Inference efficiency

Quantization, distillation, pruning and serving work aimed at the same accuracy for less memory, latency and money.

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arXiv AI
Sep 2

Drift-Aware LLM Routing with Sparse Contexts and Shared Budgets

The paper introduces Drift‑Aware Sparse Routing (DRS), a method for routing requests in a multi‑model language service while respecting compute, latency, memory, or cost budgets. DRS estimates reward and resource use from a rolling audit window, routes using pessimistic reward and optimistic cost estimates, updates resource shadow prices online, and applies a hard meter before commitment. The authors provide theoretical regret bounds that separate control from statistics, showing how the method adapts to non‑stationary prompt distributions and model changes.

By Cheung Hao Lee, Patrick Wong
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Triple-Bottom-Line Sustainability of Language Models for Edge AI: A Comparison Between SLMs and Quantized LLMs

The paper compares the sustainability of native small language models (SLMs) versus large language models (LLMs) compressed via post‑training quantization for edge AI deployment. Using a Holistic Sustainability Score (HSS) that balances capability, efficiency, and safety, the study evaluates 30 configurations across five benchmarks, latency, VRAM, energy, and harmful‑prompt robustness. Results show that optimized quantized LLMs can outperform SLMs overall, while SLMs remain competitive due to lower resource demands, challenging the assumption that native SLMs are always the most sustainable choice.

By Jainil Dharmil Shah
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Instella-MoE Technical Report

Instella‑MoE is a fully open Mixture‑of‑Experts language model with 16 billion total parameters and 2.8 billion active parameters per token, trained from scratch on AMD Instinct GPUs. It incorporates a sparsely activated MoE design with Gated Multi‑head Latent Attention and FarSkip‑Collective connectivity, and follows a multi‑stage pipeline that includes pre‑training, long‑context extension, supervised fine‑tuning, direct preference optimization, and reinforcement learning with Multi‑Teacher On‑Policy Distillation. The model achieves an average score of 76.7 on pre‑training benchmarks and 73.2 on instruction‑following, reasoning, math, coding, and chat benchmarks, outperforming comparable fully open and open‑weight models, and its full training pipeline, weights, and code are released for reproducibility.

By Jiang Liu, Sudhanshu Ranjan, Prakamya Mishra, Yonatan Dukler, Gowtham Ramesh, Jialian Wu, Ximeng Sun, Wen Xie, Chaojun Hou, Vikram Appia, Zhenyu Gu, Zicheng Liu, Emad Barsoum
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

Conditional Flow Matching for ML-Based Inverse Design Problems

The paper introduces Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) for engineering inverse design, comparing it to conditional diffusion models and cGANs on EngiBench structural and thermal benchmarks. CFM outperforms the baselines in cumulative and final optimality gaps, mean volume‑fraction deviation, and throughput, achieving up to 66× faster sample generation with fewer network evaluations. The study demonstrates CFM’s effectiveness as a warm‑start generator for gradient‑based refinement in PDE‑constrained design problems.

By Juliana Felder, Milad Habibi, Soheyl Massoudi, Mark Fuge
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Position Matters: Feature Inversion Attacks in ViT Split Inference with Token Reduction and Shuffling

The paper investigates privacy risks in Vision Transformer (ViT) split‑inference systems that use token reduction and token shuffling to lower computation and communication costs. It shows that even after token shuffling, transmitted token embeddings still contain enough positional information for a new attack, the Spatially Aligned Reconstruction Attack (SARA), which predicts token positions, restores spatial layout, fills missing embeddings with a masked autoencoder, and reconstructs the input image. While token reduction offers stronger protection, significant leakage remains when retained tokens preserve semantic and positional cues, and the authors propose a lightweight edge‑side defense that removes positional embeddings and adapts transformer blocks via knowledge distillation to reduce SARA’s effectiveness without harming downstream accuracy.

By Stefano Leggio, Giulio Rossolini, Alessandro Biondi
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Causal Evidentiary Governance for High-Risk Machine Learning Systems

The paper proposes Causal Evidentiary Governance (CEG), a framework that requires regulated institutions to maintain a versioned directed acyclic graph (DAG) separating allowable from disallowed causal pathways in high‑risk machine learning systems. CEG introduces the Causal Harm Rate to quantify prediction variation due to disallowed pathways and pairs each decision with a signed Decision‑Evidence Packet (DEP) that cryptographically links the prediction to the DAG and path‑specific attributions, enabling efficient inclusion proofs via a Merkle tree. Empirical validation on synthetic credit data and the German Credit dataset demonstrates that CEG more clearly isolates causal effects than traditional fairness metrics and that a proof‑of‑concept implementation shows operational feasibility with manageable performance tradeoffs.

By Samah Kareem, Bar{\i}\c{s} \c{C}elikta\c{s}
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 2

Hybrid Event Frame Sensors: Modeling, Calibration, and Simulation

Hybrid event-frame sensors combine an Event Vision Sensor (EVS) and an Active Pixel Sensor (APS) on a single chip, offering high dynamic range, low latency, and rich spatial intensity data. The paper introduces a unified statistics-based noise model that captures photon shot noise, dark current noise, fixed-pattern noise, and quantization noise for both APS and EVS pixels, and links EVS noise to illumination and dark current. It also presents a calibration pipeline to estimate these noise parameters from real data and proposes H-ESIM, a simulator that generates realistic RAW frames and events, validated on two hybrid sensors for tasks such as video frame interpolation and deblurring.

By Yunfan Lu, Nico Messikommer, Xiaogang Xu, Liming Chen, Yuhan Chen, Nikola Zubic, Davide Scaramuzza, Hui Xiong
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Solaris: Towards Interfaces That Are Generated, Not Coded

arXiv:2609.00776v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Digital interfaces are traditionally implemented through intermediate representations such as code, requiring their appearance and behavior to be spe...

By Yuval Alaluf, Omri Avrahami, Guy Bukchin Leshem, Michal Geyer, Kfir Goldberg, Elad Richardson, Diego Alarc\'on, Alejandro Alvarez, Cole Garry, Anastasis Germanidis, Tenaya Goldsen, Corina Gurau, Robin Kahlow, Joel Kwartler, Kathleen Lewis, Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, Eugene McMahon, Thon Prom, Sarah Saltonstall-Wurm, Jamie Umpherson, Hudson Yeo
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Global Attention with Linear Complexity for Exascale Generative Data Assimilation in Earth System Prediction

The paper introduces STORM, a one‑stage generative AI framework that reformulates Earth system data assimilation as diffusion‑based Bayesian posterior sampling, replacing costly PDE ensemble forecasts with scalable AI inference. STORM employs a spatiotemporal transformer with a global‑attention algorithm that reduces computational complexity from quadratic to linear, enabling high‑resolution, long‑context modeling. The system scales to 74,400 GPUs on Frontier, achieving 96–99 % strong‑scaling efficiency and up to 6 ExaFLOPs sustained BF16 throughput, while supporting 32,768‑member ensembles for uncertainty quantification in just 34 seconds on 4,096 GPUs, and demonstrates improved hurricane tracking and climate reanalysis accuracy.

By Xiao Wang, Zezhong Zhang, Isaac Lyngaas, Hong-Jun Yoon, Jong-Youl Choi, Siming Liang, Janet Wang, Hristo G. Chipilski, Ashwin M. Aji, Feng Bao, Peter Jan van Leeuwen, Dan Lu, Guannan Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

Artificial Rosetta Stone: Constrained Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) Reconstruction of Symbolic Raga Sequences via Order-k Markov Models

arXiv:2609. 01064v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reconstructing a damaged musical fragment is an inverse problem: the observed sequence contains partial information, while a raga encodes constraints limiting allowable completions.

By Saanvi Raghavendran (Abstract Math Institute), Abhishek Bhattacharjee (Abstract Math Institute)
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Making Prospective Memory SLM-Shaped: Typed Intention Stores for Small-Model Agents

The paper introduces the Prospective Intention Store (PIS), a method that places lifecycle logic in code and confines language tasks to a typed action space, enabling small models to perform prospective memory tasks more effectively. Using PIS, a small model (DeepSeek-Chat) achieves 82.9% Set‑F1 on PM‑Bench, surpassing the previous best of 65.1%. On Gemma‑E2B, PIS boosts Set‑F1 from 4.2% (without a store) to 66.2%, and reaches 70.1% Set‑F1, outperforming retrospective memory approaches that max out at 54.4%.

By Jinqing Zhao, Chengcan Wu
arXiv AI
Sep 2

DiffHDR: Re-Exposing LDR Videos with Video Diffusion Models

arXiv:2604.06161v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Most digital videos are stored in 8-bit low dynamic range (LDR) formats, where much of the original high dynamic range (HDR) scene radiance i...

By Zhengming Yu, Li Ma, Mingming He, Leo Isikdogan, Yuancheng Xu, Dmitriy Smirnov, Pablo Salamanca, Dao Mi, Pablo Delgado, Ning Yu, Julien Philip, Xin Li, Wenping Wang, Paul Debevec