arXiv Machine Learning

Specter: Fast MoE Inference via Quantization-Enabled Multi-Step Speculative Offloading

Specter is an inference system for mixture-of-experts (MoE) models that uses quantization to enable speculative decoding and expert offloading. By running a lightweight quantized draft model on the device, Specter predicts future expert usage and pre‑organizes expert movement, reducing PCIe I/O bottlenecks. The approach yields an average 1.50× speedup (up to 1.88×) in time per output token compared to state‑of‑the‑art systems, making single‑GPU MoE inference more practical on commodity hardware.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 27

DraftExpert: Expansion-Aware Self-Speculative Decoding for End-Device MoE Inference

Large Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models are attractive for end-device deployment because only a small subset of experts is active per token, but their routed expert weights often exceed accelerator memory. We target latency-critical single-user settings where routed experts are staged on demand from CPU memory to a GPU or from Flash to a mobile NPU.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Dynamic Expert Quantization for Scalable Mixture-of-Experts Inference

Dynamic Expert Quantization (DynaExq) is a runtime-aware mixed-precision serving system designed for single‑GPU Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) inference under a hard high‑bandwidth memory (HBM) envelope. It treats the problem as an online, budget‑constrained precision allocation task, keeping the most frequently used experts at higher precision while relegating the rest to low‑precision fallbacks. By estimating expert hotness from router traces and asynchronously promoting or demoting experts, DynaExq maintains a fully materialized expert set during the forward pass, improving accuracy and throughput compared to static post‑training quantization and offloading/prefetch baselines. whyItMatters":"DynaExq enables efficient deployment of large MoE models on memory‑limited GPUs by dynamically allocating precision based on runtime expert usage, thereby reducing memory footprint and latency while boosting accuracy and throughput."

By Kexin Chu, Dawei Xiang, Zixu Shen, Yiwei Yang, Zecheng Liu, Wei Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

SpecQuant: Speculative Decoding with Multi-Parent Quantization for Adaptive LLM Inference

SpecQuant is a training‑free framework that merges speculative decoding with multi‑parent quantization to enable adaptive, efficient inference of large language models. It generates several quantized variants (INT4, FP8, FP16) from a single base model and routes queries to the appropriate variant based on predicted complexity, using lightweight models for simple tasks and full‑precision models for complex reasoning. Evaluations on Qwen2.5 models across MMLU, AlpacaEval, and GSM8K show 35‑43% speedups with less than 2% accuracy loss, facilitating practical on‑device LLM deployment without specialized infrastructure.

By Harish KB, Jagadeeswaran M, Pradheep P, Yuvanesh S, Sivakumar T
arXiv AI
Aug 18

S2-MoE: Enabling Efficient Self-Speculative Decoding for Mixture-of-Experts on Edge Devices

S2-MoE is a self‑speculative decoding framework designed to make Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) inference more efficient on edge devices. It reduces verification overhead by using routing‑aware adaptive speculative expansion, improves verification efficiency with reuse‑aware expert gating, and aligns draft and target execution through shared context. Implemented in llama.cpp, S2‑MoE delivers up to 5.3× speedup (≈2.0× on average) over standard autoregressive decoding across various MoE models and datasets on edge hardware.

By Haochen Huang, Shengxuan Qiu, Meng Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Efficient Mixture-of-Experts with Speculative Decoding via Expert Coactivation

The paper studies how the design of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) routers affects inference speed when combined with Speculative Decoding (SD). It shows that routers promoting high expert coactivation reduce memory transfer costs and improve runtime. By integrating a global load‑balancing loss, shared experts, a consistency loss, and an autoregressive expert selection mechanism, the authors achieve a 21% throughput gain over baseline MoEs while preserving accuracy.

By Kumari Nishu, Han-Byul Kim, Santosh Chilkunda, Maxwell Horton, Arnav Kundu, Mohammad Samragh, Lauren Hannah, Mohammad Sekhavat, Nikhil Bhendawade, Manuel Ciosici, Iman Mirzadeh, Keivan Alizadeh Vahid, David Harrison, Irina Belousova, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Minsik Cho
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)