arXiv AI

Does Mixture-of-Experts Actually Help Inference on Consumer and Edge Hardware? An Empirical Study

arXiv:2606. 21428v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models are often described as ideal for resource-constrained inference.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Cacheable by Design? Training Mixture-of-Experts Routers for Locality Against the Edge Memory-Bandwidth Wall: A Pre-Registered Negative Result with a Systems Measurement Study

The paper investigates whether training Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) routers can improve memory‑bandwidth locality on consumer GPUs. Using a new zero‑surgery telemetry tool, the authors measure that a large Qwen3‑235B model is bottlenecked by disk‑based expert access, and that an LRU cache can serve a majority of requests. They pre‑register experiments training 137 M‑parameter MoE models with locality‑aware losses, finding that while cache misses can drop up to 60 % (99 % static‑pin hit rate), every configuration fails to meet a strict 1 % perplexity threshold, indicating a tight coupling between cache efficiency and model quality.

By Shriniwas Ramesh Suram
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 18

Cacheable by Design? Training Mixture-of-Experts Routers for Locality Against the Edge Memory-Bandwidth Wall: A Pre-Registered Negative Result with a Systems Measurement Study

Serving a 235B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model on a single 8 GB GPU is bottlenecked not by compute but by memory bandwidth: decode must stream each token's active experts from whichever tier holds them, and on consumer hardware most experts sit on an SSD far slower than RAM. We quantify this bandwidth wall on Qwen3-235B (Q4_K_M, 134 GB): measured decode is 0.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

The Other Half of the Memory Wall: Serving 35B MoEs from SSD with Trained Routing Prediction

The paper introduces Edge0, a streaming mixture‑of‑experts (MoE) inference engine that enables a 35‑billion‑parameter MoE model to run on consumer hardware by predicting routing decisions one token ahead. Edge0 uses a per‑layer prerouter to prefetch the necessary experts from SSD, and an unmerged recovery LoRA trained on the student path to recover quality lost to 4‑bit quantization and routing replacement. On a single 24‑GB machine, Edge0 serves the 35B MoE at 20 tokens per second while keeping peak active memory below 3 GiB, achieving performance close to its fp16 teacher across five public benchmarks.

By Yu Lin, Yiming Wang, Runyuan Cai, Hanze Liu, Xiaodong Zeng
arXiv AI
6d ago

Energy Efficiency of Locally Deployed LLMs: A Preliminary Quantitative GPU Power Benchmark on Consumer Hardware

The paper reports a reproducible GPU power benchmark for 18 open‑source LLMs (0.5B–7B parameters) run on a single consumer RTX 4060ti GPU using the Ollama inference engine. Energy metrics such as mean/peak power, total energy per prompt, energy per output token, and throughput were measured, revealing that model architecture and quantization strategy, rather than parameter count alone, drive energy efficiency. The most efficient models were qwen2.5:0.5b and tinyllama:1.1b, while the 7B‑Mistral model consumed up to 8.6× more energy per token, and qwen3.5:0.8b(on) showed unusually high per‑prompt energy due to extended internal reasoning.

By Philipp M. Z\"ahl, Elja Dalipaj, Anika Hennig, Timon Bayer
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

FluxMoE: Decoupling Expert Residency for High-Performance MoE Serving

FluxMoE introduces an expert paging system that decouples Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model experts from permanent GPU residency, allowing dynamic adaptation to available memory. By combining PagedTensor, a bandwidth‑balanced memory hierarchy, and a budget‑aware residency planner, FluxMoE streams expert weights on demand while keeping computations on GPUs. Experiments on GLM‑4.5 and Mixtral‑8×7B‑Instruct show significant throughput gains and reduced time‑per‑output‑token compared to existing inference engines, without compromising model quality.

By Qingxiu Liu, Yongchao He, Runhan Jiang, Zion Wang, Bohan Zhao, Mi Zhang, Patrick P. C. Lee