arXiv AI

Where Should Optimizer State Live? Tiered State Allocation for Memory-Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Training

arXiv:2607. 19058v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizer state is the largest single line item in the memory budget of mixture-of-experts (MoE) training: on a 6.

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 Machine Learning
4d ago

Scaling Zero-Order Pretraining through Model Sharding

arXiv:2609.37899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zero-order optimization (ZO) trains without backpropagation, making it relevant to forward-only hardware and non-differentiable loss, but its gradient...

By Francois Chaubard, Mykel J. Kochenderfer, Chris R\'e
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Baseline Shape Decides the Verdict: A Controlled Re-Examination of Ternary Language Models at 60K Parameters

The study re‑examines a reported advantage of a routed ternary (1.58‑bit) language model over a full‑precision transformer at 60K parameters. By running controlled experiments with multiple seeds and a fixed training recipe, the authors find that the apparent benefit largely stems from the choice of baseline model shape rather than the ternary architecture itself. While the routed model does outperform other shapes at a larger 130M‑byte budget, its advantage diminishes when a plain gated diagonal‑SSM block is used, and the ternary penalty varies with architecture and quantization details.

By Gautam Veldanda
arXiv AI
Sep 17

The Other Half of the Memory Wall: Serving 35B MoEs from SSD with Trained Routing Prediction

The paper introduces Edge0, a streaming mixture‑of‑experts (MoE) inference engine that enables a 35‑billion‑parameter MoE model to run on consumer hardware by predicting routing decisions one token ahead. Edge0 uses a per‑layer prerouter to prefetch the necessary experts from SSD, and an unmerged recovery LoRA trained on the student path to recover quality lost to 4‑bit quantization and routing replacement. On a single 24‑GB machine, Edge0 serves the 35B MoE at 20 tokens per second while keeping peak active memory below 3 GiB, achieving performance close to its fp16 teacher across five public benchmarks.

By Yu Lin, Yiming Wang, Runyuan Cai, Hanze Liu, Xiaodong Zeng
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.