arXiv AI

NetKV: Network-Aware Decode Instance Selection for Disaggregated LLM Inference

arXiv:2606. 03910v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Disaggregated LLM inference forces the KV cache to traverse the datacenter network before decoding begins, so transfer time enters directly into the Time to First Token (TTFT) budget.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

GroupKV: Hierarchical KV Cache Management for Long-Context Diffusion LLM Inference

GroupKV is a lightweight hierarchical KV cache management system designed for long‑context diffusion large language model (dLLM) inference. It partitions the context into contiguous groups and uses coarse‑to‑fine sparse selection, cross‑layer consistency for predictive prefetching, and a staleness correction mechanism to keep the cache coherent amid dynamic KV updates. The approach also incorporates streaming prefill to lower peak memory usage, achieving up to 48× longer serviceable context, 3.73× faster inference in offload‑based settings, and competitive task accuracy.

By Jinhao Wang, Zhexin Hu, Kangjie Zhou, Xin Zhou, Fangfang Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Building py-kvcache: A Performance Characterization of External KV Caching for vLLM with NVMe SSDs

The paper presents py‑kvcache, a new KV offload connector for vLLM that uses asynchronous direct I/O, bounded shared staging, and scheduler‑aware preloading to improve external KV caching performance on NVMe SSDs. Experiments across synthetic workloads, long‑context benchmarks, and production traces show that py‑kvcache can load 80k‑token prefixes 2.0× faster than LMCache, with preloading contributing an additional 1.34× speedup, and achieves overall performance within 4% of native vLLM KV Offload. The study highlights that cache effectiveness depends on transfer granularity, intermediate memory use, and scheduling timing rather than just device bandwidth, indicating that external KV caching should be considered a setup‑specific admission decision.

By Joseph Kanichai, Tiziano De Matteis, Animesh Trivedi
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
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
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Elastic KV Cache for LLM Serving:A Working Reclamation Mechanism, and Why Chunked Prefill Already Closes the Gap

The paper introduces an elastic key‑value (KV) cache for large language model (LLM) serving that dynamically reclaims a pre‑allocated reserve during decode‑heavy phases and restores it before prefill, using a userspace CUDA virtual‑memory trick that requires no driver changes. The authors implement this mechanism, test it under realistic workloads, and find that it offers only marginal benefits—about a 1 % difference in time‑to‑first‑token for large prefill chunks—and that simpler strategies such as lowering the maximum batch size can achieve similar results. The study also notes that the reserve’s impact diminishes with higher tensor‑parallelism levels. whyItMatters":"The work demonstrates that a dynamic KV cache reclamation strategy can be implemented without driver patches and that its practical benefits are limited, guiding future LLM serving optimizations toward simpler approaches."

By Sathishkumar Sivashanmugam
arXiv AI
Sep 16

Calibrate, Then Route: A Measured Study of Learned Request Routing for Disaggregated LLM Serving

The paper evaluates a learned request‑routing policy for disaggregated large‑language‑model serving, where compute‑heavy prefill and memory‑heavy decode stages run on separate GPU pools. Using a discrete‑event simulator and real NVIDIA A40 GPUs, the calibrated router—leveraging prompt length, predicted output length, KV‑cache pressure, and SLO class—outperforms round‑robin, least‑loaded, and length‑based heuristics, achieving the highest mean goodput (0.864) and lowest variance across three mixed, bursty arrival traces. Hardware calibration proves critical, providing a 4.5‑point goodput boost and roughly 40 % of the tail‑latency advantage, and the learned router can match round‑robin performance with one fewer GPU in certain scenarios.

By Srikanta Datta Tumkur, Jay Iyer, Mehar Simhadri, Sai Pavan Kumar, Sai Kapil Kumar, Ramesh Nampelly