuracy in resource allocation tasks. We find that the planner method outperforms the orchestrator method in handling concurrent actions, resulting in improved efficiency and better utilization of agents. Additionally, we show that providing explicit information about worker capabilities enhances the allocation strategies of planners, particularly when dealing with suboptimal workers.

Transformer-based long context generative models power emerging AI applications like hour-long video understanding and project-level coding agent. Deploying long context transformers (e.g., 100K to 10M tokens) is prohibitively expensive compared to short context (e.g., 4K tokens) model variants. Reducing the cost of long-context transformers is becoming a pressing research and engineering challenge starting from the year of 2024. This work describes a concurrent programming framework for quantitatively analyzing the efficiency challenges in serving multiple long-context requests under limited size of GPU high-bandwidth memory (HBM) regime. We give a detailed analysis of how all additional computational costs, compared to 4K context, trace back to one single source: the large size of the KV cache. We use a 34B GPT-3.5 level model of 50K context on A100 NVLink as a running example, and describe how its large KV cache causes four types of deployment challenges: (1) prefilling long inputs takes much longer compute time and GPU memory than short inputs; (2) after prefilling, the large KV cache residing on the GPU HBM substantially restricts the number of concurrent users being served; (3) during decoding, repeatedly reading the KV cache from HBM to SM largely increases latency; (4) when KV cache memory overflows, swapping it from HBM to DDR causes significant context switching latency. We use this framework to analyze existing works and identify possibilities of combining them to build end-to-end systems. Overall, this work offers a foundational framework for analyzing long context transformer deployment and identifies directions towards reducing the inference cost of 1M context to be as cheap as 4K.

Large Language Model (LLM) workloads have distinct prefill and decode phases with different compute and memory requirements which should ideally be accounted for when scheduling input queries across different LLM instances in a cluster. However existing scheduling algorithms treat LLM workloads as monolithic jobs without considering the distinct characteristics of the two phases in each workload. This leads to sub-optimal scheduling and increased response latency. In this work, we propose a heuristic-guided reinforcement learning-based intelligent router for data-driven and workload-aware scheduling. Our router leverages a trainable response-length predictor, and a novel formulation for estimating the impact of mixing different workloads to schedule queries across LLM instances and achieve over 11\% lower end-to-end latency than existing approaches.

As the adoption of Generative AI in real-world services grow explosively, energy has emerged as a critical bottleneck resource. However, energy remains a metric that is often overlooked, under-explored, or poorly understood in the context of building ML systems. We present the ML.ENERGY Benchmark, a benchmark suite and tool for measuring inference energy consumption under realistic service environments, and the corresponding ML.ENERGY Leaderboard, which have served as a valuable resource for those hoping to understand and optimize the energy consumption of their generative AI services. In this paper, we explain four key design principles for benchmarking ML energy we have acquired over time, and then describe how they are implemented in the ML.ENERGY Benchmark. We then highlight results from the latest iteration of the benchmark, including energy measurements of 40 widely used model architectures across 6 different tasks, case studies of how ML design choices impact energy consumption, and how automated optimization recommendations can lead to significant (sometimes more than 40%) energy savings without changing what is being computed by the model. The ML.ENERGY Benchmark is open-source and can be easily extended to various customized models and application scenarios.

The intelligent interaction model based on large models reduces the differences in user experience across various system platforms but faces challenges in multi-agent collaboration and resource sharing. To demonstrate a uniform user experience across different foundational software platforms and address resource coordination management challenges, this paper proposes KAOS, a multi-agent operating system based on the open-source Kylin. The research method involves empowering agents with large models to serve applications. First, by introducing management role agents and vertical multi-agent collaboration to construct or replace typical application software. Second, by studying system-level shared resource scheduling strategies to enhance user experience and optimize resource utilization. And finally, by validating the efficiency and superiority of the large model multi-agent operating system through real applications and scoring intelligence. The feasibility of this system is demonstrated, providing a new perspective for the development of multi-agent operating systems. Experimental results show significant advantages of multi-agent collaboration in various application scenarios.

Large language models trained on source code can support a variety of software development tasks, such as code recommendation and program repair. Large amounts of data for training such models benefit the models' performance. However, the size of the data and models results in long training times and high energy consumption. While publishing source code allows for replicability, users need to repeat the expensive training process if models are not shared. The main goal of the study is to investigate if publications that trained language models for software engineering (SE) tasks share source code and trained artifacts. The second goal is to analyze the transparency on training energy usage. We perform a snowballing-based literature search to find publications on language models for source code, and analyze their reusability from a sustainability standpoint. From 494 unique publications, we identified 293 relevant publications that use language models to address code-related tasks. Among them, 27% (79 out of 293) make artifacts available for reuse. This can be in the form of tools or IDE plugins designed for specific tasks or task-agnostic models that can be fine-tuned for a variety of downstream tasks. Moreover, we collect insights on the hardware used for model training, as well as training time, which together determine the energy consumption of the development process. We find that there are deficiencies in the sharing of information and artifacts for current studies on source code models for software engineering tasks, with 40% of the surveyed papers not sharing source code or trained artifacts. We recommend the sharing of source code as well as trained artifacts, to enable sustainable reproducibility. Moreover, comprehensive information on training times and hardware configurations should be shared for transparency on a model's carbon footprint.

We present the design, implementation and engineering experience in building and deploying MegaScale, a production system for training large language models (LLMs) at the scale of more than 10,000 GPUs. Training LLMs at this scale brings unprecedented challenges to training efficiency and stability. We take a full-stack approach that co-designs the algorithmic and system components across model block and optimizer design, computation and communication overlapping, operator optimization, data pipeline, and network performance tuning. Maintaining high efficiency throughout the training process (i.e., stability) is an important consideration in production given the long extent of LLM training jobs. Many hard stability issues only emerge at large scale, and in-depth observability is the key to address them. We develop a set of diagnosis tools to monitor system components and events deep in the stack, identify root causes, and derive effective techniques to achieve fault tolerance and mitigate stragglers. MegaScale achieves 55.2% Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) when training a 175B LLM model on 12,288 GPUs, improving the MFU by 1.34x compared to Megatron-LM. We share our operational experience in identifying and fixing failures and stragglers. We hope by articulating the problems and sharing our experience from a systems perspective, this work can inspire future LLM systems research.

The most popular framework for distributed training of machine learning models is the (synchronous) parameter server (PS). This paradigm consists of n workers, which iteratively compute updates of the model parameters, and a stateful PS, which waits and aggregates all updates to generate a new estimate of model parameters and sends it back to the workers for a new iteration. Transient computation slowdowns or transmission delays can intolerably lengthen the time of each iteration. An efficient way to mitigate this problem is to let the PS wait only for the fastest n-b updates, before generating the new parameters. The slowest b workers are called backup workers. The optimal number b of backup workers depends on the cluster configuration and workload, but also (as we show in this paper) on the hyper-parameters of the learning algorithm and the current stage of the training. We propose DBW, an algorithm that dynamically decides the number of backup workers during the training process to maximize the convergence speed at each iteration. Our experiments show that DBW 1) removes the necessity to tune b by preliminary time-consuming experiments, and 2) makes the training up to a factor 3 faster than the optimal static configuration.

In this report, we introduce INTELLECT-1, the first 10 billion parameter language model collaboratively trained across the globe, demonstrating that large-scale model training is no longer confined to large corporations but can be achieved through a distributed, community-driven approach. INTELLECT-1 was trained on 1 trillion tokens using up to 14 concurrent nodes distributed across 3 continents, with contributions from 30 independent compute providers dynamically joining and leaving the training process, while maintaining 83-96% compute utilization and 36.2-41.4% model FLOPS utilization. We leverage PRIME, our scalable distributed training framework designed for fault-tolerant, high-performance training on unreliable, globally distributed nodes. Key innovations in PRIME include the ElasticDeviceMesh, which manages dynamic global process groups for fault-tolerant communication across the internet and local process groups for communication within a node, live checkpoint recovery kernels, and a hybrid DiLoCo-FSDP2 implementation. Using PRIME with DiLoCo and our custom int8 all-reduce, we achieve a 400x reduction in communication bandwidth compared to traditional data-parallel training settings while delivering comparable performance. These results demonstrate the feasibility and promise of training frontier foundation models in a decentralized network of global GPU resources.

In the rapidly evolving realm of artificial intelligence, deploying large language models (LLMs) poses increasingly pressing computational and environmental challenges. This paper introduces MELODI - Monitoring Energy Levels and Optimization for Data-driven Inference - a multifaceted framework crafted to monitor and analyze the energy consumed during LLM inference processes. MELODI enables detailed observations of power consumption dynamics and facilitates the creation of a comprehensive dataset reflective of energy efficiency across varied deployment scenarios. The dataset, generated using MELODI, encompasses a broad spectrum of LLM deployment frameworks, multiple language models, and extensive prompt datasets, enabling a comparative analysis of energy use. Using the dataset, we investigate how prompt attributes, including length and complexity, correlate with energy expenditure. Our findings indicate substantial disparities in energy efficiency, suggesting ample scope for optimization and adoption of sustainable measures in LLM deployment. Our contribution lies not only in the MELODI framework but also in the novel dataset, a resource that can be expanded by other researchers. Thus, MELODI is a foundational tool and dataset for advancing research into energy-conscious LLM deployment, steering the field toward a more sustainable future.

Large models represent a groundbreaking advancement in multiple application fields, enabling remarkable achievements across various tasks. However, their unprecedented scale comes with significant computational costs. These models, often consisting of billions of parameters, require vast amounts of computational resources for execution. Especially, the expansive scale and computational demands pose considerable challenges when customizing them for particular downstream tasks, particularly over the hardware platforms constrained by computational capabilities. Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) provides a practical solution by efficiently adapt the large models over the various downstream tasks. In particular, PEFT refers to the process of adjusting the parameters of a pre-trained large models to adapt it to a specific task while minimizing the number of additional parameters introduced or computational resources required. This approach is particularly important when dealing with large language models with high parameter counts, as fine-tuning these models from scratch can be computationally expensive and resource-intensive, posing considerable challenges in the supporting system platform design. In this survey, we present comprehensive studies of various PEFT algorithms, examining their performance and computational overhead. Moreover, we provide an overview of applications developed using different PEFT algorithms and discuss common techniques employed to mitigate computation costs for PEFT. In addition to the algorithmic perspective, we overview various real-world system designs to investigate the implementation costs associated with different PEFT algorithms. This survey serves as an indispensable resource for researchers aiming to understand both the PEFT algorithm and its system implementation, offering detailed insights into recent advancements and practical applications.

The increasing complexity of computer science research projects demands more effective tools for deploying code repositories. Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Anthropic Claude and Meta Llama, have demonstrated significant advancements across various fields of computer science research, including the automation of diverse software engineering tasks. To evaluate the effectiveness of LLMs in handling complex code development tasks of research projects, particularly for NLP/CV/AI/ML/DM topics, we introduce CSR-Bench, a benchmark for Computer Science Research projects. This benchmark assesses LLMs from various aspects including accuracy, efficiency, and deployment script quality, aiming to explore their potential in conducting computer science research autonomously. We also introduce a novel framework, CSR-Agents, that utilizes multiple LLM agents to automate the deployment of GitHub code repositories of computer science research projects. Specifically, by checking instructions from markdown files and interpreting repository structures, the model generates and iteratively improves bash commands that set up the experimental environments and deploy the code to conduct research tasks. Preliminary results from CSR-Bench indicate that LLM agents can significantly enhance the workflow of repository deployment, thereby boosting developer productivity and improving the management of developmental workflows.

Large model inference is shifting from cloud to edge due to concerns about the privacy of user interaction data. However, edge devices often struggle with limited computing power, memory, and bandwidth, requiring collaboration across multiple devices to run and speed up LLM inference. Pipeline parallelism, the mainstream solution, is inefficient for single-user scenarios, while tensor parallelism struggles with frequent communications. In this paper, we argue that tensor parallelism can be more effective than pipeline on low-resource devices, and present a compute- and memory-efficient tensor parallel inference system, named TPI-LLM, to serve 70B-scale models. TPI-LLM keeps sensitive raw data local in the users' devices and introduces a sliding window memory scheduler to dynamically manage layer weights during inference, with disk I/O latency overlapped with the computation and communication. This allows larger models to run smoothly on memory-limited devices. We analyze the communication bottleneck and find that link latency, not bandwidth, emerges as the main issue, so a star-based allreduce algorithm is implemented. Through extensive experiments on both emulated and real testbeds, TPI-LLM demonstrated over 80% less time-to-first-token and token latency compared to Accelerate, and over 90% compared to Transformers and Galaxy, while cutting the peak memory footprint of Llama 2-70B by 90%, requiring only 3.1 GB of memory for 70B-scale models.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has necessitated the adoption of parallel training techniques, involving the deployment of thousands of GPUs to train a single model. Unfortunately, we have found that the efficiency of current parallel training is often suboptimal, largely due to the following two main issues. Firstly, hardware failures are inevitable, leading to interruptions in the training tasks. The inability to quickly identify the faulty components results in a substantial waste of GPU resources. Secondly, since GPUs must wait for parameter synchronization to complete before proceeding to the next round of computation, network congestions can greatly increase the waiting time for GPUs. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a communication-driven solution, namely the C4. The key insights of C4 are two folds. First, in parallel training, collective communication exhibits periodic and homogeneous characteristics, so any anomalies are certainly due to some form of hardware malfunction. By leveraging this feature, C4 can rapidly identify the faulty components, swiftly isolate the anomaly, and restart the task, thereby avoiding resource wastage caused by delays in anomaly detection. Second, the predictable communication model of collective communication, involving few large flows, allows C4 to efficiently execute traffic planning, substantially reducing network congestion. C4 has been extensively implemented across our production systems, cutting error-induced overhead by roughly 30% and enhancing runtime performance by about 15% for certain applications with moderate communication costs.

Checkpointing to preserve training states is crucial during the development of Large Foundation Models (LFMs), for training resumption upon various failures or changes in GPU resources and parallelism configurations. In addition, saved checkpoints are dispatched to evaluation tasks or transferred across different training stages (e.g., from pre-training to post-training). All these scenarios require resharding distributed checkpoints from one parallelism to another. In production environments, different LFMs are trained with various frameworks and storage backends, depending on model sizes and training scales. A high-performance checkpointing system is needed to enable efficient checkpoint management at scale throughout the lifecycle of LFM development. We introduce ByteCheckpoint, an industrial-grade checkpointing system for large-scale LFM training. ByteCheckpoint features: a parallelism-agnostic checkpoint representation that enables efficient load-time checkpoint resharding; a generic checkpoint saving/loading workflow to accommodate multiple training frameworks and support different storage backends; full-stack optimizations to ensure high I/O efficiency and scalability; a suite of monitoring tools to streamline large-scale performance analysis and bottleneck detection. Compared to existing open-source checkpointing systems [52, 58], ByteCheckpoint significantly reduces runtime checkpoint stalls, achieving an average reduction of 54.20x. For saving and loading times, ByteCheckpoint achieves improvements of up to 9.96x and 8.80x, respectively.

This paper introduces Opus, a novel framework for generating and optimizing Workflows tailored to complex Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) use cases, focusing on cost reduction and quality enhancement while adhering to established industry processes and operational constraints. Our approach generates executable Workflows from Intention, defined as the alignment of Client Input, Client Output, and Process Context. These Workflows are represented as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), with nodes as Tasks consisting of sequences of executable Instructions, including tools and human expert reviews. We adopt a two-phase methodology: Workflow Generation and Workflow Optimization. In the Generation phase, Workflows are generated using a Large Work Model (LWM) informed by a Work Knowledge Graph (WKG) that encodes domain-specific procedural and operational knowledge. In the Optimization phase, Workflows are transformed into Workflow Graphs (WFGs), where optimal Workflows are determined through path optimization. Our experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) face challenges in reliably retrieving detailed process data as well as generating industry-compliant workflows. The key contributions of this paper include: - The integration of a Work Knowledge Graph (WKG) into a Large Work Model (LWM), enabling the generation of context-aware, semantically aligned, structured and auditable Workflows. - A two-phase approach that combines Workflow Generation from Intention with graph-based Workflow Optimization. - Opus Alpha 1 Large and Opus Alpha 1 Small, models that outperform state-of-the-art LLMs by 38\% and 29\% respectively in Workflow Generation for a Medical Coding use case.

The fundamental success of large language models hinges upon the efficacious implementation of large-scale distributed training techniques. Nevertheless, building a vast, high-performance cluster featuring high-speed communication interconnectivity is prohibitively costly, and accessible only to prominent entities. In this work, we aim to lower this barrier and democratize large-scale training with limited bandwidth clusters. We propose a new approach called CO2 that introduces local-updating and asynchronous communication to the distributed data-parallel training, thereby facilitating the full overlap of COmunication with COmputation. CO2 is able to attain a high scalability even on extensive multi-node clusters constrained by very limited communication bandwidth. We further propose the staleness gap penalty and outer momentum clipping techniques together with CO2 to bolster its convergence and training stability. Besides, CO2 exhibits seamless integration with well-established ZeRO-series optimizers which mitigate memory consumption of model states with large model training. We also provide a mathematical proof of convergence, accompanied by the establishment of a stringent upper bound. Furthermore, we validate our findings through an extensive set of practical experiments encompassing a wide range of tasks in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing. These experiments serve to demonstrate the capabilities of CO2 in terms of convergence, generalization, and scalability when deployed across configurations comprising up to 128 A100 GPUs. The outcomes emphasize the outstanding capacity of CO2 to hugely improve scalability, no matter on clusters with 800Gbps RDMA or 80Gbps TCP/IP inter-node connections.

There is an increasing need to bring machine learning to a wide diversity of hardware devices. Current frameworks rely on vendor-specific operator libraries and optimize for a narrow range of server-class GPUs. Deploying workloads to new platforms -- such as mobile phones, embedded devices, and accelerators (e.g., FPGAs, ASICs) -- requires significant manual effort. We propose TVM, a compiler that exposes graph-level and operator-level optimizations to provide performance portability to deep learning workloads across diverse hardware back-ends. TVM solves optimization challenges specific to deep learning, such as high-level operator fusion, mapping to arbitrary hardware primitives, and memory latency hiding. It also automates optimization of low-level programs to hardware characteristics by employing a novel, learning-based cost modeling method for rapid exploration of code optimizations. Experimental results show that TVM delivers performance across hardware back-ends that are competitive with state-of-the-art, hand-tuned libraries for low-power CPU, mobile GPU, and server-class GPUs. We also demonstrate TVM's ability to target new accelerator back-ends, such as the FPGA-based generic deep learning accelerator. The system is open sourced and in production use inside several major companies.

Rapid Large Language Model (LLM) advancements are fueling autonomous Multi-Agent System (MAS) development. However, current frameworks often lack flexibility, resource awareness, model diversity, and autonomous tool creation. This paper introduces HASHIRU (Hierarchical Agent System for Hybrid Intelligent Resource Utilization), a novel MAS framework enhancing flexibility, resource efficiency, and adaptability. HASHIRU features a "CEO" agent dynamically managing specialized "employee" agents, instantiated based on task needs and resource constraints (cost, memory). Its hybrid intelligence prioritizes smaller, local LLMs (via Ollama) while flexibly using external APIs and larger models when necessary. An economic model with hiring/firing costs promotes team stability and efficient resource allocation. The system also includes autonomous API tool creation and a memory function. Evaluations on tasks like academic paper review (58% success), safety assessments (100% on a JailbreakBench subset), and complex reasoning (outperforming Gemini 2.0 Flash on GSM8K: 96% vs. 61%; JEEBench: 80% vs. 68.3%; SVAMP: 92% vs. 84%) demonstrate HASHIRU's capabilities. Case studies illustrate its self-improvement via autonomous cost model generation, tool integration, and budget management. HASHIRU offers a promising approach for more robust, efficient, and adaptable MAS through dynamic hierarchical control, resource-aware hybrid intelligence, and autonomous functional extension. Source code and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/HASHIRU-AI/HASHIRU and https://github.com/HASHIRU-AI/HASHIRUBench respectively, and a live demo is available at https://hashiruagentx-hashiruai.hf.space upon request.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming integral to daily life, showcasing their vast potential across various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Beyond NLP, LLMs are increasingly used in software development tasks, such as code completion, modification, bug fixing, and code translation. Software engineers widely use tools like GitHub Copilot and Amazon Q, streamlining workflows and automating tasks with high accuracy. While the resource and energy intensity of LLM training is often highlighted, inference can be even more resource-intensive over time, as it's a continuous process with a high number of invocations. Therefore, developing resource-efficient alternatives for LLM inference is crucial for sustainability. This work proposes GREEN-CODE, a framework for energy-aware code generation in LLMs. GREEN-CODE performs dynamic early exit during LLM inference. We train a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent that learns to balance the trade-offs between accuracy, latency, and energy consumption. Our approach is evaluated on two open-source LLMs, Llama 3.2 3B and OPT 2.7B, using the JavaCorpus and PY150 datasets. Results show that our method reduces the energy consumption between 23-50 % on average for code generation tasks without significantly affecting accuracy.

Despite the popularity of large language model (LLM) quantization for inference acceleration, significant uncertainty remains regarding the accuracy-performance trade-offs associated with various quantization formats. We present a comprehensive empirical study of quantized accuracy, evaluating popular quantization formats (FP8, INT8, INT4) across academic benchmarks and real-world tasks, on the entire Llama-3.1 model family. Additionally, our study examines the difference in text generated by quantized models versus their uncompressed counterparts. Beyond benchmarks, we also present a couple of quantization improvements which allowed us to obtain state-of-the-art accuracy recovery results. Our investigation, encompassing over 500,000 individual evaluations, yields several key findings: (1) FP8 weight and activation quantization (W8A8-FP) is lossless across all model scales, (2) INT8 weight and activation quantization (W8A8-INT), when properly tuned, incurs surprisingly low 1-3% accuracy degradation, and (3) INT4 weight-only quantization (W4A16-INT) is competitive with 8-bit integer weight and activation quantization. To address the question of the "best" format for a given deployment environment, we conduct inference performance analysis using the popular open-source vLLM framework on various GPU architectures. We find that W4A16 offers the best cost-efficiency for synchronous deployments, and for asynchronous deployment on mid-tier GPUs. At the same time, W8A8 formats excel in asynchronous "continuous batching" deployment of mid- and large-size models on high-end GPUs. Our results provide a set of practical guidelines for deploying quantized LLMs across scales and performance requirements.

Large language models (LLM) have become a critical component in many applications of machine learning. However, standard approaches to training LLM require a large number of tightly interconnected accelerators, with devices exchanging gradients and other intermediate states at each optimization step. While it is difficult to build and maintain a single computing cluster hosting many accelerators, it might be easier to find several computing clusters each hosting a smaller number of devices. In this work, we propose a distributed optimization algorithm, Distributed Low-Communication (DiLoCo), that enables training of language models on islands of devices that are poorly connected. The approach is a variant of federated averaging, where the number of inner steps is large, the inner optimizer is AdamW, and the outer optimizer is Nesterov momentum. On the widely used C4 dataset, we show that DiLoCo on 8 workers performs as well as fully synchronous optimization while communicating 500 times less. DiLoCo exhibits great robustness to the data distribution of each worker. It is also robust to resources becoming unavailable over time, and vice versa, it can seamlessly leverage resources that become available during training.

Using fault-tolerant constructions, computations performed with unreliable components can simulate their noiseless counterparts though the introduction of a modest amount of redundancy. Given the modest overhead required to achieve fault-tolerance, and the fact that increasing the reliability of basic components often comes at a cost, are there situations where fault-tolerance may be more economical? We present a general framework to account for this overhead cost in order to effectively compare fault-tolerant to non-fault-tolerant approaches for computation, in the limit of small logical error rates. Using this detailed accounting, we determine explicit boundaries at which fault-tolerant designs become more efficient than designs that achieve comparable reliability through direct consumption of resources. We find that the fault-tolerant construction is always preferred in the limit of high reliability in cases where the resources required to construct a basic unit grows faster than log(1 / epsilon) asymptotically for small epsilon.

The paper introduces D-CODE, a new framework blending Data Colony Optimization (DCO) algorithms inspired by biological colonies' collective behaviours with Dynamic Efficiency (DE) models for real-time adaptation. DCO utilizes metaheuristic strategies from ant colonies, bee swarms, and fungal networks to efficiently explore complex data landscapes, while DE enables continuous resource recalibration and process adjustments for optimal performance amidst changing conditions. Through a mixed-methods approach involving simulations and case studies, D-CODE outperforms traditional techniques, showing improvements of 3-4% in solution quality, 2-3 times faster convergence rates, and up to 25% higher computational efficiency. The integration of DCO's robust optimization and DE's dynamic responsiveness positions D-CODE as a transformative paradigm for intelligent systems design, with potential applications in operational efficiency, decision support, and computational intelligence, supported by empirical validation and promising outcomes.

Programmable switches are driving a massive increase in fine-grained measurements. This puts significant pressure on telemetry collectors that have to process reports from many switches. Past research acknowledged this problem by either improving collectors' stack performance or by limiting the amount of data sent from switches. In this paper, we take a different and radical approach: switches are responsible for directly inserting queryable telemetry data into the collectors' memory, bypassing their CPU, and thereby improving their collection scalability. We propose to use a method we call direct telemetry access, where switches jointly write telemetry reports directly into the same collector's memory region, without coordination. Our solution, DART, is probabilistic, trading memory redundancy and query success probability for CPU resources at collectors. We prototype DART using commodity hardware such as P4 switches and RDMA NICs and show that we get high query success rates with a reasonable memory overhead. For example, we can collect INT path tracing information on a fat tree topology without a collector's CPU involvement while achieving 99.9\% query success probability and using just 300 bytes per flow.

We introduce Differential Performance Evaluation (DPE), a framework designed to reliably evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for efficient code generation. Traditional coding benchmarks often fail to provide reliable insights into code efficiency, due to their reliance on simplistic test inputs and the absence of effective compound metrics. DPE addresses these issues by focusing on efficiency-demanding programming tasks and establishing an insightful compound metric for performance evaluation. DPE operates in two phases: To curate efficiency datasets, it selects efficiency-demanding tasks from existing coding benchmarks and generates computationally expensive inputs to stress the efficiency of LLM solutions. To assess the code efficiency, DPE profiles the new solution and compares it globally against a set of reference solutions that exhibit distinct efficiency levels, where the matched level defines its efficiency score. As a proof of concept, we use DPE to create EvalPerf, a benchmark with 121 performance-challenging coding tasks. Our comprehensive evaluation draws interesting findings on the efficiency impact of model sizes, instruction tuning, and prompting. For example, while the scaling law fails to account for code efficiency, general instruction tuning benefits both code correctness and efficiency. We also evaluate the evaluation by examining the effectiveness of DPE, showing that EvalPerf is reliable and convenient to use even across platforms.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have gained popularity in achieving state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of tasks in computer vision and natural language processing. They effectively expand the model capacity while incurring a minimal increase in computation cost during training. However, deploying such models for inference is difficult due to their large size and complex communication pattern. In this work, we provide a characterization of two MoE workloads, namely Language Modeling (LM) and Machine Translation (MT) and identify their sources of inefficiencies at deployment. We propose three optimization techniques to mitigate sources of inefficiencies, namely (1) Dynamic gating, (2) Expert Buffering, and (3) Expert load balancing. We show that dynamic gating improves maximum throughput by 6.21-11.23times for LM, 5.75-10.98times for MT Encoder and 2.58-5.71times for MT Decoder. It also reduces memory usage by up to 1.36times for LM and up to 1.1times for MT. We further propose Expert Buffering, a new caching mechanism that only keeps hot, active experts in GPU memory while buffering the rest in CPU memory. This reduces static memory allocation by up to 1.47times. We finally propose a load balancing methodology that provides additional scalability to the workload.

Recent advances in leveraging the agentic paradigm of large language models (LLMs) utilization have significantly enhanced Text-to-SQL capabilities, enabling users without specialized database expertise to query data intuitively. However, deploying these agentic LLM-based Text-to-SQL systems in production poses substantial challenges due to their inherently multi-stage workflows, stringent latency constraints, and potentially heterogeneous GPU infrastructure in enterprise environments. Current LLM serving frameworks lack effective mechanisms for handling interdependent inference tasks, dynamic latency variability, and resource heterogeneity, leading to suboptimal performance and frequent service-level objective (SLO) violations. In this paper, we introduce HEXGEN-TEXT2SQL, a novel framework designed explicitly to schedule and execute agentic multi-stage LLM-based Text-to-SQL workflows on heterogeneous GPU clusters that handle multi-tenant end-to-end queries. HEXGEN-TEXT2SQL introduce a hierarchical scheduling approach combining global workload-balanced task dispatching and local adaptive urgency-guided prioritization, guided by a systematic analysis of agentic Text-to-SQL workflows. Additionally, we propose a lightweight simulation-based method for tuning critical scheduling hyperparameters, further enhancing robustness and adaptability. Our extensive evaluation on realistic Text-to-SQL benchmarks demonstrates that HEXGEN-TEXT2SQL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art LLM serving frameworks. Specifically, HEXGEN-TEXT2SQL reduces latency deadlines by up to 1.67times (average: 1.41times) and improves system throughput by up to 1.75times (average: 1.65times) compared to vLLM under diverse, realistic workload conditions. Our code is available at https://github.com/Relaxed-System-Lab/Hexgen-Flow.

Recent studies have drawn attention to the untapped potential of the "star operation" (element-wise multiplication) in network design. While intuitive explanations abound, the foundational rationale behind its application remains largely unexplored. Our study attempts to reveal the star operation's ability to map inputs into high-dimensional, non-linear feature spaces -- akin to kernel tricks -- without widening the network. We further introduce StarNet, a simple yet powerful prototype, demonstrating impressive performance and low latency under compact network structure and efficient budget. Like stars in the sky, the star operation appears unremarkable but holds a vast universe of potential. Our work encourages further exploration across tasks, with codes available at https://github.com/ma-xu/Rewrite-the-Stars.

The growth in the number of parameters of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a significant surge in computational requirements, making them challenging and costly to deploy. Speculative decoding (SD) leverages smaller models to efficiently propose future tokens, which are then verified by the LLM in parallel. Small models that utilise activations from the LLM currently achieve the fastest decoding speeds. However, we identify several limitations of SD models including the lack of on-policyness during training and partial observability. To address these shortcomings, we propose a more grounded architecture for small models by introducing a Mixture of Attentions for SD. Our novel architecture can be applied in two scenarios: a conventional single device deployment and a novel client-server deployment where the small model is hosted on a consumer device and the LLM on a server. In a single-device scenario, we demonstrate state-of-the-art speedups improving EAGLE-2 by 9.5% and its acceptance length by 25%. In a client-server setting, our experiments demonstrate: 1) state-of-the-art latencies with minimal calls to the server for different network conditions, and 2) in the event of a complete disconnection, our approach can maintain higher accuracy compared to other SD methods and demonstrates advantages over API calls to LLMs, which would otherwise be unable to continue the generation process.

The rapid progress in Deep Learning (DL) and Large Language Models (LLMs) has exponentially increased demands of computational power and bandwidth. This, combined with the high costs of faster computing chips and interconnects, has significantly inflated High Performance Computing (HPC) construction costs. To address these challenges, we introduce the Fire-Flyer AI-HPC architecture, a synergistic hardware-software co-design framework and its best practices. For DL training, we deployed the Fire-Flyer 2 with 10,000 PCIe A100 GPUs, achieved performance approximating the DGX-A100 while reducing costs by half and energy consumption by 40%. We specifically engineered HFReduce to accelerate allreduce communication and implemented numerous measures to keep our Computation-Storage Integrated Network congestion-free. Through our software stack, including HaiScale, 3FS, and HAI-Platform, we achieved substantial scalability by overlapping computation and communication. Our system-oriented experience from DL training provides valuable insights to drive future advancements in AI-HPC.

In Large Language Model (LLM) inference, the output length of an LLM request is typically regarded as not known a priori. Consequently, most LLM serving systems employ a simple First-come-first-serve (FCFS) scheduling strategy, leading to Head-Of-Line (HOL) blocking and reduced throughput and service quality. In this paper, we reexamine this assumption -- we show that, although predicting the exact generation length of each request is infeasible, it is possible to predict the relative ranks of output lengths in a batch of requests, using learning to rank. The ranking information offers valuable guidance for scheduling requests. Building on this insight, we develop a novel scheduler for LLM inference and serving that can approximate the shortest-job-first (SJF) schedule better than existing approaches. We integrate this scheduler with the state-of-the-art LLM serving system and show significant performance improvement in several important applications: 2.8x lower latency in chatbot serving and 6.5x higher throughput in synthetic data generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/hao-ai-lab/vllm-ltr.git

Transformers have revolutionized the machine learning landscape, gradually making their way into everyday tasks and equipping our computers with "sparks of intelligence". However, their runtime requirements have prevented them from being broadly deployed on mobile. As personal devices become increasingly powerful and prompt privacy becomes an ever more pressing issue, we explore the current state of mobile execution of Large Language Models (LLMs). To achieve this, we have created our own automation infrastructure, MELT, which supports the headless execution and benchmarking of LLMs on device, supporting different models, devices and frameworks, including Android, iOS and Nvidia Jetson devices. We evaluate popular instruction fine-tuned LLMs and leverage different frameworks to measure their end-to-end and granular performance, tracing their memory and energy requirements along the way. Our analysis is the first systematic study of on-device LLM execution, quantifying performance, energy efficiency and accuracy across various state-of-the-art models and showcases the state of on-device intelligence in the era of hyperscale models. Results highlight the performance heterogeneity across targets and corroborates that LLM inference is largely memory-bound. Quantization drastically reduces memory requirements and renders execution viable, but at a non-negligible accuracy cost. Drawing from its energy footprint and thermal behavior, the continuous execution of LLMs remains elusive, as both factors negatively affect user experience. Last, our experience shows that the ecosystem is still in its infancy, and algorithmic as well as hardware breakthroughs can significantly shift the execution cost. We expect NPU acceleration, and framework-hardware co-design to be the biggest bet towards efficient standalone execution, with the alternative of offloading tailored towards edge deployments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) for Generative AI have achieved remarkable progress, evolving into sophisticated and versatile tools widely adopted across various domains and applications. However, the substantial memory overhead caused by their vast number of parameters, combined with the high computational demands of the attention mechanism, poses significant challenges in achieving low latency and high throughput for LLM inference services. Recent advancements, driven by groundbreaking research, have significantly accelerated progress in this field. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of these methods, covering fundamental instance-level approaches, in-depth cluster-level strategies, emerging scenario directions, and other miscellaneous but important areas. At the instance level, we review model placement, request scheduling, decoding length prediction, storage management, and the disaggregation paradigm. At the cluster level, we explore GPU cluster deployment, multi-instance load balancing, and cloud service solutions. For emerging scenarios, we organize the discussion around specific tasks, modules, and auxiliary methods. To ensure a holistic overview, we also highlight several niche yet critical areas. Finally, we outline potential research directions to further advance the field of LLM inference serving.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) enables efficient scaling of large language models (LLMs) with sparsely activated experts during inference. To effectively deploy large MoE models on memory-constrained devices, many systems introduce *expert offloading* that caches a subset of experts in fast memory, leaving others on slow memory to run on CPU or load on demand. While some research has exploited the locality of expert activations, where consecutive tokens activate similar experts, the degree of this **local routing consistency** varies across models and remains understudied. In this paper, we propose two metrics to measure local routing consistency of MoE models: (1) **Segment Routing Best Performance (SRP)**, which evaluates how well a fixed group of experts can cover the needs of a segment of tokens, and (2) **Segment Cache Best Hit Rate (SCH)**, which measures the optimal segment-level cache hit rate under a given cache size limit. We analyzed 20 MoE LLMs with diverse sizes and architectures and found that models that apply MoE on every layer and do not use shared experts exhibit the highest local routing consistency. We further showed that domain-specialized experts contribute more to routing consistency than vocabulary-specialized ones, and that most models can balance between cache effectiveness and efficiency with cache sizes approximately 2x the active experts. These findings pave the way for memory-efficient MoE design and deployment without compromising inference speed. We publish the code for replicating experiments at https://github.com/ljcleo/moe-lrc .

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in solving complex tasks across diverse domains, typically by employing agentic workflows that follow detailed instructions and operational sequences. However, constructing these workflows requires significant human effort, limiting scalability and generalizability. Recent research has sought to automate the generation and optimization of these workflows, but existing methods still rely on initial manual setup and fall short of achieving fully automated and effective workflow generation. To address this challenge, we reformulate workflow optimization as a search problem over code-represented workflows, where LLM-invoking nodes are connected by edges. We introduce AFlow, an automated framework that efficiently explores this space using Monte Carlo Tree Search, iteratively refining workflows through code modification, tree-structured experience, and execution feedback. Empirical evaluations across six benchmark datasets demonstrate AFlow's efficacy, yielding a 5.7% average improvement over state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, AFlow enables smaller models to outperform GPT-4o on specific tasks at 4.55% of its inference cost in dollars. The code will be available at https://github.com/geekan/MetaGPT.

The remarkable performance of models like the OpenAI o1 can be attributed to their ability to emulate human-like long-time thinking during inference. These models employ extended chain-of-thought (CoT) processes, exploring multiple strategies to enhance problem-solving capabilities. However, a critical question remains: How to intelligently and efficiently scale computational resources during testing. This paper presents the first comprehensive study on the prevalent issue of overthinking in these models, where excessive computational resources are allocated for simple problems with minimal benefit. We introduce novel efficiency metrics from both outcome and process perspectives to evaluate the rational use of computational resources by o1-like models. Using a self-training paradigm, we propose strategies to mitigate overthinking, streamlining reasoning processes without compromising accuracy. Experimental results show that our approach successfully reduces computational overhead while preserving model performance across a range of testsets with varying difficulty levels, such as GSM8K, MATH500, GPQA, and AIME.

Training large AI models on numerous GPUs consumes a massive amount of energy. We observe that not all energy consumed during training directly contributes to end-to-end training throughput, and a significant portion can be removed without slowing down training, which we call energy bloat. In this work, we identify two independent sources of energy bloat in large model training, intrinsic and extrinsic, and propose Perseus, a unified optimization framework that mitigates both. Perseus obtains the "iteration time-energy" Pareto frontier of any large model training job using an efficient iterative graph cut-based algorithm and schedules energy consumption of its forward and backward computations across time to remove intrinsic and extrinsic energy bloat. Evaluation on large models like GPT-3 and Bloom shows that Perseus reduces energy consumption of large model training by up to 30%, enabling savings otherwise unobtainable before.

Recent years have seen a surge in the popularity of commercial AI products based on generative, multi-purpose AI systems promising a unified approach to building machine learning (ML) models into technology. However, this ambition of "generality" comes at a steep cost to the environment, given the amount of energy these systems require and the amount of carbon that they emit. In this work, we propose the first systematic comparison of the ongoing inference cost of various categories of ML systems, covering both task-specific (i.e. finetuned models that carry out a single task) and `general-purpose' models, (i.e. those trained for multiple tasks). We measure deployment cost as the amount of energy and carbon required to perform 1,000 inferences on representative benchmark dataset using these models. We find that multi-purpose, generative architectures are orders of magnitude more expensive than task-specific systems for a variety of tasks, even when controlling for the number of model parameters. We conclude with a discussion around the current trend of deploying multi-purpose generative ML systems, and caution that their utility should be more intentionally weighed against increased costs in terms of energy and emissions. All the data from our study can be accessed via an interactive demo to carry out further exploration and analysis.

Columnar storage is a core component of a modern data analytics system. Although many database management systems (DBMSs) have proprietary storage formats, most provide extensive support to open-source storage formats such as Parquet and ORC to facilitate cross-platform data sharing. But these formats were developed over a decade ago, in the early 2010s, for the Hadoop ecosystem. Since then, both the hardware and workload landscapes have changed. In this paper, we revisit the most widely adopted open-source columnar storage formats (Parquet and ORC) with a deep dive into their internals. We designed a benchmark to stress-test the formats' performance and space efficiency under different workload configurations. From our comprehensive evaluation of Parquet and ORC, we identify design decisions advantageous with modern hardware and real-world data distributions. These include using dictionary encoding by default, favoring decoding speed over compression ratio for integer encoding algorithms, making block compression optional, and embedding finer-grained auxiliary data structures. We also point out the inefficiencies in the format designs when handling common machine learning workloads and using GPUs for decoding. Our analysis identified important considerations that may guide future formats to better fit modern technology trends.

Large transformer models display promising performance on a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Although the AI community has expanded the model scale to the trillion parameter level, the practical deployment of 10-100 billion parameter models is still uncertain due to the latency, throughput, and memory constraints. In this paper, we proposed EnergonAI to solve the challenges of the efficient deployment of 10-100 billion parameter transformer models on single- or multi-GPU systems. EnergonAI adopts a hierarchy-controller system architecture to coordinate multiple devices and efficiently support different parallel patterns. It delegates the execution of sub-models to multiple workers in the single-controller style and applies tensor parallelism and pipeline parallelism among the workers in a multi-controller style. Upon the novel architecture, we propose three techniques, i.e. non-blocking pipeline parallelism, distributed redundant computation elimination, and peer memory pooling. EnergonAI enables the users to program complex parallel code the same as a serial one. Compared with the FasterTransformer, we have proven that EnergonAI has superior performance on latency and throughput. In our experiments, EnergonAI can achieve 37% latency reduction in tensor parallelism, 10% scalability improvement in pipeline parallelism, and it improves the model scale inferred on a single GPU by using a larger heterogeneous memory space at cost of limited performance reduction.

Driven by new types of wireless devices and the proliferation of bandwidth-intensive applications, data traffic and the corresponding network load are increasing dramatically. Network densification has been recognized as a promising and efficient way to provide higher network capacity and enhanced coverage. Most prior work on performance analysis of ultra-dense networks (UDNs) has focused on random spatial deployment with idealized singular path loss models and Rayleigh fading. In this paper, we consider a more precise and general model, which incorporates multi-slope path loss and general fading distributions. We derive the tail behavior and scaling laws for the coverage probability and the capacity considering strongest base station association in a Poisson field network. Our analytical results identify the regimes in which the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) either asymptotically grows, saturates, or decreases with increasing network density. We establish general results on when UDNs lead to worse or even zero SINR coverage and capacity, and we provide crisp insights on the fundamental limits of wireless network densification.

Vector databases have emerged as key enablers for bridging intelligent applications with unstructured data, providing generic search and management support for embedding vectors extracted from the raw unstructured data. As multiple data users can share the same database infrastructure, multi-tenancy support for vector databases is increasingly desirable. This hinges on an efficient filtered search operation, i.e., only querying the vectors accessible to a particular tenant. Multi-tenancy in vector databases is currently achieved by building either a single, shared index among all tenants, or a per-tenant index. The former optimizes for memory efficiency at the expense of search performance, while the latter does the opposite. Instead, this paper presents Curator, an in-memory vector index design tailored for multi-tenant queries that simultaneously achieves the two conflicting goals, low memory overhead and high performance for queries, vector insertion, and deletion. Curator indexes each tenant's vectors with a tenant-specific clustering tree and encodes these trees compactly as sub-trees of a shared clustering tree. Each tenant's clustering tree adapts dynamically to its unique vector distribution, while maintaining a low per-tenant memory footprint. Our evaluation, based on two widely used data sets, confirms that Curator delivers search performance on par with per-tenant indexing, while maintaining memory consumption at the same level as metadata filtering on a single, shared index.

Decentralised Machine Learning (DML) enables collaborative machine learning without centralised input data. Federated Learning (FL) and Edge Inference are examples of DML. While tools for DML (especially FL) are starting to flourish, many are not flexible and portable enough to experiment with novel processors (e.g., RISC-V), non-fully connected network topologies, and asynchronous collaboration schemes. We overcome these limitations via a domain-specific language allowing us to map DML schemes to an underlying middleware, i.e. the FastFlow parallel programming library. We experiment with it by generating different working DML schemes on x86-64 and ARM platforms and an emerging RISC-V one. We characterise the performance and energy efficiency of the presented schemes and systems. As a byproduct, we introduce a RISC-V porting of the PyTorch framework, the first publicly available to our knowledge.

This technical report presents a cost-efficient strategy for training a video generation foundation model. We present a mid-sized research model with approximately 7 billion parameters (7B) called Seaweed-7B trained from scratch using 665,000 H100 GPU hours. Despite being trained with moderate computational resources, Seaweed-7B demonstrates highly competitive performance compared to contemporary video generation models of much larger size. Design choices are especially crucial in a resource-constrained setting. This technical report highlights the key design decisions that enhance the performance of the medium-sized diffusion model. Empirically, we make two observations: (1) Seaweed-7B achieves performance comparable to, or even surpasses, larger models trained on substantially greater GPU resources, and (2) our model, which exhibits strong generalization ability, can be effectively adapted across a wide range of downstream applications either by lightweight fine-tuning or continue training. See the project page at https://seaweed.video/

Design flows use graph partitioning both as a precursor to place and route for single devices, and to divide netlists or task graphs among multiple devices. Partitioners have accommodated FPGA heterogeneity via multi-resource constraints, but have not yet exploited the corresponding ability to implement some computations in multiple ways (e.g., LUTs vs. DSP blocks), which could enable a superior solution. This paper introduces multi-personality graph partitioning, which incorporates aspects of resource mapping into partitioning. We present a modified multi-level KLFM partitioning algorithm that also performs heterogeneous resource mapping for nodes with multiple potential implementations (multiple personalities). We evaluate several variants of our multi-personality FPGA circuit partitioner using 21 circuits and benchmark graphs, and show that dynamic resource mapping improves cut size on average by 27% over static mapping for these circuits. We further show that it improves deviation from target resource utilizations by 50% over post-partitioning resource mapping.

Training dense LLMs requires enormous amounts of data and centralized compute, which introduces fundamental bottlenecks and ever-growing costs for large models. Several studies aim to reduce this dependency on centralization by reducing the communication overhead of training dense models. Taking this idea of reducing communication overhead to a natural extreme, by training embarrassingly parallelizable ensembles of small independent experts, has been shown to outperform large dense models trained in traditional centralized settings. However, existing studies do not take into account underlying differences amongst data domains and treat them as monolithic, regardless of their underlying complexity, size, or distribution. In this paper, we explore the effects of introducing heterogeneity to these ensembles of domain expert models. Specifically, by allowing models within the ensemble to vary in size--as well as the number of training steps taken depending on the training data's domain--we study the effect heterogeneity has on these ensembles when evaluated against domains included in, and excluded from, the training set. We use the same compute budget to train heterogeneous ensembles and homogeneous baselines for comparison. We show that the heterogeneous ensembles achieve the lowest perplexity scores in 20 out of the 21 data domains used in the evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/gensyn-ai/hdee.

The open radio access network (O-RAN), with its disaggregated and open architecture, is poised to meet the demands of the next generation of wireless communication. However, to unlock the full potentials of O-RAN, real-time network modeling and optimization are essential. A promising solution for such requirement is the use of network digital twin (NDT). NDT provides a comprehensive view of a network, covering both physical and logical components, including infrastructure, protocols, and algorithms. NDT, as a real-time virtual representation of O-RAN facilitates a variety of operations, such as emulations, test, optimization, monitoring, and analysis of a new configuration in a risk-free environment, without requiring them to be implemented in real network. Such capability enables the vendors and network operators for a faster adoption of new solutions with frequent updates, while ensuring the resiliency of the existing services via planning ahead under various "what-if" scenarios. In this paper, we first describe what exactly NDT means in the context of O-RAN, as well as its key enablers. We then describe the NDT application within the O-RAN in both prior and post-deployment. Finally, we provide two practical uses cases, namely network energy efficiency and traffic steering, where the NDT can be leveraged effectively.

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has unlocked their capabilities in advanced reasoning tasks like mathematical problem-solving, code generation, and legal analysis. Central to this progress are inference-time reasoning algorithms, which refine outputs by exploring multiple solution paths, at the cost of increasing compute demands and response latencies. Existing serving systems fail to adapt to the scaling behaviors of these algorithms or the varying difficulty of queries, leading to inefficient resource use and unmet latency targets. We present Dynasor, a system that optimizes inference-time compute for LLM reasoning queries. Unlike traditional engines, Dynasor tracks and schedules requests within reasoning queries and uses Certaindex, a proxy that measures statistical reasoning progress based on model certainty, to guide compute allocation dynamically. Dynasor co-adapts scheduling with reasoning progress: it allocates more compute to hard queries, reduces compute for simpler ones, and terminates unpromising queries early, balancing accuracy, latency, and cost. On diverse datasets and algorithms, Dynasor reduces compute by up to 50% in batch processing and sustaining 3.3x higher query rates or 4.7x tighter latency SLOs in online serving.

The success of deep neural networks (DNNs) is attributable to three factors: increased compute capacity, more complex models, and more data. These factors, however, are not always present, especially for edge applications such as autonomous driving, augmented reality, and internet-of-things. Training DNNs requires a large amount of data, which is difficult to obtain. Edge devices such as mobile phones have limited compute capacity, and therefore, require specialized and efficient DNNs. However, due to the enormous design space and prohibitive training costs, designing efficient DNNs for different target devices is challenging. So the question is, with limited data, compute capacity, and model complexity, can we still successfully apply deep neural networks? This dissertation focuses on the above problems and improving the efficiency of deep neural networks at four levels. Model efficiency: we designed neural networks for various computer vision tasks and achieved more than 10x faster speed and lower energy. Data efficiency: we developed an advanced tool that enables 6.2x faster annotation of a LiDAR point cloud. We also leveraged domain adaptation to utilize simulated data, bypassing the need for real data. Hardware efficiency: we co-designed neural networks and hardware accelerators and achieved 11.6x faster inference. Design efficiency: the process of finding the optimal neural networks is time-consuming. Our automated neural architecture search algorithms discovered, using 421x lower computational cost than previous search methods, models with state-of-the-art accuracy and efficiency.

Many areas of deep learning benefit from using increasingly larger neural networks trained on public data, as is the case for pre-trained models for NLP and computer vision. Training such models requires a lot of computational resources (e.g., HPC clusters) that are not available to small research groups and independent researchers. One way to address it is for several smaller groups to pool their computational resources together and train a model that benefits all participants. Unfortunately, in this case, any participant can jeopardize the entire training run by sending incorrect updates, deliberately or by mistake. Training in presence of such peers requires specialized distributed training algorithms with Byzantine tolerance. These algorithms often sacrifice efficiency by introducing redundant communication or passing all updates through a trusted server, making it infeasible to apply them to large-scale deep learning, where models can have billions of parameters. In this work, we propose a novel protocol for secure (Byzantine-tolerant) decentralized training that emphasizes communication efficiency.

Heat pumps are essential for decarbonizing residential heating but consume substantial electrical energy, impacting operational costs and grid demand. Many systems run inefficiently due to planning flaws, operational faults, or misconfigurations. While optimizing performance requires skilled professionals, labor shortages hinder large-scale interventions. However, digital tools and improved data availability create new service opportunities for energy efficiency, predictive maintenance, and demand-side management. To support research and practical solutions, we present an open-source dataset of electricity consumption from 1,408 households with heat pumps and smart electricity meters in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland, recorded at 15-minute and daily resolutions between 2018-11-03 and 2024-03-21. The dataset includes household metadata, weather data from 8 stations, and ground truth data from 410 field visit protocols collected by energy consultants during system optimizations. Additionally, the dataset includes a Python-based data loader to facilitate seamless data processing and exploration.

Scaling data and compute is critical to the success of machine learning. However, scaling demands predictability: we want methods to not only perform well with more compute or data, but also have their performance be predictable from small-scale runs, without running the large-scale experiment. In this paper, we show that value-based off-policy RL methods are predictable despite community lore regarding their pathological behavior. First, we show that data and compute requirements to attain a given performance level lie on a Pareto frontier, controlled by the updates-to-data (UTD) ratio. By estimating this frontier, we can predict this data requirement when given more compute, and this compute requirement when given more data. Second, we determine the optimal allocation of a total resource budget across data and compute for a given performance and use it to determine hyperparameters that maximize performance for a given budget. Third, this scaling behavior is enabled by first estimating predictable relationships between hyperparameters, which is used to manage effects of overfitting and plasticity loss unique to RL. We validate our approach using three algorithms: SAC, BRO, and PQL on DeepMind Control, OpenAI gym, and IsaacGym, when extrapolating to higher levels of data, compute, budget, or performance.

The rapid development and application of foundation models have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence. Large diffusion models have gained significant attention for their ability to generate photorealistic images and support various tasks. On-device deployment of these models provides benefits such as lower server costs, offline functionality, and improved user privacy. However, common large diffusion models have over 1 billion parameters and pose challenges due to restricted computational and memory resources on devices. We present a series of implementation optimizations for large diffusion models that achieve the fastest reported inference latency to-date (under 12 seconds for Stable Diffusion 1.4 without int8 quantization on Samsung S23 Ultra for a 512x512 image with 20 iterations) on GPU-equipped mobile devices. These enhancements broaden the applicability of generative AI and improve the overall user experience across a wide range of devices.

Developing high-performance software is a complex task that requires specialized expertise. We introduce GSO, a benchmark for evaluating language models' capabilities in developing high-performance software. We develop an automated pipeline that generates and executes performance tests to analyze repository commit histories to identify 102 challenging optimization tasks across 10 codebases, spanning diverse domains and programming languages. An agent is provided with a codebase and performance test as a precise specification, and tasked to improve the runtime efficiency, which is measured against the expert developer optimization. Our quantitative evaluation reveals that leading SWE-Agents struggle significantly, achieving less than 5% success rate, with limited improvements even with inference-time scaling. Our qualitative analysis identifies key failure modes, including difficulties with low-level languages, practicing lazy optimization strategies, and challenges in accurately localizing bottlenecks. We release the code and artifacts of our benchmark along with agent trajectories to enable future research.

We propose the concept of Intra-Query Runtime Elasticity (IQRE) for cloud-native data analysis. IQRE enables a cloud-native OLAP engine to dynamically adjust a query's Degree of Parallelism (DOP) during execution. This capability allows users to utilize cloud computing resources more cost-effectively. We present Accordion, the first IQRE query engine. Accordion can adjust the parallelism of a query at any point during query execution without pausing data processing. It features a user-friendly interface and an auto-tuner backed by a "what-if" service to allow users to adjust the DOP according to their query latency constraints. The design of Accordion follows the execution model in Presto, an open-source distributed SQL query engine developed at Meta. We present the implementation of Accordion and demonstrate its ease of use, showcasing how it enables users to minimize compute resource consumption while meeting their query time constraints.

Recent Computer-Using Agents (CUAs), powered by multimodal large language models (LLMs), offer a promising direction for automating complex desktop workflows through natural language. However, most existing CUAs remain conceptual prototypes, hindered by shallow OS integration, fragile screenshot-based interaction, and disruptive execution. We present UFO2, a multiagent AgentOS for Windows desktops that elevates CUAs into practical, system-level automation. UFO2 features a centralized HostAgent for task decomposition and coordination, alongside a collection of application-specialized AppAgent equipped with native APIs, domain-specific knowledge, and a unified GUI--API action layer. This architecture enables robust task execution while preserving modularity and extensibility. A hybrid control detection pipeline fuses Windows UI Automation (UIA) with vision-based parsing to support diverse interface styles. Runtime efficiency is further enhanced through speculative multi-action planning, reducing per-step LLM overhead. Finally, a Picture-in-Picture (PiP) interface enables automation within an isolated virtual desktop, allowing agents and users to operate concurrently without interference. We evaluate UFO2 across over 20 real-world Windows applications, demonstrating substantial improvements in robustness and execution accuracy over prior CUAs. Our results show that deep OS integration unlocks a scalable path toward reliable, user-aligned desktop automation.

In this paper, we investigate the intersection of large generative AI models and cloud-native computing architectures. Recent large models such as ChatGPT, while revolutionary in their capabilities, face challenges like escalating costs and demand for high-end GPUs. Drawing analogies between large-model-as-a-service (LMaaS) and cloud database-as-a-service (DBaaS), we describe an AI-native computing paradigm that harnesses the power of both cloud-native technologies (e.g., multi-tenancy and serverless computing) and advanced machine learning runtime (e.g., batched LoRA inference). These joint efforts aim to optimize costs-of-goods-sold (COGS) and improve resource accessibility. The journey of merging these two domains is just at the beginning and we hope to stimulate future research and development in this area.

There have been growing discussions on estimating and subsequently reducing the operational carbon footprint of enterprise data centers. The design and intelligent control for data centers have an important impact on data center carbon footprint. In this paper, we showcase PyDCM, a Python library that enables extremely fast prototyping of data center design and applies reinforcement learning-enabled control with the purpose of evaluating key sustainability metrics including carbon footprint, energy consumption, and observing temperature hotspots. We demonstrate these capabilities of PyDCM and compare them to existing works in EnergyPlus for modeling data centers. PyDCM can also be used as a standalone Gymnasium environment for demonstrating sustainability-focused data center control.

The deployment of large-scale models, such as large language models (LLMs) and sophisticated image generation systems, incurs substantial costs due to their computational demands. To mitigate these costs and address challenges related to scalability and data security, there is a growing shift towards decentralized systems for deploying such models. In these decentralized environments, efficient inference acceleration becomes crucial to manage computational resources effectively and enhance system responsiveness. In this work, we address the challenge of selecting optimal acceleration methods in decentralized systems by introducing a meta-learning-based framework. This framework automates the selection process by learning from historical performance data of various acceleration techniques across different tasks. Unlike traditional methods that rely on random selection or expert intuition, our approach systematically identifies the best acceleration strategies based on the specific characteristics of each task. We demonstrate that our meta-learning framework not only streamlines the decision-making process but also consistently outperforms conventional methods in terms of efficiency and performance. Our results highlight the potential of meta-learning to revolutionize inference acceleration in decentralized AI systems, offering a path towards more democratic and economically feasible artificial intelligence solutions.

Autonomous agents that accomplish complex computer tasks with minimal human interventions have the potential to transform human-computer interaction, significantly enhancing accessibility and productivity. However, existing benchmarks either lack an interactive environment or are limited to environments specific to certain applications or domains, failing to reflect the diverse and complex nature of real-world computer use, thereby limiting the scope of tasks and agent scalability. To address this issue, we introduce OSWorld, the first-of-its-kind scalable, real computer environment for multimodal agents, supporting task setup, execution-based evaluation, and interactive learning across various operating systems such as Ubuntu, Windows, and macOS. OSWorld can serve as a unified, integrated computer environment for assessing open-ended computer tasks that involve arbitrary applications. Building upon OSWorld, we create a benchmark of 369 computer tasks involving real web and desktop apps in open domains, OS file I/O, and workflows spanning multiple applications. Each task example is derived from real-world computer use cases and includes a detailed initial state setup configuration and a custom execution-based evaluation script for reliable, reproducible evaluation. Extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLM/VLM-based agents on OSWorld reveals significant deficiencies in their ability to serve as computer assistants. While humans can accomplish over 72.36% of the tasks, the best model achieves only 12.24% success, primarily struggling with GUI grounding and operational knowledge. Comprehensive analysis using OSWorld provides valuable insights for developing multimodal generalist agents that were not possible with previous benchmarks. Our code, environment, baseline models, and data are publicly available at https://os-world.github.io.

Many deep learning applications benefit from using large models with billions of parameters. Training these models is notoriously expensive due to the need for specialized HPC clusters. In this work, we consider alternative setups for training large models: using cheap "preemptible" instances or pooling existing resources from multiple regions. We analyze the performance of existing model-parallel algorithms in these conditions and find configurations where training larger models becomes less communication-intensive. Based on these findings, we propose SWARM parallelism, a model-parallel training algorithm designed for poorly connected, heterogeneous and unreliable devices. SWARM creates temporary randomized pipelines between nodes that are rebalanced in case of failure. We empirically validate our findings and compare SWARM parallelism with existing large-scale training approaches. Finally, we combine our insights with compression strategies to train a large Transformer language model with 1B shared parameters (approximately 13B before sharing) on preemptible T4 GPUs with less than 200Mb/s network.

The large number of parameters in Pretrained Language Models enhance their performance, but also make them resource-intensive, making it challenging to deploy them on commodity hardware like a single GPU. Due to the memory and power limitations of these devices, model compression techniques are often used to decrease both the model's size and its inference latency. This usually results in a trade-off between model accuracy and efficiency. Therefore, optimizing this balance is essential for effectively deploying LLMs on commodity hardware. A significant portion of the efficiency challenge is the Feed-forward network (FFN) component, which accounts for roughly 2{3} total parameters and inference latency. In this paper, we first observe that only a few neurons of FFN module have large output norm for any input tokens, a.k.a. heavy hitters, while the others are sparsely triggered by different tokens. Based on this observation, we explicitly split the FFN into two parts according to the heavy hitters. We improve the efficiency-accuracy trade-off of existing compression methods by allocating more resource to FFN parts with heavy hitters. In practice, our method can reduce model size by 43.1\% and bring 1.25sim1.56times wall clock time speedup on different hardware with negligible accuracy drop.

We rethink test-time scaling laws from a practical efficiency perspective, revealing that the effectiveness of smaller models is significantly overestimated. Prior work, grounded in compute-optimality, overlooks critical memory access bottlenecks introduced by inference-time strategies (e.g., Best-of-N, long CoTs). Our holistic analysis, spanning models from 0.6B to 32B parameters, reveals a new Kinetics Scaling Law that better guides resource allocation by incorporating both computation and memory access costs. Kinetics Scaling Law suggests that test-time compute is more effective when used on models above a threshold than smaller ones. A key reason is that in TTS, attention, rather than parameter count, emerges as the dominant cost factor. Motivated by this, we propose a new scaling paradigm centered on sparse attention, which lowers per-token cost and enables longer generations and more parallel samples within the same resource budget. Empirically, we show that sparse attention models consistently outperform dense counterparts, achieving over 60 points gains in low-cost regimes and over 5 points gains in high-cost regimes for problem-solving accuracy on AIME, encompassing evaluations on state-of-the-art MoEs. These results suggest that sparse attention is essential for realizing the full potential of test-time scaling because, unlike training, where parameter scaling saturates, test-time accuracy continues to improve through increased generation. The code is available at https://github.com/Infini-AI-Lab/Kinetics.

Despite growing interest in domain-specific benchmarking of large language models (LLMs) and agents, current evaluations remain limited to static, small-scale datasets, especially in high-stakes tasks like network operations that demand reliability for deployments. We present NetPress, an automated benchmark generation framework for evaluating LLM agents in network applications. NetPress introduces a unified abstraction with state and action, enabling dynamic generation of diverse query sets along with corresponding ground truths. At runtime, users can specify benchmark configurations to generate millions of queries on the fly. In addition to dynamic benchmark construction, NetPress integrates with network emulators to provide realistic environment feedback, supporting comprehensive evaluation across correctness, safety, and latency. We instantiate NetPress on three representative applications, revealing interesting fine-grained differences in agent behavior that static, correctness-only benchmarks often miss. NetPress moves LLM evaluation toward realistic, scalable testing in infrastructure-centric domains, helping close the gap between benchmark performance and real-world deployment readiness. Code is available at https://github.com/Froot-NetSys/NetPress.

Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have unlocked remarkable capabilities. While deploying these models typically requires server-grade GPUs and cloud-based inference, the recent emergence of smaller open-source models and increasingly powerful consumer devices have made on-device deployment practical. The web browser as a platform for on-device deployment is universally accessible, provides a natural agentic environment, and conveniently abstracts out the different backends from diverse device vendors. To address this opportunity, we introduce WebLLM, an open-source JavaScript framework that enables high-performance LLM inference entirely within web browsers. WebLLM provides an OpenAI-style API for seamless integration into web applications, and leverages WebGPU for efficient local GPU acceleration and WebAssembly for performant CPU computation. With machine learning compilers MLC-LLM and Apache TVM, WebLLM leverages optimized WebGPU kernels, overcoming the absence of performant WebGPU kernel libraries. Evaluations show that WebLLM can retain up to 80% native performance on the same device, with room to further close the gap. WebLLM paves the way for universally accessible, privacy-preserving, personalized, and locally powered LLM applications in web browsers. The code is available at: https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-llm.

Distributed optimization methods such as DiLoCo have been shown to be effective in training very large models across multiple distributed workers, such as datacenters. These methods split updates into two parts: an inner optimization phase, where the workers independently execute multiple optimization steps on their own local data, and an outer optimization step, where the inner updates are synchronized. While such approaches require orders of magnitude less communication than standard data-parallel training, in settings where the workers are datacenters, even the limited communication requirements of these approaches can still cause significant slow downs due to the blocking necessary at each outer optimization step. In this paper, we investigate techniques to mitigate this issue by overlapping communication with computation in a manner that allows the outer optimization step to fully overlap with the inner optimization phase. We show that a particular variant, dubbed eager updates, provides competitive performance with standard DiLoCo in settings with low bandwidth between workers.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely adopted for assisting in software development tasks, yet their performance evaluations have narrowly focused on the functional correctness of generated code. Human programmers, however, require LLM-generated code to be not only correct but also optimally efficient. We propose PerfCodeGen, a training-free framework that enhances the performance of LLM-generated code by incorporating feedback based on runtime during test case execution into the self-refinement iterations. With PerfCodeGen, we achieve speedups for a significantly higher proportion of problems compared to using the base LLM with sophisticated prompting techniques. Applied to open language models like Phi-3-mini, PerfCodeGen achieves runtime efficiency comparable to prompting powerful closed models like GPT-4. We achieve state-of-the-art runtime efficiency on benchmarks such as HumanEval, MBPP, and APPS, frequently surpassing the ground truth reference solutions with PerfCodeGen using GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Additionally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing code quality across a range of open LLMs of varying sizes including Phi-3-mini, Llama 3 8B, Mixtral 8x7B, Command R, and Llama 3 70B.

Logs are imperative in the development and maintenance process of many software systems. They record detailed runtime information that allows developers and support engineers to monitor their systems and dissect anomalous behaviors and errors. The increasing scale and complexity of modern software systems, however, make the volume of logs explodes. In many cases, the traditional way of manual log inspection becomes impractical. Many recent studies, as well as industrial tools, resort to powerful text search and machine learning-based analytics solutions. Due to the unstructured nature of logs, a first crucial step is to parse log messages into structured data for subsequent analysis. In recent years, automated log parsing has been widely studied in both academia and industry, producing a series of log parsers by different techniques. To better understand the characteristics of these log parsers, in this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation study on automated log parsing and further release the tools and benchmarks for easy reuse. More specifically, we evaluate 13 log parsers on a total of 16 log datasets spanning distributed systems, supercomputers, operating systems, mobile systems, server applications, and standalone software. We report the benchmarking results in terms of accuracy, robustness, and efficiency, which are of practical importance when deploying automated log parsing in production. We also share the success stories and lessons learned in an industrial application at Huawei. We believe that our work could serve as the basis and provide valuable guidance to future research and deployment of automated log parsing.

In Open Source Software, the source code and any other resources available in a project can be viewed or reused by anyone subject to often permissive licensing restrictions. In contrast to some studies of dependency-based reuse supported via package managers, no studies of OSS-wide copy-based reuse exist. This dataset seeks to encourage the studies of OSS-wide copy-based reuse by providing copying activity data that captures whole-file reuse in nearly all OSS. To accomplish that, we develop approaches to detect copy-based reuse by developing an efficient algorithm that exploits World of Code infrastructure: a curated and cross referenced collection of nearly all open source repositories. We expect this data to enable future research and tool development that support such reuse and minimize associated risks.

Agents, as user-centric tools, are increasingly deployed for human task delegation, assisting with a broad spectrum of requests by generating thoughts, engaging with user proxies, and producing action plans. However, agents based on large language models (LLMs) often face substantial planning latency due to two primary factors: the efficiency limitations of the underlying LLMs due to their large size and high demand, and the structural complexity of the agents due to the extensive generation of intermediate thoughts to produce the final output. Given that inefficiency in service provision can undermine the value of automation for users, this paper presents a human-centered efficient agent planning method -- Interactive Speculative Planning -- aiming at enhancing the efficiency of agent planning through both system design and human-AI interaction. Our approach advocates for the co-design of the agent system and user interface, underscoring the importance of an agent system that can fluidly manage user interactions and interruptions. By integrating human interruptions as a fundamental component of the system, we not only make it more user-centric but also expedite the entire process by leveraging human-in-the-loop interactions to provide accurate intermediate steps. Code and data will be released.

We investigate an emerging setup in which a small, on-device language model (LM) with access to local data communicates with a frontier, cloud-hosted LM to solve real-world tasks involving financial, medical, and scientific reasoning over long documents. Can a local-remote collaboration reduce cloud inference costs while preserving quality? First, we consider a naive collaboration protocol where the local and remote models simply chat back and forth. Because only the local model reads the full context, this protocol achieves a 30.4x reduction in remote costs, but recovers only 87% of the performance of the frontier model. We identify two key limitations of this protocol: the local model struggles to (1) follow the remote model's multi-step instructions and (2) reason over long contexts. Motivated by these observations, we study an extension of this protocol, coined MinionS, in which the remote model decomposes the task into easier subtasks over shorter chunks of the document, that are executed locally in parallel. MinionS reduces costs by 5.7x on average while recovering 97.9% of the performance of the remote model alone. Our analysis reveals several key design choices that influence the trade-off between cost and performance in local-remote systems.

State-of-art NPUs are typically architected as a self-contained sub-system with multiple heterogeneous hardware computing modules, and a dataflow-driven programming model. There lacks well-established methodology and tools in the industry to evaluate and compare the performance of NPUs from different architectures. We present an event-based performance modeling framework, VPU-EM, targeting scalable performance evaluation of modern NPUs across diversified AI workloads. The framework adopts high-level event-based system-simulation methodology to abstract away design details for speed, while maintaining hardware pipelining, concurrency and interaction with software task scheduling. It is natively developed in Python and built to interface directly with AI frameworks such as Tensorflow, PyTorch, ONNX and OpenVINO, linking various in-house NPU graph compilers to achieve optimized full model performance. Furthermore, VPU-EM also provides the capability to model power characteristics of NPU in Power-EM mode to enable joint performance/power analysis. Using VPU-EM, we conduct performance/power analysis of models from representative neural network architecture. We demonstrate that even though this framework is developed for Intel VPU, an Intel in-house NPU IP technology, the methodology can be generalized for analysis of modern NPUs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in serving end-users with human-like intelligence. However, LLMs demand high computational resources, making it challenging to deploy them to satisfy various performance objectives, such as meeting the resource constraints on edge devices close to end-users or achieving high accuracy with ample resources. In this paper, we introduce CE-CoLLM, a novel cloud-edge collaboration framework that supports efficient and adaptive LLM inference for end-users at the edge with two modes, (1) low-latency edge standalone inference and (2) highly accurate cloud-edge collaborative inference. First, we show that the inherent high communication costs for transmitting LLM contextual information between the edge and cloud dominate the overall latency, making it inefficient and costly to deploy LLMs using cloud-edge collaboration. Second, we propose several critical techniques to address this challenge, including early-exit mechanism, cloud context manager, and quantization in cloud-edge collaboration to enable not only low-latency standalone edge inference but also efficient and adaptive cloud-edge collaborative inference for LLMs. Third, we perform comprehensive experimental analysis, which demonstrates that CE-CoLLM significantly reduces inference time by up to 13.81% and cloud computation costs by up to 84.55% compared to the popular cloud-based LLM deployment, while maintaining comparable model accuracy. The proposed approach effectively shifts the computational load to the edge, reduces the communication overhead, scales efficiently with multiple edge clients, and provides reliable LLM deployment using cloud-edge collaboration.