arXiv AI

Pushing the Envelope of LLM Inference with Ultra-Low-Bit Quantized Models

The paper reports the development of 2‑bit microkernels for CPUs and mixed‑precision 2‑bit kernels for Intel Xe2 GPUs, achieving near‑roofline performance. Integrated into LLM inference pipelines, these kernels deliver up to 7× speedup over 16‑bit inference on CPUs and 6.7× on GPUs, surpassing the current state‑of‑the‑art bitnet.cpp runtime by 2.2×. The work demonstrates that ultra‑low‑bit LLM models can be deployed efficiently, offering significant gains in latency, memory, throughput, and energy consumption.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 17

PolyQ: Codesigning End-to-End Quantization Framework for Scalable Edge CPU LLM Inference

arXiv:2607. 14618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: CPUs are the most universal target for on-device LLM inference, but existing low-bit quantization methods offer either coarse operating points or fine-grained mixed precision that is difficult to execute efficiently on CPUs.

By Hyunwoo Oh, Suyeon Jang, Hanning Chen, KyungIn Nam, Sanggeon Yun, Ryozo Masukawa, Mohsen Imani
arXiv AI
Jun 30

KernelSight-LM: A Kernel-Level LLM Inference Simulator

arXiv:2606. 28565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) move into production serving, practitioners must rapidly evaluate inference performance across diverse hardware, models, and serving parameters to meet cost and latency targets.

By Xiteng Yao, Taeho Kim, Hengzhi Pei, Xinle Liu, Kyle Ulrich, Leonard Lausen, Ashish Khetan, Xiang Song, George Karypis, Martin Herbordt
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

LeanStream: A Speculate-and-Refine Streaming Framework for Efficient on-Device LLM Inference

LeanStream introduces a speculate‑and‑refine streaming framework that enables efficient on‑device inference of large language models by progressively refining computation, loading, and cache‑retention priorities using partial GPU results. This approach allows fine‑grained overlap between GPU execution and storage I/O, avoiding the trade‑offs of existing systems that serialize execution or incur redundant weight fetches. Implemented on mobile and embedded platforms, LeanStream reduces memory usage by 4.8× to 7.5× compared to prior work while improving token generation throughput by 1.6× to 2.1×.

By Renyuan Liu (Richard), Yuyang Leng (Richard), Kaiyan Liu (Richard), Yuzhou Zhong (Richard), Shaohan Hu (Richard), Chun-Fu (Richard), Chen, Peijun Zhao, Heechul Yun, Shuochao Yao
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

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