arXiv Machine Learning

HERALD: High-Throughput Block Diffusion LLM Serving via CPU-GPU Cooperative KV Cache Retrieval

arXiv:2606. 21633v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The KV cache dominates GPU memory in long-context LLM serving, crowding out batch capacity and leaving GPU compute idle.

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 AI
Aug 26

Serving Masked Diffusion LLMs: Characterization and Design Principles from Real Hardware

Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) promise faster text generation by denoising multiple tokens simultaneously, yet their real‑world serving behavior has been largely unexamined. Using LLaDA‑8B‑Instruct on a single NVIDIA H200 GPU, the study finds that request difficulty is discretized into 11 step‑count levels, short‑budget benchmarks underestimate serving variance, and only 24% of single‑request time is GPU computation, with batching mainly reducing CPU dispatch overhead. The authors also demonstrate that output quality remains stable across batch sizes and propose a batch‑timeout rule for synchronized batching under Poisson arrivals.

By Farhana Amin, Sabiha Afroz, Mona Moghadampanah, Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

The KV Cache Is the New Memory Wall

The paper argues that for large‑context autoregressive language‑model inference, memory bandwidth—specifically the Key‑Value (KV) cache—becomes the limiting resource rather than arithmetic throughput. It analytically derives how arithmetic intensity decays with context length for NVIDIA H100, NVIDIA B200, and AMD MI300X, identifies crossover points where KV traffic overtakes weight traffic, and evaluates representative techniques across five compression domains. The study finds a three‑regime behavior: below the crossover, weight traffic dominates and KV compression offers little benefit; beyond it, KV traffic dominates and compression methods trade quality for bandwidth, with paging and prefix sharing being lossless but capacity‑limited, while quantization and eviction directly reduce bandwidth at the cost of accuracy. whyItMatters":"The work provides a unified analytical framework and a standardized protocol that enable consistent comparison of KV‑compression techniques across hardware and workloads, guiding practitioners in selecting appropriate methods for long‑context inference."

By Tejinder Singh
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
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
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.