arXiv Computation and Language

Budget-Aware Compression Pipeline for Single-GPU LLM Inference: Methods, Trade-offs, and Coupling Effects

The paper presents a budget‑aware compression pipeline for deploying 70B‑parameter language models on a single NVIDIA GPU. It examines how pruning, quantization, and KV‑cache compression interact, showing that layer‑wise pruning improves weight quantization robustness and that KV‑cache sparsification complements INT8 KV quantization without harming decoding speed. Using these insights, the authors compressed a 70B model to ~33 GB, achieving ~57 tokens/s on 10k‑token prompts on an A40 while maintaining accuracy within 5% on standard benchmarks.

arXiv AI
Oct 5

Hardware-Native Joint Sparse-Quantization for Trillion-Scale Mixture-of-Experts

The paper introduces a hardware-software co‑design framework that compresses Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) model weights into low‑precision, hardware‑native sparse representations, enabling efficient execution on Sparse Tensor Cores (SpTCs). By relaxing discrete support selection through continuous reparameterization, the method jointly optimizes quantized weights and supports a router‑weighted reconstruction objective, achieving up to 4.35 percentage‑point gains in joint sparse‑quantization accuracy while retaining 96.09% of the original model’s performance. A custom grouped sparse GEMM kernel further boosts inference speed, outperforming NVIDIA’s baseline by up to 1.65× and reducing latency by up to 4.03× on B200 GPUs.

By Kwanhee Lee, Namhoon Lee, Dan Alistarh
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Oct 13

MultiAlloc: Budget-Aware Precision Allocation for KV Cache Quantization

MultiAlloc is a profiling‑guided framework that allocates limited quantization resources between layer‑wise precision enhancement and token‑wise preservation for KV cache quantization in large language models. By using lightweight offline profiling to assess layer sensitivity and token importance, it automatically derives an effective precision allocation strategy that satisfies a fixed memory budget without online search. Experiments on reasoning and long‑context benchmarks show that MultiAlloc consistently outperforms existing layer‑wise, token‑wise, and multi‑granularity quantization methods across models such as Mistral, Llama, DeepSeek‑Qwen, and QwQ.

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 Machine Learning
Sep 16

LLM Inference in a Flash!

The paper "LLM Inference in a Flash!" proposes an integer‑only quantization scheme and a dictionary‑based KV cache compression technique to enable large language model inference on compute‑in‑flash (CIF) devices. By eliminating floating‑point operations and reducing KV cache traffic through sparse dictionary coding, the authors achieve minimal accuracy loss while cutting dynamic KV cache traffic by 15× on Llama‑3.1‑8B and Qwen‑2.5‑7B models.

By Sebastian Zhao, Minseo Kim, Coleman Hooper, Luca Manolache, Michael W. Mahoney, Yakun Sophia Shao, Kurt Keutzer, Amir Gholami
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

Evaluating the Applicability of LLM Inference Optimizations on Apple Silicon

The paper investigates how well common large‑language‑model (LLM) inference optimizations perform on Apple Silicon compared to server‑class NVIDIA GPUs. Four optimization families—KV‑cache pruning, speculative decoding, ported GPU kernels, and post‑training quantization—are evaluated on four Apple machines under a single‑request decode workload, with matched RTX 4090 comparisons where possible. Results show that KV‑cache pruning can boost Apple throughput up to 1.75×, while speculative decoding actually reduces throughput on Apple; CUDA kernel designs transfer only partially, and quantization gains vary by machine, indicating that speedups depend on the specific technique, runtime, hardware, and workload regime.

By Kyrylo Yemets, Andrii Yaroshevych, Victor Muryn, Ostap Khomenko, Pavlo Kryven, Maksym Kmet, Maksym Shamrai, Mariya Hirna