arXiv AI

Pushing CPU Speech Synthesis to the Wall: Extreme Inference Tuning under Serverless Architecture and Billing

The paper presents a billing‑aware neural text‑to‑speech system for serverless CPUs, focusing on minimizing CPU‑seconds and GB‑seconds rather than just throughput or latency. By using request‑sized concurrent inference and a reclaimable instance lifecycle, the system limits per‑request CPU parallelism and releases idle memory while keeping the server process alive. On the Kokoro‑82M benchmark, it achieves 2.71 audio‑seconds per CPU‑second versus 0.89 with ONNX Runtime, cuts cost per audio‑hour from $0.0631 to $0.0153, and reduces idle billed memory from 8.7 GB to 1.33 GB, with faster restoration times.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Does per-frame early exit pay? A compute-matched study of dynamic depth for on-device speech enhancement

The paper investigates whether per‑frame early exit can improve compute‑matched performance for on‑device speech enhancement. By supervising every intermediate depth of a causal model and fine‑tuning output heads, the authors produce a family of static models that are more Pareto‑efficient than those trained from scratch, achieving up to 0.11 higher PESQ for equivalent compute and matching the best PESQ at 30% less compute. After int8 quantization, the dynamic enhancer performs on the same latency‑quality frontier as static models on an STM32N6 microcontroller, with the policy execution adding only 26 µs per frame and a 2.2% latency overhead from graph splitting.

By Cl\'ement Laroche, Riccardo Miccini
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

GEPARD - Generative, Prosody-aware, Autoregressive text-to-speech model for Realtime Dialogue

GEPARD is a streaming text‑to‑speech model that uses a standard large language model backbone to generate speech autoregressively, decoding audio with an FSQ‑based neural codec. It streams audio chunk‑by‑chunk as text arrives, achieving a real‑time factor of about 0.067 and an aggregate speedup of roughly 204× on a single GPU with 256 concurrent streams. The design keeps all complex auxiliary mechanisms outside the decode loop, enabling deployment with a standard LLM engine (vLLM) without kernel modifications.

By Denis Pavlov, Ulanbek Abdurazakov, Nursultan Bakashov
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Threshold-Based Exclusive Batching for LLM Inference

arXiv:2606. 00516v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixed batching (MB)--interleaving prefill and decode in a single batch--has become the standard scheduling strategy for large language model (LLM) inference due to its efficiency in maximizing compute and memory utilization.

By Weifang Zhang, Yuzhou Nie, Bowen Pang, Guangrui Ma, Shining Wu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 10

Cascade: Exploiting SLO-Aware latency budget for fair and high goodput LLM inference serving

arXiv:2608. 06557v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The reasoning and agentic capabilities of large language models have expanded the range of applications they support, from short interactive exchanges to long, compute-heavy requests.

By Muhammad Adnan, Rohan Mahapatra, Prashant J. Nair, Daniel Berger, Pantea Zardoshti, Rodrigo Fonseca, Esha Choukse
arXiv AI
Sep 3

HeadWiseKV: Budgeted Per-Head Cache Residency for Hybrid Long-Context Language Models

HeadWiseKV is a training‑free framework that compresses the residual global key–value caches of hybrid long‑context language models by assigning each physical KV head a static, multilevel history window. It formulates cache allocation as a restricted operational rate–distortion problem and uses the SeqCalib algorithm to generate per‑head residency policies that account for interactions across layers. In evaluations on four hybrid models, HeadWiseKV preserves near‑full‑KV quality while reducing peak device memory usage by 8.59% at a 112K context length and extending the largest verified context from 114K to 161K.

By Renjie Xie, Juncheng Yang, Aoting Hu, Mingxi Zhang, Liyao Wu, Zheheng Hong, Wei Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

Tangram: Unlocking Non-Uniform KV Cache Compression for Efficient Multi-turn LLM Serving

arXiv:2606. 06302v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-turn LLM serving accumulates dialogue history whose Key-Value (KV) cache grows with every turn and every user, quickly exceeding the model weights themselves and making memory -- not compute -- the binding constraint on throughput.

By Hyungmin Kim, Minsoo Kim, Hongseok Kim, Jungwook Choi