arXiv AI

Spike-Aware INT8 Execution for Spiking Language Models on Commodity CPUs

arXiv AI
Oct 12

NeuronSpark: Selective Spiking State Space Models with Adaptive Computation for Language Modeling

NeuronSpark is a self‑attention‑free language model that uses input‑dependent spiking membrane dynamics, allowing each neuron’s decay rate, gain, and firing threshold to adapt to the current token. This selective spiking approach enables billion‑parameter pretraining from random initialization without relying on backbone transfer, conversion, or distillation, achieving competitive zero‑shot performance and a fast–slow hierarchy. On a 1.1B‑parameter, 2.1B‑token training run, NeuronSpark attains a 40.0 eight‑task zero‑shot average, surpasses comparable‑budget Pythia/Mamba checkpoints, and demonstrates significant energy and cycle reductions on FPGA implementations.

By Zhengzheng Tang
arXiv AI
Sep 23

SPECTRA: Adaptive Execution of Speculative Decoding on a Runtime-Reconfigurable Tiled Architecture

The paper introduces SPECTRA, a runtime‑reconfigurable tiled architecture designed to accelerate speculative decoding for large language models on edge devices. SPECTRA adapts its compute engine within each tile between systolic GEMM execution and vector‑lane GEMV execution, while dynamically adjusting tile count, kernel partitioning, and communication patterns across tiles. Experiments on a 20‑tile FPGA prototype demonstrate up to a 2.09× speedup from tile‑level reconfiguration and an additional 1.25× improvement from system‑level adaptability compared to fixed designs.

By Gabriele Tombesi, William Baisi, Je Yang, Elisavet Lydia Alvanaki, Kevin Lee, Michael Lippe, Biruk Seyoum, Luca P. Carloni
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

STAPLE: Static Sparse Upcycling of Pretrained Checkpoints via Embedding Modules

STAPLE is a method that integrates static sparse memory into pretrained language models by adding token‑indexed embeddings as a residual pathway while preserving the original feed‑forward network. On the OLMo‑2 1B and 7B models, STAPLE outperforms dense training and other static sparse baselines, improving benchmark scores by up to 4.27 points and achieving faster decoding with less GPU memory and energy usage. The approach demonstrates that large pretrained models can be expanded efficiently without costly sparse pretraining from scratch.

By Ranajoy Sadhukhan, Euijin Hong, Sheng Cao, Zechun Liu, Shuowei Jin, Sha Li, Changlong Yu, Xin Liu, Qin Lu, Zhenyu Shi, Priyanka Nigam, Beidi Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

Flash-dLLM: IO-Aware KV Caching and Parallel Decoding for Fast, Memory-Efficient Diffusion LLMs

Flash-dLLM is a training‑free inference acceleration framework that improves the speed and memory efficiency of Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs). It tackles GPU memory I/O bottlenecks by introducing an I/O‑aware fused KV‑cache kernel and then employs a draft‑and‑verify decoding strategy that uses the dLLM itself as both drafter and verifier. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code‑generation tasks show Flash‑dLLM outperforms existing acceleration methods, achieving up to 11.0× speedups over the Elastic‑Cache baseline.

By Quan Nguyen-Tri, Mukul Ranjan, Zhiqiang Shen
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Cascadia: Resident 975B MoE Inference on Eleven AI PCs

The paper introduces Cascadia, a resident inference system that runs the 975B‑parameter Inkling mixture‑of‑experts model across eleven Intel Core Ultra X7 358H AI PCs. It details a custom MoE engine that preserves routing rules, compresses graphs for OpenVINO, and coordinates FP16 expert computation with FP32 output restoration, enabling efficient deployment of six decoder layers per machine. Performance results show up to 60.29 aggregate decode tokens per second at 88 streams, with first‑token latency of 6.05 s at fifteen streams, and demonstrate that larger context budgets recover embedded code while maintaining bounded latency.

By Tate Berenbaum (Not Community Labs Inc.), Matias Parij (Not Community Labs Inc.), Muthaiah Venkatachalam (Intel Corporation)