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SubscribeHigh-Throughput Vector Similarity Search in Knowledge Graphs
There is an increasing adoption of machine learning for encoding data into vectors to serve online recommendation and search use cases. As a result, recent data management systems propose augmenting query processing with online vector similarity search. In this work, we explore vector similarity search in the context of Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Motivated by the tasks of finding related KG queries and entities for past KG query workloads, we focus on hybrid vector similarity search (hybrid queries for short) where part of the query corresponds to vector similarity search and part of the query corresponds to predicates over relational attributes associated with the underlying data vectors. For example, given past KG queries for a song entity, we want to construct new queries for new song entities whose vector representations are close to the vector representation of the entity in the past KG query. But entities in a KG also have non-vector attributes such as a song associated with an artist, a genre, and a release date. Therefore, suggested entities must also satisfy query predicates over non-vector attributes beyond a vector-based similarity predicate. While these tasks are central to KGs, our contributions are generally applicable to hybrid queries. In contrast to prior works that optimize online queries, we focus on enabling efficient batch processing of past hybrid query workloads. We present our system, HQI, for high-throughput batch processing of hybrid queries. We introduce a workload-aware vector data partitioning scheme to tailor the vector index layout to the given workload and describe a multi-query optimization technique to reduce the overhead of vector similarity computations. We evaluate our methods on industrial workloads and demonstrate that HQI yields a 31x improvement in throughput for finding related KG queries compared to existing hybrid query processing approaches.
High-Throughput Precision Phenotyping of Left Ventricular Hypertrophy with Cardiovascular Deep Learning
Left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) results from chronic remodeling caused by a broad range of systemic and cardiovascular disease including hypertension, aortic stenosis, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, and cardiac amyloidosis. Early detection and characterization of LVH can significantly impact patient care but is limited by under-recognition of hypertrophy, measurement error and variability, and difficulty differentiating etiologies of LVH. To overcome this challenge, we present EchoNet-LVH - a deep learning workflow that automatically quantifies ventricular hypertrophy with precision equal to human experts and predicts etiology of LVH. Trained on 28,201 echocardiogram videos, our model accurately measures intraventricular wall thickness (mean absolute error [MAE] 1.4mm, 95% CI 1.2-1.5mm), left ventricular diameter (MAE 2.4mm, 95% CI 2.2-2.6mm), and posterior wall thickness (MAE 1.2mm, 95% CI 1.1-1.3mm) and classifies cardiac amyloidosis (area under the curve of 0.83) and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (AUC 0.98) from other etiologies of LVH. In external datasets from independent domestic and international healthcare systems, EchoNet-LVH accurately quantified ventricular parameters (R2 of 0.96 and 0.90 respectively) and detected cardiac amyloidosis (AUC 0.79) and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (AUC 0.89) on the domestic external validation site. Leveraging measurements across multiple heart beats, our model can more accurately identify subtle changes in LV geometry and its causal etiologies. Compared to human experts, EchoNet-LVH is fully automated, allowing for reproducible, precise measurements, and lays the foundation for precision diagnosis of cardiac hypertrophy. As a resource to promote further innovation, we also make publicly available a large dataset of 23,212 annotated echocardiogram videos.
Hydragen: High-Throughput LLM Inference with Shared Prefixes
Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) are now deployed to hundreds of millions of users. LLM inference is commonly performed on batches of sequences that share a prefix, such as few-shot examples or a chatbot system prompt. Decoding in this large-batch setting can be bottlenecked by the attention operation, which reads large key-value (KV) caches from memory and computes inefficient matrix-vector products for every sequence in the batch. In this work, we introduce Hydragen, a hardware-aware exact implementation of attention with shared prefixes. Hydragen computes attention over the shared prefix and unique suffixes separately. This decomposition enables efficient prefix attention by batching queries together across sequences, reducing redundant memory reads and enabling the use of hardware-friendly matrix multiplications. Our method can improve end-to-end LLM throughput by up to 32x against competitive baselines, with speedup growing with the batch size and shared prefix length. Hydragen also enables the use of very long shared contexts: with a high batch size, increasing the prefix length from 1K to 16K tokens decreases Hydragen throughput by less than 15%, while the throughput of baselines drops by over 90%. Hydragen generalizes beyond simple prefix-suffix decomposition and can be applied to tree-based prompt sharing patterns, allowing us to further reduce inference time on competitive programming problems by 55%.
FlexGen: High-Throughput Generative Inference of Large Language Models with a Single GPU
The high computational and memory requirements of large language model (LLM) inference make it feasible only with multiple high-end accelerators. Motivated by the emerging demand for latency-insensitive tasks with batched processing, this paper initiates the study of high-throughput LLM inference using limited resources, such as a single commodity GPU. We present FlexGen, a high-throughput generation engine for running LLMs with limited GPU memory. FlexGen can be flexibly configured under various hardware resource constraints by aggregating memory and computation from the GPU, CPU, and disk. By solving a linear programming problem, it searches for efficient patterns to store and access tensors. FlexGen further compresses the weights and the attention cache to 4 bits with negligible accuracy loss. These techniques enable FlexGen to have a larger space of batch size choices and thus significantly increase maximum throughput. As a result, when running OPT-175B on a single 16GB GPU, FlexGen achieves significantly higher throughput compared to state-of-the-art offloading systems, reaching a generation throughput of 1 token/s for the first time with an effective batch size of 144. On the HELM benchmark, FlexGen can benchmark a 30B model with a 16GB GPU on 7 representative sub-scenarios in 21 hours. The code is available at https://github.com/FMInference/FlexGen
XR-NPE: High-Throughput Mixed-precision SIMD Neural Processing Engine for Extended Reality Perception Workloads
This work proposes XR-NPE, a high-throughput Mixed-precision SIMD Neural Processing Engine, designed for extended reality (XR) perception workloads like visual inertial odometry (VIO), object classification, and eye gaze extraction. XR-NPE is first to support FP4, Posit (4,1), Posit (8,0), and Posit (16,1) formats, with layer adaptive hybrid-algorithmic implementation supporting ultra-low bit precision to significantly reduce memory bandwidth requirements, and accompanied by quantization-aware training for minimal accuracy loss. The proposed Reconfigurable Mantissa Multiplication and Exponent processing Circuitry (RMMEC) reduces dark silicon in the SIMD MAC compute engine, assisted by selective power gating to reduce energy consumption, providing 2.85x improved arithmetic intensity. XR-NPE achieves a maximum operating frequency of 1.72 GHz, area 0.016 mm2 , and arithmetic intensity 14 pJ at CMOS 28nm, reducing 42% area, 38% power compared to the best of state-of-the-art MAC approaches. The proposed XR-NPE based AXI-enabled Matrix-multiplication co-processor consumes 1.4x fewer LUTs, 1.77x fewer FFs, and provides 1.2x better energy efficiency compared to SoTA accelerators on VCU129. The proposed co-processor provides 23% better energy efficiency and 4% better compute density for VIO workloads. XR-NPE establishes itself as a scalable, precision-adaptive compute engine for future resource-constrained XR devices. The complete set for codes for results reproducibility are released publicly, enabling designers and researchers to readily adopt and build upon them. https://github.com/mukullokhande99/XR-NPE.
DistZO2: High-Throughput and Memory-Efficient Zeroth-Order Fine-tuning LLMs with Distributed Parallel Computing
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) remains resource-intensive due to their sheer scale. While zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a memory-efficient alternative by eliminating backward passes, its application to multi-hundred-billion-parameter models is constrained by GPU memory and compute throughput. The ZO2 framework addresses the memory bottleneck by offloading model parameters to CPU memory and overlapping transformer block transfer with dual forward computation on a single GPU. However, ZO2 remains limited by its single-device execution and achieves modest throughput. In this work, we present DistZO2, a high-throughput, memory-efficient framework for distributed zeroth-order fine-tuning of LLMs. DistZO2 introduces three parallel strategies: (1) Perturbation Parallelism (PertP), which parallelizes the two perturbed forward passes across devices; (2) Distributed Data Parallelism (DDP), adapted to the scalar-gradient nature of ZO training; and (3) a unified 2D Parallelism design that combines PertP and DDP. To further mitigate communication bottlenecks introduced by parameter offloading, we propose a hardware-aware communication strategy that slices parameter blocks and redistributes them across GPUs via high-speed interconnects such as NVLink. DistZO2 scales zeroth-order fine-tuning to modern multi-GPU systems, preserving ZO2's memory efficiency while substantially improving training throughput. In our experiments on OPT-175B, DistZO2 achieves a 3x speedup over ZO2 with distributed computing. DistZO2's code has been open-sourced in https://github.com/liangyuwang/zo2.
Seesaw: High-throughput LLM Inference via Model Re-sharding
To improve the efficiency of distributed large language model (LLM) inference, various parallelization strategies, such as tensor and pipeline parallelism, have been proposed. However, the distinct computational characteristics inherent in the two stages of LLM inference-prefilling and decoding-render a single static parallelization strategy insufficient for the effective optimization of both stages. In this work, we present Seesaw, an LLM inference engine optimized for throughput-oriented tasks. The key idea behind Seesaw is dynamic model re-sharding, a technique that facilitates the dynamic reconfiguration of parallelization strategies across stages, thereby maximizing throughput at both phases. To mitigate re-sharding overhead and optimize computational efficiency, we employ tiered KV cache buffering and transition-minimizing scheduling. These approaches work synergistically to reduce the overhead caused by frequent stage transitions while ensuring maximum batching efficiency. Our evaluation demonstrates that Seesaw achieves a throughput increase of up to 1.78x (1.36x on average) compared to vLLM, the most widely used state-of-the-art LLM inference engine.
DeepSpeed-FastGen: High-throughput Text Generation for LLMs via MII and DeepSpeed-Inference
The deployment and scaling of large language models (LLMs) have become critical as they permeate various applications, demanding high-throughput and low-latency serving systems. Existing frameworks struggle to balance these requirements, especially for workloads with long prompts. This paper introduces DeepSpeed-FastGen, a system that employs Dynamic SplitFuse, a novel prompt and generation composition strategy, to deliver up to 2.3x higher effective throughput, 2x lower latency on average, and up to 3.7x lower (token-level) tail latency, compared to state-of-the-art systems like vLLM. We leverage a synergistic combination of DeepSpeed-MII and DeepSpeed-Inference to provide an efficient and easy-to-use serving system for LLMs. DeepSpeed-FastGen's advanced implementation supports a range of models and offers both non-persistent and persistent deployment options, catering to diverse user scenarios from interactive sessions to long-running applications. We present a detailed benchmarking methodology, analyze the performance through latency-throughput curves, and investigate scalability via load balancing. Our evaluations demonstrate substantial improvements in throughput and latency across various models and hardware configurations. We discuss our roadmap for future enhancements, including broader model support and new hardware backends. The DeepSpeed-FastGen code is readily available for community engagement and contribution.
ShadowKV: KV Cache in Shadows for High-Throughput Long-Context LLM Inference
With the widespread deployment of long-context large language models (LLMs), there has been a growing demand for efficient support of high-throughput inference. However, as the key-value (KV) cache expands with the sequence length, the increasing memory footprint and the need to access it for each token generation both result in low throughput when serving long-context LLMs. While various dynamic sparse attention methods have been proposed to speed up inference while maintaining generation quality, they either fail to sufficiently reduce GPU memory consumption or introduce significant decoding latency by offloading the KV cache to the CPU. We present ShadowKV, a high-throughput long-context LLM inference system that stores the low-rank key cache and offloads the value cache to reduce the memory footprint for larger batch sizes and longer sequences. To minimize decoding latency, ShadowKV employs an accurate KV selection strategy that reconstructs minimal sparse KV pairs on-the-fly. By evaluating ShadowKV on a broad range of benchmarks, including RULER, LongBench, and Needle In A Haystack, and models like Llama-3.1-8B, Llama-3-8B-1M, GLM-4-9B-1M, Yi-9B-200K, Phi-3-Mini-128K, and Qwen2-7B-128K, we demonstrate that it can support up to 6times larger batch sizes and boost throughput by up to 3.04times on an A100 GPU without sacrificing accuracy, even surpassing the performance achievable with infinite batch size under the assumption of infinite GPU memory. The code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/ShadowKV.
Polar Sparsity: High Throughput Batched LLM Inferencing with Scalable Contextual Sparsity
Accelerating large language model (LLM) inference is critical for real-world deployments requiring high throughput and low latency. Contextual sparsity, where each token dynamically activates only a small subset of the model parameters, shows promise but does not scale to large batch sizes due to union of active neurons quickly approaching dense computation. We introduce Polar Sparsity, highlighting a key shift in sparsity importance from MLP to Attention layers as we scale batch size and sequence length. While MLP layers become more compute-efficient under batching, their sparsity vanishes. In contrast, attention becomes increasingly more expensive at scale, while their head sparsity remains stable and batch-invariant. We develop hardware-efficient, sparsity-aware GPU kernels for selective MLP and Attention computations, delivering up to \(2.2\times\) end-to-end speedups for models like OPT, LLaMA-2 \& 3, across various batch sizes and sequence lengths without compromising accuracy. To our knowledge, this is the first work to demonstrate that contextual sparsity can scale effectively to large batch sizes, delivering substantial inference acceleration with minimal changes, making Polar Sparsity practical for large-scale, high-throughput LLM deployment systems. Our code is available at: https://github.com/susavlsh10/Polar-Sparsity.
MoE-Lens: Towards the Hardware Limit of High-Throughput MoE LLM Serving Under Resource Constraints
Mixture of Experts (MoE) LLMs, characterized by their sparse activation patterns, offer a promising approach to scaling language models while avoiding proportionally increasing the inference cost. However, their large parameter sizes present deployment challenges in resource-constrained environments with limited GPU memory capacity, as GPU memory is often insufficient to accommodate the full set of model weights. Consequently, typical deployments rely on CPU-GPU hybrid execution: the GPU handles compute-intensive GEMM operations, while the CPU processes the relatively lightweight attention mechanism. This setup introduces a key challenge: how to effectively optimize resource utilization across CPU and GPU? Prior work has designed system optimizations based on performance models with limited scope. Specifically, such models do not capture the complex interactions between hardware properties and system execution mechanisms. Therefore, previous approaches neither identify nor achieve the hardware limit. This paper presents MoE-Lens, a high-throughput MoE LLM inference system designed through holistic performance modeling for resource-constrained environments. Our performance model thoroughly analyzes various fundamental system components, including CPU memory capacity, GPU compute power, and workload characteristics, to understand the theoretical performance upper bound of MoE inference. Furthermore, it captures the system execution mechanisms to identify the key hardware bottlenecks and accurately predict the achievable throughput. Informed by our performance model, MoE-Lens introduces an inference system approaching hardware limits. Evaluated on diverse MoE models and datasets, MoE-Lens outperforms the state-of-the-art solution by 4.6x on average (up to 25.5x), with our theoretical model predicting performance with an average 94% accuracy.
MoE-Gen: High-Throughput MoE Inference on a Single GPU with Module-Based Batching
This paper presents MoE-Gen, a high-throughput MoE inference system optimized for single-GPU execution. Existing inference systems rely on model-based or continuous batching strategies, originally designed for interactive inference, which result in excessively small batches for MoE's key modules-attention and expert modules-leading to poor throughput. To address this, we introduce module-based batching, which accumulates tokens in host memory and dynamically launches large batches on GPUs to maximize utilization. Additionally, we optimize the choice of batch sizes for each module in an MoE to fully overlap GPU computation and communication, maximizing throughput. Evaluation demonstrates that MoE-Gen achieves 8-31x higher throughput compared to state-of-the-art systems employing model-based batching (FlexGen, MoE-Lightning, DeepSpeed), and offers even greater throughput improvements over continuous batching systems (e.g., vLLM and Ollama) on popular MoE models (DeepSeek and Mixtral) across offline inference tasks. MoE-Gen's source code is publicly available at https://github.com/EfficientMoE/MoE-Gen
E-BATCH: Energy-Efficient and High-Throughput RNN Batching
Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) inference exhibits low hardware utilization due to the strict data dependencies across time-steps. Batching multiple requests can increase throughput. However, RNN batching requires a large amount of padding since the batched input sequences may largely differ in length. Schemes that dynamically update the batch every few time-steps avoid padding. However, they require executing different RNN layers in a short timespan, decreasing energy efficiency. Hence, we propose E-BATCH, a low-latency and energy-efficient batching scheme tailored to RNN accelerators. It consists of a runtime system and effective hardware support. The runtime concatenates multiple sequences to create large batches, resulting in substantial energy savings. Furthermore, the accelerator notifies it when the evaluation of a sequence is done, so that a new sequence can be immediately added to a batch, thus largely reducing the amount of padding. E-BATCH dynamically controls the number of time-steps evaluated per batch to achieve the best trade-off between latency and energy efficiency for the given hardware platform. We evaluate E-BATCH on top of E-PUR and TPU. In E-PUR, E-BATCH improves throughput by 1.8x and energy-efficiency by 3.6x, whereas in TPU, it improves throughput by 2.1x and energy-efficiency by 1.6x, over the state-of-the-art.
MUX-PLMs: Data Multiplexing for High-throughput Language Models
The widespread adoption of large language models such as ChatGPT and Bard has led to unprecedented demand for these technologies. The burgeoning cost of inference for ever-increasing model sizes coupled with hardware shortages has limited affordable access and poses a pressing need for efficiency approaches geared towards high throughput and performance. Multi-input multi-output (MIMO) algorithms such as data multiplexing, offer a promising solution with a many-fold increase in throughput by performing inference for multiple inputs at the cost of a single input. Yet these approaches are not currently performant enough to be deployed in modern systems. We change that by developing MUX-PLMs, a class of high throughput pre-trained language models (PLMs) trained with data multiplexing, that can be fine-tuned for any downstream task to yield high-throughput high-performance. Our novel multiplexing and demultiplexing modules proficiently entangle and disentangle inputs, and enable high-performance high throughput that are competitive with vanilla PLMs while achieving 2x/5x inference speedup with only a 1-4% drop on a broad suite of tasks.
PyramidInfer: Pyramid KV Cache Compression for High-throughput LLM Inference
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable comprehension abilities but face challenges in GPU memory usage during inference, hindering their scalability for real-time applications like chatbots. To accelerate inference, we store computed keys and values (KV cache) in the GPU memory. Existing methods study the KV cache compression to reduce memory by pruning the pre-computed KV cache. However, they neglect the inter-layer dependency between layers and huge memory consumption in pre-computation. To explore these deficiencies, we find that the number of crucial keys and values that influence future generations decreases layer by layer and we can extract them by the consistency in attention weights. Based on the findings, we propose PyramidInfer, a method that compresses the KV cache by layer-wise retaining crucial context. PyramidInfer saves significant memory by computing fewer keys and values without sacrificing performance. Experimental results show PyramidInfer improves 2.2x throughput compared to Accelerate with over 54% GPU memory reduction in KV cache.
The Tiny Time-series Transformer: Low-latency High-throughput Classification of Astronomical Transients using Deep Model Compression
A new golden age in astronomy is upon us, dominated by data. Large astronomical surveys are broadcasting unprecedented rates of information, demanding machine learning as a critical component in modern scientific pipelines to handle the deluge of data. The upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will raise the big-data bar for time-domain astronomy, with an expected 10 million alerts per-night, and generating many petabytes of data over the lifetime of the survey. Fast and efficient classification algorithms that can operate in real-time, yet robustly and accurately, are needed for time-critical events where additional resources can be sought for follow-up analyses. In order to handle such data, state-of-the-art deep learning architectures coupled with tools that leverage modern hardware accelerators are essential. We showcase how the use of modern deep compression methods can achieve a 18times reduction in model size, whilst preserving classification performance. We also show that in addition to the deep compression techniques, careful choice of file formats can improve inference latency, and thereby throughput of alerts, on the order of 8times for local processing, and 5times in a live production setting. To test this in a live setting, we deploy this optimised version of the original time-series transformer, t2, into the community alert broking system of FINK on real Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) alert data, and compare throughput performance with other science modules that exist in FINK. The results shown herein emphasise the time-series transformer's suitability for real-time classification at LSST scale, and beyond, and introduce deep model compression as a fundamental tool for improving deploy-ability and scalable inference of deep learning models for transient classification.
Flash-VL 2B: Optimizing Vision-Language Model Performance for Ultra-Low Latency and High Throughput
In this paper, we introduce Flash-VL 2B, a novel approach to optimizing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for real-time applications, targeting ultra-low latency and high throughput without sacrificing accuracy. Leveraging advanced architectural enhancements and efficient computational strategies, Flash-VL 2B is designed to maximize throughput by reducing processing time while maintaining competitive performance across multiple vision-language benchmarks. Our approach includes tailored architectural choices, token compression mechanisms, data curation, training schemes, and a novel image processing technique called implicit semantic stitching that effectively balances computational load and model performance. Through extensive evaluations on 11 standard VLM benchmarks, we demonstrate that Flash-VL 2B achieves state-of-the-art results in both speed and accuracy, making it a promising solution for deployment in resource-constrained environments and large-scale real-time applications.
MagicDec: Breaking the Latency-Throughput Tradeoff for Long Context Generation with Speculative Decoding
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become more prevalent in long-context applications such as interactive chatbots, document analysis, and agent workflows, but it is challenging to serve long-context requests with low latency and high throughput. Speculative decoding (SD) is a widely used technique to reduce latency without sacrificing performance but the conventional wisdom suggests that its efficacy is limited to small batch sizes. In MagicDec, we show that surprisingly SD can achieve speedup even for a high throughput inference regime for moderate to long sequences. More interestingly, an intelligent drafting strategy can achieve better speedup with increasing batch size based on our rigorous analysis. MagicDec first identifies the bottleneck shifts with increasing batch size and sequence length, and uses these insights to deploy speculative decoding more effectively for high throughput inference. Then, it leverages draft models with sparse KV cache to address the KV bottleneck that scales with both sequence length and batch size.
LGM: Large Multi-View Gaussian Model for High-Resolution 3D Content Creation
3D content creation has achieved significant progress in terms of both quality and speed. Although current feed-forward models can produce 3D objects in seconds, their resolution is constrained by the intensive computation required during training. In this paper, we introduce Large Multi-View Gaussian Model (LGM), a novel framework designed to generate high-resolution 3D models from text prompts or single-view images. Our key insights are two-fold: 1) 3D Representation: We propose multi-view Gaussian features as an efficient yet powerful representation, which can then be fused together for differentiable rendering. 2) 3D Backbone: We present an asymmetric U-Net as a high-throughput backbone operating on multi-view images, which can be produced from text or single-view image input by leveraging multi-view diffusion models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the high fidelity and efficiency of our approach. Notably, we maintain the fast speed to generate 3D objects within 5 seconds while boosting the training resolution to 512, thereby achieving high-resolution 3D content generation.
Taming Throughput-Latency Tradeoff in LLM Inference with Sarathi-Serve
Each LLM serving request goes through two phases. The first is prefill which processes the entire input prompt to produce one output token and the second is decode which generates the rest of output tokens, one-at-a-time. Prefill iterations have high latency but saturate GPU compute due to parallel processing of the input prompt. In contrast, decode iterations have low latency but also low compute utilization because a decode iteration processes only a single token per request. This makes batching highly effective for decodes and consequently for overall throughput. However, batching multiple requests leads to an interleaving of prefill and decode iterations which makes it challenging to achieve both high throughput and low latency. We introduce an efficient LLM inference scheduler Sarathi-Serve inspired by the techniques we originally proposed for optimizing throughput in Sarathi. Sarathi-Serve leverages chunked-prefills from Sarathi to create stall-free schedules that can add new requests in a batch without pausing ongoing decodes. Stall-free scheduling unlocks the opportunity to improve throughput with large batch sizes while minimizing the effect of batching on latency. Our evaluation shows that Sarathi-Serve improves serving throughput within desired latency SLOs of Mistral-7B by up to 2.6x on a single A100 GPU and up to 6.9x for Falcon-180B on 8 A100 GPUs over Orca and vLLM.
SpeechDialogueFactory: Generating High-Quality Speech Dialogue Data to Accelerate Your Speech-LLM Development
High-quality speech dialogue datasets are crucial for Speech-LLM development, yet existing acquisition methods face significant limitations. Human recordings incur high costs and privacy concerns, while synthetic approaches often lack conversational authenticity. To address these challenges, we introduce SpeechDialogueFactory, a production-ready framework for generating natural speech dialogues efficiently. Our solution employs a comprehensive pipeline including metadata generation, dialogue scripting, paralinguistic-enriched utterance simulation, and natural speech synthesis with voice cloning. Additionally, the system provides an interactive UI for detailed sample inspection and a high-throughput batch synthesis mode. Evaluations show that dialogues generated by our system achieve a quality comparable to human recordings while significantly reducing production costs. We release our work as an open-source toolkit, alongside example datasets available in English and Chinese, empowering researchers and developers in Speech-LLM research and development.
Apparate: Rethinking Early Exits to Tame Latency-Throughput Tensions in ML Serving
Machine learning (ML) inference platforms are tasked with balancing two competing goals: ensuring high throughput given many requests, and delivering low-latency responses to support interactive applications. Unfortunately, existing platform knobs (e.g., batch sizes) fail to ease this fundamental tension, and instead only enable users to harshly trade off one property for the other. This paper explores an alternate strategy to taming throughput-latency tradeoffs by changing the granularity at which inference is performed. We present Apparate, a system that automatically applies and manages early exits (EEs) in ML models, whereby certain inputs can exit with results at intermediate layers. To cope with the time-varying overhead and accuracy challenges that EEs bring, Apparate repurposes exits to provide continual feedback that powers several novel runtime monitoring and adaptation strategies. Apparate lowers median response latencies by 40.5--91.5% and 10.0--24.2% for diverse CV and NLP classification workloads, and median time-per-token latencies by 22.6--77.9% for generative scenarios, without affecting throughputs or violating tight accuracy constraints.
Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention
High throughput serving of large language models (LLMs) requires batching sufficiently many requests at a time. However, existing systems struggle because the key-value cache (KV cache) memory for each request is huge and grows and shrinks dynamically. When managed inefficiently, this memory can be significantly wasted by fragmentation and redundant duplication, limiting the batch size. To address this problem, we propose PagedAttention, an attention algorithm inspired by the classical virtual memory and paging techniques in operating systems. On top of it, we build vLLM, an LLM serving system that achieves (1) near-zero waste in KV cache memory and (2) flexible sharing of KV cache within and across requests to further reduce memory usage. Our evaluations show that vLLM improves the throughput of popular LLMs by 2-4times with the same level of latency compared to the state-of-the-art systems, such as FasterTransformer and Orca. The improvement is more pronounced with longer sequences, larger models, and more complex decoding algorithms. vLLM's source code is publicly available at https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm
Integrating Biological Knowledge for Robust Microscopy Image Profiling on De Novo Cell Lines
High-throughput screening techniques, such as microscopy imaging of cellular responses to genetic and chemical perturbations, play a crucial role in drug discovery and biomedical research. However, robust perturbation screening for de novo cell lines remains challenging due to the significant morphological and biological heterogeneity across cell lines. To address this, we propose a novel framework that integrates external biological knowledge into existing pretraining strategies to enhance microscopy image profiling models. Our approach explicitly disentangles perturbation-specific and cell line-specific representations using external biological information. Specifically, we construct a knowledge graph leveraging protein interaction data from STRING and Hetionet databases to guide models toward perturbation-specific features during pretraining. Additionally, we incorporate transcriptomic features from single-cell foundation models to capture cell line-specific representations. By learning these disentangled features, our method improves the generalization of imaging models to de novo cell lines. We evaluate our framework on the RxRx database through one-shot fine-tuning on an RxRx1 cell line and few-shot fine-tuning on cell lines from the RxRx19a dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our method enhances microscopy image profiling for de novo cell lines, highlighting its effectiveness in real-world phenotype-based drug discovery applications.
Text-Augmented Multimodal LLMs for Chemical Reaction Condition Recommendation
High-throughput reaction condition (RC) screening is fundamental to chemical synthesis. However, current RC screening suffers from laborious and costly trial-and-error workflows. Traditional computer-aided synthesis planning (CASP) tools fail to find suitable RCs due to data sparsity and inadequate reaction representations. Nowadays, large language models (LLMs) are capable of tackling chemistry-related problems, such as molecule design, and chemical logic Q\&A tasks. However, LLMs have not yet achieved accurate predictions of chemical reaction conditions. Here, we present MM-RCR, a text-augmented multimodal LLM that learns a unified reaction representation from SMILES, reaction graphs, and textual corpus for chemical reaction recommendation (RCR). To train MM-RCR, we construct 1.2 million pair-wised Q\&A instruction datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that MM-RCR achieves state-of-the-art performance on two open benchmark datasets and exhibits strong generalization capabilities on out-of-domain (OOD) and High-Throughput Experimentation (HTE) datasets. MM-RCR has the potential to accelerate high-throughput condition screening in chemical synthesis.
Removing Biases from Molecular Representations via Information Maximization
High-throughput drug screening -- using cell imaging or gene expression measurements as readouts of drug effect -- is a critical tool in biotechnology to assess and understand the relationship between the chemical structure and biological activity of a drug. Since large-scale screens have to be divided into multiple experiments, a key difficulty is dealing with batch effects, which can introduce systematic errors and non-biological associations in the data. We propose InfoCORE, an Information maximization approach for COnfounder REmoval, to effectively deal with batch effects and obtain refined molecular representations. InfoCORE establishes a variational lower bound on the conditional mutual information of the latent representations given a batch identifier. It adaptively reweighs samples to equalize their implied batch distribution. Extensive experiments on drug screening data reveal InfoCORE's superior performance in a multitude of tasks including molecular property prediction and molecule-phenotype retrieval. Additionally, we show results for how InfoCORE offers a versatile framework and resolves general distribution shifts and issues of data fairness by minimizing correlation with spurious features or removing sensitive attributes. The code is available at https://github.com/uhlerlab/InfoCORE.
RxRx1: A Dataset for Evaluating Experimental Batch Correction Methods
High-throughput screening techniques are commonly used to obtain large quantities of data in many fields of biology. It is well known that artifacts arising from variability in the technical execution of different experimental batches within such screens confound these observations and can lead to invalid biological conclusions. It is therefore necessary to account for these batch effects when analyzing outcomes. In this paper we describe RxRx1, a biological dataset designed specifically for the systematic study of batch effect correction methods. The dataset consists of 125,510 high-resolution fluorescence microscopy images of human cells under 1,138 genetic perturbations in 51 experimental batches across 4 cell types. Visual inspection of the images alone clearly demonstrates significant batch effects. We propose a classification task designed to evaluate the effectiveness of experimental batch correction methods on these images and examine the performance of a number of correction methods on this task. Our goal in releasing RxRx1 is to encourage the development of effective experimental batch correction methods that generalize well to unseen experimental batches. The dataset can be downloaded at https://rxrx.ai.
CellCLIP -- Learning Perturbation Effects in Cell Painting via Text-Guided Contrastive Learning
High-content screening (HCS) assays based on high-throughput microscopy techniques such as Cell Painting have enabled the interrogation of cells' morphological responses to perturbations at an unprecedented scale. The collection of such data promises to facilitate a better understanding of the relationships between different perturbations and their effects on cellular state. Towards achieving this goal, recent advances in cross-modal contrastive learning could, in theory, be leveraged to learn a unified latent space that aligns perturbations with their corresponding morphological effects. However, the application of such methods to HCS data is not straightforward due to substantial differences in the semantics of Cell Painting images compared to natural images, and the difficulty of representing different classes of perturbations (e.g., small molecule vs CRISPR gene knockout) in a single latent space. In response to these challenges, here we introduce CellCLIP, a cross-modal contrastive learning framework for HCS data. CellCLIP leverages pre-trained image encoders coupled with a novel channel encoding scheme to better capture relationships between different microscopy channels in image embeddings, along with natural language encoders for representing perturbations. Our framework outperforms current open-source models, demonstrating the best performance in both cross-modal retrieval and biologically meaningful downstream tasks while also achieving significant reductions in computation time.
Fara-7B: An Efficient Agentic Model for Computer Use
Progress in computer use agents (CUAs) has been constrained by the absence of large and high-quality datasets that capture how humans interact with a computer. While LLMs have thrived on abundant textual data, no comparable corpus exists for CUA trajectories. To address these gaps, we introduce FaraGen, a novel synthetic data generation system for multi-step web tasks. FaraGen can propose diverse tasks from frequently used websites, generate multiple solution attempts, and filter successful trajectories using multiple verifiers. It achieves high throughput, yield, and diversity for multi-step web tasks, producing verified trajectories at approximately $1 each. We use this data to train Fara-7B, a native CUA model that perceives the computer using only screenshots, executes actions via predicted coordinates, and is small enough to run on-device. We find that Fara-7B outperforms other CUA models of comparable size on benchmarks like WebVoyager, Online-Mind2Web, and WebTailBench -- our novel benchmark that better captures under-represented web tasks in pre-existing benchmarks. Furthermore, Fara-7B is competitive with much larger frontier models, illustrating key benefits of scalable data generation systems in advancing small efficient agentic models. We are making Fara-7B open-weight on Microsoft Foundry and HuggingFace, and we are releasing WebTailBench.
PINN surrogate of Li-ion battery models for parameter inference. Part I: Implementation and multi-fidelity hierarchies for the single-particle model
To plan and optimize energy storage demands that account for Li-ion battery aging dynamics, techniques need to be developed to diagnose battery internal states accurately and rapidly. This study seeks to reduce the computational resources needed to determine a battery's internal states by replacing physics-based Li-ion battery models -- such as the single-particle model (SPM) and the pseudo-2D (P2D) model -- with a physics-informed neural network (PINN) surrogate. The surrogate model makes high-throughput techniques, such as Bayesian calibration, tractable to determine battery internal parameters from voltage responses. This manuscript is the first of a two-part series that introduces PINN surrogates of Li-ion battery models for parameter inference (i.e., state-of-health diagnostics). In this first part, a method is presented for constructing a PINN surrogate of the SPM. A multi-fidelity hierarchical training, where several neural nets are trained with multiple physics-loss fidelities is shown to significantly improve the surrogate accuracy when only training on the governing equation residuals. The implementation is made available in a companion repository (https://github.com/NREL/pinnstripes). The techniques used to develop a PINN surrogate of the SPM are extended in Part II for the PINN surrogate for the P2D battery model, and explore the Bayesian calibration capabilities of both surrogates.
AgentFly: Extensible and Scalable Reinforcement Learning for LM Agents
Language model (LM) agents have gained significant attention for their ability to autonomously complete tasks through interactions with environments, tools, and APIs. LM agents are primarily built with prompt engineering or supervised finetuning. At the same time, reinforcement learning (RL) has been explored to enhance LM's capabilities, such as reasoning and factuality. However, the combination of the LM agents and reinforcement learning (Agent-RL) remains underexplored and lacks systematic study. To this end, we built AgentFly, a scalable and extensible Agent-RL framework designed to empower LM agents with a variety of RL algorithms. Our framework supports multi-turn interactions by adapting traditional RL methods with token-level masking. It features a decorator-based interface for defining tools and reward functions, enabling seamless extension and ease of use. To support high-throughput training, we implement asynchronous execution of tool calls and reward computations, and design a centralized resource management system for scalable environment coordination. We also provide a suite of prebuilt tools and environments, demonstrating the framework's effectiveness through successful agent training across multiple tasks.
Explainable AI Methods for Multi-Omics Analysis: A Survey
Advancements in high-throughput technologies have led to a shift from traditional hypothesis-driven methodologies to data-driven approaches. Multi-omics refers to the integrative analysis of data derived from multiple 'omes', such as genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and microbiomics. This approach enables a comprehensive understanding of biological systems by capturing different layers of biological information. Deep learning methods are increasingly utilized to integrate multi-omics data, offering insights into molecular interactions and enhancing research into complex diseases. However, these models, with their numerous interconnected layers and nonlinear relationships, often function as black boxes, lacking transparency in decision-making processes. To overcome this challenge, explainable artificial intelligence (xAI) methods are crucial for creating transparent models that allow clinicians to interpret and work with complex data more effectively. This review explores how xAI can improve the interpretability of deep learning models in multi-omics research, highlighting its potential to provide clinicians with clear insights, thereby facilitating the effective application of such models in clinical settings.
SGUQ: Staged Graph Convolution Neural Network for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis using Multi-Omics Data
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disorder and the leading cause of dementia, significantly impacting cost, mortality, and burden worldwide. The advent of high-throughput omics technologies, such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and epigenomics, has revolutionized the molecular understanding of AD. Conventional AI approaches typically require the completion of all omics data at the outset to achieve optimal AD diagnosis, which are inefficient and may be unnecessary. To reduce the clinical cost and improve the accuracy of AD diagnosis using multi-omics data, we propose a novel staged graph convolutional network with uncertainty quantification (SGUQ). SGUQ begins with mRNA and progressively incorporates DNA methylation and miRNA data only when necessary, reducing overall costs and exposure to harmful tests. Experimental results indicate that 46.23% of the samples can be reliably predicted using only single-modal omics data (mRNA), while an additional 16.04% of the samples can achieve reliable predictions when combining two omics data types (mRNA + DNA methylation). In addition, the proposed staged SGUQ achieved an accuracy of 0.858 on ROSMAP dataset, which outperformed existing methods significantly. The proposed SGUQ can not only be applied to AD diagnosis using multi-omics data but also has the potential for clinical decision-making using multi-viewed data. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/chenzhao2023/multiomicsuncertainty.
Batch-based Model Registration for Fast 3D Sherd Reconstruction
3D reconstruction techniques have widely been used for digital documentation of archaeological fragments. However, efficient digital capture of fragments remains as a challenge. In this work, we aim to develop a portable, high-throughput, and accurate reconstruction system for efficient digitization of fragments excavated in archaeological sites. To realize high-throughput digitization of large numbers of objects, an effective strategy is to perform scanning and reconstruction in batches. However, effective batch-based scanning and reconstruction face two key challenges: 1) how to correlate partial scans of the same object from multiple batch scans, and 2) how to register and reconstruct complete models from partial scans that exhibit only small overlaps. To tackle these two challenges, we develop a new batch-based matching algorithm that pairs the front and back sides of the fragments, and a new Bilateral Boundary ICP algorithm that can register partial scans sharing very narrow overlapping regions. Extensive validation in labs and testing in excavation sites demonstrate that these designs enable efficient batch-based scanning for fragments. We show that such a batch-based scanning and reconstruction pipeline can have immediate applications on digitizing sherds in archaeological excavations. Our project page: https://jiepengwang.github.io/FIRES/.
Predicting Cellular Responses to Novel Drug Perturbations at a Single-Cell Resolution
Single-cell transcriptomics enabled the study of cellular heterogeneity in response to perturbations at the resolution of individual cells. However, scaling high-throughput screens (HTSs) to measure cellular responses for many drugs remains a challenge due to technical limitations and, more importantly, the cost of such multiplexed experiments. Thus, transferring information from routinely performed bulk RNA HTS is required to enrich single-cell data meaningfully. We introduce chemCPA, a new encoder-decoder architecture to study the perturbational effects of unseen drugs. We combine the model with an architecture surgery for transfer learning and demonstrate how training on existing bulk RNA HTS datasets can improve generalisation performance. Better generalisation reduces the need for extensive and costly screens at single-cell resolution. We envision that our proposed method will facilitate more efficient experiment designs through its ability to generate in-silico hypotheses, ultimately accelerating drug discovery.
Sample Factory: Egocentric 3D Control from Pixels at 100000 FPS with Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning
Increasing the scale of reinforcement learning experiments has allowed researchers to achieve unprecedented results in both training sophisticated agents for video games, and in sim-to-real transfer for robotics. Typically such experiments rely on large distributed systems and require expensive hardware setups, limiting wider access to this exciting area of research. In this work we aim to solve this problem by optimizing the efficiency and resource utilization of reinforcement learning algorithms instead of relying on distributed computation. We present the "Sample Factory", a high-throughput training system optimized for a single-machine setting. Our architecture combines a highly efficient, asynchronous, GPU-based sampler with off-policy correction techniques, allowing us to achieve throughput higher than 10^5 environment frames/second on non-trivial control problems in 3D without sacrificing sample efficiency. We extend Sample Factory to support self-play and population-based training and apply these techniques to train highly capable agents for a multiplayer first-person shooter game. The source code is available at https://github.com/alex-petrenko/sample-factory
Adaptive Orchestration for Large-Scale Inference on Heterogeneous Accelerator Systems Balancing Cost, Performance, and Resilience
The surge in generative AI workloads has created a need for scalable inference systems that can flexibly harness both GPUs and specialized accelerators while containing operational costs. This paper proposes a hardware-agnostic control loop that adaptively allocates requests across heterogeneous accelerators based on real-time cost and capacity signals. The approach sustains low latency and high throughput by dynamically shifting between cost-optimized and capacity-optimized modes, ensuring the most efficient use of expensive compute resources under fluctuating availability. Evaluated using the Stable Diffusion model, the framework consistently meets latency targets, automatically redirects traffic during capacity shortfalls, and capitalizes on lower-cost accelerators when possible. These results highlight how a feedback-driven deployment strategy, spanning the entire software and hardware stack, can help organizations efficiently scale generative AI workloads while maintaining resilience in the face of limited accelerator capacity.
Cross-Modal Translation and Alignment for Survival Analysis
With the rapid advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies, the focus of survival analysis has shifted from examining clinical indicators to incorporating genomic profiles with pathological images. However, existing methods either directly adopt a straightforward fusion of pathological features and genomic profiles for survival prediction, or take genomic profiles as guidance to integrate the features of pathological images. The former would overlook intrinsic cross-modal correlations. The latter would discard pathological information irrelevant to gene expression. To address these issues, we present a Cross-Modal Translation and Alignment (CMTA) framework to explore the intrinsic cross-modal correlations and transfer potential complementary information. Specifically, we construct two parallel encoder-decoder structures for multi-modal data to integrate intra-modal information and generate cross-modal representation. Taking the generated cross-modal representation to enhance and recalibrate intra-modal representation can significantly improve its discrimination for comprehensive survival analysis. To explore the intrinsic crossmodal correlations, we further design a cross-modal attention module as the information bridge between different modalities to perform cross-modal interactions and transfer complementary information. Our extensive experiments on five public TCGA datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
AdsorbML: Accelerating Adsorption Energy Calculations with Machine Learning
Computational catalysis is playing an increasingly significant role in the design of catalysts across a wide range of applications. A common task for many computational methods is the need to accurately compute the minimum binding energy - the adsorption energy - for an adsorbate and a catalyst surface of interest. Traditionally, the identification of low energy adsorbate-surface configurations relies on heuristic methods and researcher intuition. As the desire to perform high-throughput screening increases, it becomes challenging to use heuristics and intuition alone. In this paper, we demonstrate machine learning potentials can be leveraged to identify low energy adsorbate-surface configurations more accurately and efficiently. Our algorithm provides a spectrum of trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, with one balanced option finding the lowest energy configuration, within a 0.1 eV threshold, 86.33% of the time, while achieving a 1331x speedup in computation. To standardize benchmarking, we introduce the Open Catalyst Dense dataset containing nearly 1,000 diverse surfaces and 85,658 unique configurations.
IMPALA: Scalable Distributed Deep-RL with Importance Weighted Actor-Learner Architectures
In this work we aim to solve a large collection of tasks using a single reinforcement learning agent with a single set of parameters. A key challenge is to handle the increased amount of data and extended training time. We have developed a new distributed agent IMPALA (Importance Weighted Actor-Learner Architecture) that not only uses resources more efficiently in single-machine training but also scales to thousands of machines without sacrificing data efficiency or resource utilisation. We achieve stable learning at high throughput by combining decoupled acting and learning with a novel off-policy correction method called V-trace. We demonstrate the effectiveness of IMPALA for multi-task reinforcement learning on DMLab-30 (a set of 30 tasks from the DeepMind Lab environment (Beattie et al., 2016)) and Atari-57 (all available Atari games in Arcade Learning Environment (Bellemare et al., 2013a)). Our results show that IMPALA is able to achieve better performance than previous agents with less data, and crucially exhibits positive transfer between tasks as a result of its multi-task approach.
Deep Learning for Genomics: A Concise Overview
Advancements in genomic research such as high-throughput sequencing techniques have driven modern genomic studies into "big data" disciplines. This data explosion is constantly challenging conventional methods used in genomics. In parallel with the urgent demand for robust algorithms, deep learning has succeeded in a variety of fields such as vision, speech, and text processing. Yet genomics entails unique challenges to deep learning since we are expecting from deep learning a superhuman intelligence that explores beyond our knowledge to interpret the genome. A powerful deep learning model should rely on insightful utilization of task-specific knowledge. In this paper, we briefly discuss the strengths of different deep learning models from a genomic perspective so as to fit each particular task with a proper deep architecture, and remark on practical considerations of developing modern deep learning architectures for genomics. We also provide a concise review of deep learning applications in various aspects of genomic research, as well as pointing out potential opportunities and obstacles for future genomics applications.
TiDAR: Think in Diffusion, Talk in Autoregression
Diffusion language models hold the promise of fast parallel generation, while autoregressive (AR) models typically excel in quality due to their causal structure aligning naturally with language modeling. This raises a fundamental question: can we achieve a synergy with high throughput, higher GPU utilization, and AR level quality? Existing methods fail to effectively balance these two aspects, either prioritizing AR using a weaker model for sequential drafting (speculative decoding), leading to lower drafting efficiency, or using some form of left-to-right (AR-like) decoding logic for diffusion, which still suffers from quality degradation and forfeits its potential parallelizability. We introduce TiDAR, a sequence-level hybrid architecture that drafts tokens (Thinking) in Diffusion and samples final outputs (Talking) AutoRegressively - all within a single forward pass using specially designed structured attention masks. This design exploits the free GPU compute density, achieving a strong balance between drafting and verification capacity. Moreover, TiDAR is designed to be serving-friendly (low overhead) as a standalone model. We extensively evaluate TiDAR against AR models, speculative decoding, and diffusion variants across generative and likelihood tasks at 1.5B and 8B scales. Thanks to the parallel drafting and sampling as well as exact KV cache support, TiDAR outperforms speculative decoding in measured throughput and surpasses diffusion models like Dream and Llada in both efficiency and quality. Most notably, TiDAR is the first architecture to close the quality gap with AR models while delivering 4.71x to 5.91x more tokens per second.
EmbeddingGemma: Powerful and Lightweight Text Representations
We introduce EmbeddingGemma, a new lightweight, open text embedding model based on the Gemma 3 language model family. Our innovative training recipe strategically captures knowledge from larger models via encoder-decoder initialization and geometric embedding distillation. We improve model robustness and expressiveness with a spread-out regularizer, and ensure generalizability by merging checkpoints from varied, optimized mixtures. Evaluated on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) across multilingual, English, and code domains, EmbeddingGemma (300M) achieves state-of-the-art results. Notably, it outperforms prior top models, both proprietary and open, with fewer than 500M parameters, and provides performance comparable to models double its size, offering an exceptional performance-to-cost ratio. Remarkably, this lead persists when quantizing model weights or truncating embedding outputs. This makes EmbeddingGemma particularly well-suited for low-latency and high-throughput use cases such as on-device applications. We provide ablation studies exploring our key design choices. We release EmbeddingGemma to the community to promote further research.
Fitness aligned structural modeling enables scalable virtual screening with AuroBind
Most human proteins remain undrugged, over 96% of human proteins remain unexploited by approved therapeutics. While structure-based virtual screening promises to expand the druggable proteome, existing methods lack atomic-level precision and fail to predict binding fitness, limiting translational impact. We present AuroBind, a scalable virtual screening framework that fine-tunes a custom atomic-level structural model on million-scale chemogenomic data. AuroBind integrates direct preference optimization, self-distillation from high-confidence complexes, and a teacher-student acceleration strategy to jointly predict ligand-bound structures and binding fitness. The proposed models outperform state-of-the-art models on structural and functional benchmarks while enabling 100,000-fold faster screening across ultra-large compound libraries. In a prospective screen across ten disease-relevant targets, AuroBind achieved experimental hit rates of 7-69%, with top compounds reaching sub-nanomolar to picomolar potency. For the orphan GPCRs GPR151 and GPR160, AuroBind identified both agonists and antagonists with success rates of 16-30%, and functional assays confirmed GPR160 modulation in liver and prostate cancer models. AuroBind offers a generalizable framework for structure-function learning and high-throughput molecular screening, bridging the gap between structure prediction and therapeutic discovery.
Layer-Condensed KV Cache for Efficient Inference of Large Language Models
Huge memory consumption has been a major bottleneck for deploying high-throughput large language models in real-world applications. In addition to the large number of parameters, the key-value (KV) cache for the attention mechanism in the transformer architecture consumes a significant amount of memory, especially when the number of layers is large for deep language models. In this paper, we propose a novel method that only computes and caches the KVs of a small number of layers, thus significantly saving memory consumption and improving inference throughput. Our experiments on large language models show that our method achieves up to 26times higher throughput than standard transformers and competitive performance in language modeling and downstream tasks. In addition, our method is orthogonal to existing transformer memory-saving techniques, so it is straightforward to integrate them with our model, achieving further improvement in inference efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/whyNLP/LCKV.
Generative Reasoning Recommendation via LLMs
Despite their remarkable reasoning capabilities across diverse domains, large language models (LLMs) face fundamental challenges in natively functioning as generative reasoning recommendation models (GRRMs), where the intrinsic modeling gap between textual semantics and collaborative filtering signals, combined with the sparsity and stochasticity of user feedback, presents significant obstacles. This work explores how to build GRRMs by adapting pre-trained LLMs, which achieves a unified understanding-reasoning-prediction manner for recommendation tasks. We propose GREAM, an end-to-end framework that integrates three components: (i) Collaborative-Semantic Alignment, which fuses heterogeneous textual evidence to construct semantically consistent, discrete item indices and auxiliary alignment tasks that ground linguistic representations in interaction semantics; (ii) Reasoning Curriculum Activation, which builds a synthetic dataset with explicit Chain-of-Thought supervision and a curriculum that progresses through behavioral evidence extraction, latent preference modeling, intent inference, recommendation formulation, and denoised sequence rewriting; and (iii) Sparse-Regularized Group Policy Optimization (SRPO), which stabilizes post-training via Residual-Sensitive Verifiable Reward and Bonus-Calibrated Group Advantage Estimation, enabling end-to-end optimization under verifiable signals despite sparse successes. GREAM natively supports two complementary inference modes: Direct Sequence Recommendation for high-throughput, low-latency deployment, and Sequential Reasoning Recommendation that first emits an interpretable reasoning chain for causal transparency. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate consistent gains over strong baselines, providing a practical path toward verifiable-RL-driven LLM recommenders.
Taming the Titans: A Survey of Efficient LLM Inference Serving
Large Language Models (LLMs) for Generative AI have achieved remarkable progress, evolving into sophisticated and versatile tools widely adopted across various domains and applications. However, the substantial memory overhead caused by their vast number of parameters, combined with the high computational demands of the attention mechanism, poses significant challenges in achieving low latency and high throughput for LLM inference services. Recent advancements, driven by groundbreaking research, have significantly accelerated progress in this field. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of these methods, covering fundamental instance-level approaches, in-depth cluster-level strategies, emerging scenario directions, and other miscellaneous but important areas. At the instance level, we review model placement, request scheduling, decoding length prediction, storage management, and the disaggregation paradigm. At the cluster level, we explore GPU cluster deployment, multi-instance load balancing, and cloud service solutions. For emerging scenarios, we organize the discussion around specific tasks, modules, and auxiliary methods. To ensure a holistic overview, we also highlight several niche yet critical areas. Finally, we outline potential research directions to further advance the field of LLM inference serving.
vAttention: Dynamic Memory Management for Serving LLMs without PagedAttention
Efficient use of GPU memory is essential for high throughput LLM inference. Prior systems reserved memory for the KV-cache ahead-of-time, resulting in wasted capacity due to internal fragmentation. Inspired by OS-based virtual memory systems, vLLM proposed PagedAttention to enable dynamic memory allocation for KV-cache. This approach eliminates fragmentation, enabling high-throughput LLM serving with larger batch sizes. However, to be able to allocate physical memory dynamically, PagedAttention changes the layout of KV-cache from contiguous virtual memory to non-contiguous virtual memory. This change requires attention kernels to be rewritten to support paging, and serving framework to implement a memory manager. Thus, the PagedAttention model leads to software complexity, portability issues, redundancy and inefficiency. In this paper, we propose vAttention for dynamic KV-cache memory management. In contrast to PagedAttention, vAttention retains KV-cache in contiguous virtual memory and leverages low-level system support for demand paging, that already exists, to enable on-demand physical memory allocation. Thus, vAttention unburdens the attention kernel developer from having to explicitly support paging and avoids re-implementation of memory management in the serving framework. We show that vAttention enables seamless dynamic memory management for unchanged implementations of various attention kernels. vAttention also generates tokens up to 1.97x faster than vLLM, while processing input prompts up to 3.92x and 1.45x faster than the PagedAttention variants of FlashAttention and FlashInfer.
Supporting Our AI Overlords: Redesigning Data Systems to be Agent-First
Large Language Model (LLM) agents, acting on their users' behalf to manipulate and analyze data, are likely to become the dominant workload for data systems in the future. When working with data, agents employ a high-throughput process of exploration and solution formulation for the given task, one we call agentic speculation. The sheer volume and inefficiencies of agentic speculation can pose challenges for present-day data systems. We argue that data systems need to adapt to more natively support agentic workloads. We take advantage of the characteristics of agentic speculation that we identify, i.e., scale, heterogeneity, redundancy, and steerability - to outline a number of new research opportunities for a new agent-first data systems architecture, ranging from new query interfaces, to new query processing techniques, to new agentic memory stores.
Agents for self-driving laboratories applied to quantum computing
Fully automated self-driving laboratories are promising to enable high-throughput and large-scale scientific discovery by reducing repetitive labour. However, effective automation requires deep integration of laboratory knowledge, which is often unstructured, multimodal, and difficult to incorporate into current AI systems. This paper introduces the k-agents framework, designed to support experimentalists in organizing laboratory knowledge and automating experiments with agents. Our framework employs large language model-based agents to encapsulate laboratory knowledge including available laboratory operations and methods for analyzing experiment results. To automate experiments, we introduce execution agents that break multi-step experimental procedures into state machines, interact with other agents to execute each step and analyze the experiment results. The analyzed results are then utilized to drive state transitions, enabling closed-loop feedback control. To demonstrate its capabilities, we applied the agents to calibrate and operate a superconducting quantum processor, where they autonomously planned and executed experiments for hours, successfully producing and characterizing entangled quantum states at the level achieved by human scientists. Our knowledge-based agent system opens up new possibilities for managing laboratory knowledge and accelerating scientific discovery.
APAR: LLMs Can Do Auto-Parallel Auto-Regressive Decoding
The massive adoption of large language models (LLMs) demands efficient deployment strategies. However, the auto-regressive decoding process, which is fundamental to how most LLMs generate text, poses challenges to achieve efficient serving. In this work, we introduce a parallel auto-regressive generation method. By instruct-tuning on general domain data that contains hierarchical structures, we enable LLMs to independently plan their generation process and perform auto-parallel auto-regressive (APAR) generation, significantly reducing the number of generation steps. APAR alone can achieve up to 2x speed-up, and when combined with speculative decoding, the speed-up can reach up to 4x. In addition, APAR reduces the key-value cache consumption and attention computation during generation. This leads to a throughput increase of 20-70% and a latency reduce of 20-35% in high-throughput scenarios, compared to state-of-the-art serving frameworks.
Bayesian Hierarchical Models for Quantitative Estimates for Performance metrics applied to Saddle Search Algorithms
Rigorous performance evaluation is essential for developing robust algorithms for high-throughput computational chemistry. Traditional benchmarking, however, often struggles to account for system-specific variability, making it difficult to form actionable conclusions. We present a Bayesian hierarchical modeling framework that rigorously quantifies performance metrics and their uncertainty, enabling a nuanced comparison of algorithmic strategies. We apply this framework to analyze the Dimer method, comparing Conjugate Gradient (CG) and L-BFGS rotation optimizers, with and without the removal of external rotations, across a benchmark of 500 molecular systems. Our analysis confirms that CG offers higher overall robustness than L-BFGS in this context. While the theoretically-motivated removal of external rotations led to higher computational cost (>40% more energy and force calls) for most systems in this set, our models also reveal a subtle interplay, hinting that this feature may improve the reliability of the L-BFGS optimizer. Rather than identifying a single superior method, our findings support the design of adaptive "chain of methods" workflows. This work showcases how a robust statistical paradigm can move beyond simple performance rankings to inform the intelligent, context-dependent application of computational chemistry methods.
NeRF-based Point Cloud Reconstruction using a Stationary Camera for Agricultural Applications
This paper presents a NeRF-based framework for point cloud (PCD) reconstruction, specifically designed for indoor high-throughput plant phenotyping facilities. Traditional NeRF-based reconstruction methods require cameras to move around stationary objects, but this approach is impractical for high-throughput environments where objects are rapidly imaged while moving on conveyors or rotating pedestals. To address this limitation, we develop a variant of NeRF-based PCD reconstruction that uses a single stationary camera to capture images as the object rotates on a pedestal. Our workflow comprises COLMAP-based pose estimation, a straightforward pose transformation to simulate camera movement, and subsequent standard NeRF training. A defined Region of Interest (ROI) excludes irrelevant scene data, enabling the generation of high-resolution point clouds (10M points). Experimental results demonstrate excellent reconstruction fidelity, with precision-recall analyses yielding an F-score close to 100.00 across all evaluated plant objects. Although pose estimation remains computationally intensive with a stationary camera setup, overall training and reconstruction times are competitive, validating the method's feasibility for practical high-throughput indoor phenotyping applications. Our findings indicate that high-quality NeRF-based 3D reconstructions are achievable using a stationary camera, eliminating the need for complex camera motion or costly imaging equipment. This approach is especially beneficial when employing expensive and delicate instruments, such as hyperspectral cameras, for 3D plant phenotyping. Future work will focus on optimizing pose estimation techniques and further streamlining the methodology to facilitate seamless integration into automated, high-throughput 3D phenotyping pipelines.
SUPERMERGE: An Approach For Gradient-Based Model Merging
Large language models, such as ChatGPT, Claude, or LLaMA, are gigantic, monolithic, and possess the superpower to simultaneously support thousands of tasks. However, high-throughput applications often prefer smaller task-specific models because of their lower latency and cost. One challenge of using task-specific models is the incremental need for solving newer tasks after the model is already deployed for existing tasks. A straightforward solution requires fine-tuning the model again for both existing and new tasks, which is computationally expensive and time-consuming. To address this issue, we propose a model merging based approach called SUPERMERGE. SUPERMERGE is a gradient-based method to systematically merge several fine-tuned models trained on existing and new tasks. SUPERMERGE is designed to be lightweight and fast, and the merged model achieves similar performance to fully fine-tuned models on all tasks. Furthermore, we proposed a hierarchical model merging strategy to reduce the peak space requirement without sacrificing the performance of the merged model. We experimentally demonstrate that SUPERMERGE outperforms existing model merging methods on common natural language processing and computer vision tasks.
MassSpecGym: A benchmark for the discovery and identification of molecules
The discovery and identification of molecules in biological and environmental samples is crucial for advancing biomedical and chemical sciences. Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is the leading technique for high-throughput elucidation of molecular structures. However, decoding a molecular structure from its mass spectrum is exceptionally challenging, even when performed by human experts. As a result, the vast majority of acquired MS/MS spectra remain uninterpreted, thereby limiting our understanding of the underlying (bio)chemical processes. Despite decades of progress in machine learning applications for predicting molecular structures from MS/MS spectra, the development of new methods is severely hindered by the lack of standard datasets and evaluation protocols. To address this problem, we propose MassSpecGym -- the first comprehensive benchmark for the discovery and identification of molecules from MS/MS data. Our benchmark comprises the largest publicly available collection of high-quality labeled MS/MS spectra and defines three MS/MS annotation challenges: de novo molecular structure generation, molecule retrieval, and spectrum simulation. It includes new evaluation metrics and a generalization-demanding data split, therefore standardizing the MS/MS annotation tasks and rendering the problem accessible to the broad machine learning community. MassSpecGym is publicly available at https://github.com/pluskal-lab/MassSpecGym.
AnyLogo: Symbiotic Subject-Driven Diffusion System with Gemini Status
Diffusion models have made compelling progress on facilitating high-throughput daily production. Nevertheless, the appealing customized requirements are remain suffered from instance-level finetuning for authentic fidelity. Prior zero-shot customization works achieve the semantic consistence through the condensed injection of identity features, while addressing detailed low-level signatures through complex model configurations and subject-specific fabrications, which significantly break the statistical coherence within the overall system and limit the applicability across various scenarios. To facilitate the generic signature concentration with rectified efficiency, we present AnyLogo, a zero-shot region customizer with remarkable detail consistency, building upon the symbiotic diffusion system with eliminated cumbersome designs. Streamlined as vanilla image generation, we discern that the rigorous signature extraction and creative content generation are promisingly compatible and can be systematically recycled within a single denoising model. In place of the external configurations, the gemini status of the denoising model promote the reinforced subject transmission efficiency and disentangled semantic-signature space with continuous signature decoration. Moreover, the sparse recycling paradigm is adopted to prevent the duplicated risk with compressed transmission quota for diversified signature stimulation. Extensive experiments on constructed logo-level benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of our methods.
Accelerating the Generation of Molecular Conformations with Progressive Distillation of Equivariant Latent Diffusion Models
Recent advances in fast sampling methods for diffusion models have demonstrated significant potential to accelerate generation on image modalities. We apply these methods to 3-dimensional molecular conformations by building on the recently introduced GeoLDM equivariant latent diffusion model (Xu et al., 2023). We evaluate trade-offs between speed gains and quality loss, as measured by molecular conformation structural stability. We introduce Equivariant Latent Progressive Distillation, a fast sampling algorithm that preserves geometric equivariance and accelerates generation from latent diffusion models. Our experiments demonstrate up to 7.5x gains in sampling speed with limited degradation in molecular stability. These results suggest this accelerated sampling method has strong potential for high-throughput in silico molecular conformations screening in computational biochemistry, drug discovery, and life sciences applications.
A Hybrid Cable-Driven Robot for Non-Destructive Leafy Plant Monitoring and Mass Estimation using Structure from Motion
We propose a novel hybrid cable-based robot with manipulator and camera for high-accuracy, medium-throughput plant monitoring in a vertical hydroponic farm and, as an example application, demonstrate non-destructive plant mass estimation. Plant monitoring with high temporal and spatial resolution is important to both farmers and researchers to detect anomalies and develop predictive models for plant growth. The availability of high-quality, off-the-shelf structure-from-motion (SfM) and photogrammetry packages has enabled a vibrant community of roboticists to apply computer vision for non-destructive plant monitoring. While existing approaches tend to focus on either high-throughput (e.g. satellite, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), vehicle-mounted, conveyor-belt imagery) or high-accuracy/robustness to occlusions (e.g. turn-table scanner or robot arm), we propose a middle-ground that achieves high accuracy with a medium-throughput, highly automated robot. Our design pairs the workspace scalability of a cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) with the dexterity of a 4 degree-of-freedom (DoF) robot arm to autonomously image many plants from a variety of viewpoints. We describe our robot design and demonstrate it experimentally by collecting daily photographs of 54 plants from 64 viewpoints each. We show that our approach can produce scientifically useful measurements, operate fully autonomously after initial calibration, and produce better reconstructions and plant property estimates than those of over-canopy methods (e.g. UAV). As example applications, we show that our system can successfully estimate plant mass with a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.586g and, when used to perform hypothesis testing on the relationship between mass and age, produces p-values comparable to ground-truth data (p=0.0020 and p=0.0016, respectively).
ParaFold: Paralleling AlphaFold for Large-Scale Predictions
AlphaFold predicts protein structures from the amino acid sequence at or near experimental resolution, solving the 50-year-old protein folding challenge, leading to progress by transforming large-scale genomics data into protein structures. AlphaFold will also greatly change the scientific research model from low-throughput to high-throughput manner. The AlphaFold framework is a mixture of two types of workloads: MSA construction based on CPUs and model inference on GPUs. The first CPU stage dominates the overall runtime, taking hours for a single protein due to the large database sizes and I/O bottlenecks. However, GPUs in this CPU stage remain idle, resulting in low GPU utilization and restricting the capacity of large-scale structure predictions. Therefore, we proposed ParaFold, an open-source parallel version of AlphaFold for high throughput protein structure predictions. ParaFold separates the CPU and GPU parts to enable large-scale structure predictions. ParaFold also effectively reduces the CPU and GPU runtime with two optimizations without compromising the quality of prediction results: using multi-threaded parallelism on CPUs and using optimized JAX compilation on GPUs. We evaluated ParaFold with three datasets of different size and protein lengths. We evaluated the accuracy and efficiency of optimizations on CPUs and GPUs, and showed the large-scale prediction capability by running ParaFold inferences of 19,704 small proteins in five hours on one NVIDIA DGX-2. Using the JAX compile optimization, ParaFold attained a 13.8X average speedup over AlphaFold. ParaFold offers a rapid and effective approach for high-throughput structure predictions, leveraging the predictive power by running on supercomputers, with shorter time, and at a lower cost. The development of ParaFold will greatly speed up high-throughput studies and render the protein "structure-omics" feasible.
Atom: Low-bit Quantization for Efficient and Accurate LLM Serving
The growing demand for Large Language Models (LLMs) in applications such as content generation, intelligent chatbots, and sentiment analysis poses considerable challenges for LLM service providers. To efficiently use GPU resources and boost throughput, batching multiple requests has emerged as a popular paradigm; to further speed up batching, LLM quantization techniques reduce memory consumption and increase computing capacity. However, prevalent quantization schemes (e.g., 8-bit weight-activation quantization) cannot fully leverage the capabilities of modern GPUs, such as 4-bit integer operators, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To maximize LLMs' serving throughput, we introduce Atom, a low-bit quantization method that achieves high throughput improvements with negligible accuracy loss. Atom significantly boosts serving throughput by using low-bit operators and considerably reduces memory consumption via low-bit quantization. It attains high accuracy by applying a novel mixed-precision and fine-grained quantization process. We evaluate Atom on 4-bit weight-activation quantization setups in the serving context. Atom improves end-to-end throughput by up to 7.73times compared to the FP16 and by 2.53times compared to INT8 quantization, while maintaining the same latency target.
Expert-as-a-Service: Towards Efficient, Scalable, and Robust Large-scale MoE Serving
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models challenge serving infrastructures with dynamic, sparse expert utilization, causing instability on conventional systems designed for dense architectures. We propose EaaS, a novel serving system to enable efficient, scalable, and robust MoE deployment. Our system disaggregates MoE modules into independent, stateless services. This design enables fine-grained resource scaling and provides inherent fault tolerance by decoupling compute units. The architecture is powered by a high-performance, CPU-free peer-to-peer communication library that ensures minimal overhead and high throughput. Experiments confirm EaaS's scalability and efficiency, achieving performance comparable to monolithic systems while providing robust fault tolerance and strong scalability. EaaS incurs less than a 2% throughput reduction under simulated hardware failures that would otherwise halt monolithic architectures. It further saves up to 37.5% of computing resources through dynamic fine-grained adaptation to serving traffic, demonstrating strong resilience for large-scale MoE deployment in production.
Jamba: A Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Language Model
We present Jamba, a new base large language model based on a novel hybrid Transformer-Mamba mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. Specifically, Jamba interleaves blocks of Transformer and Mamba layers, enjoying the benefits of both model families. MoE is added in some of these layers to increase model capacity while keeping active parameter usage manageable. This flexible architecture allows resource- and objective-specific configurations. In the particular configuration we have implemented, we end up with a powerful model that fits in a single 80GB GPU. Built at large scale, Jamba provides high throughput and small memory footprint compared to vanilla Transformers, and at the same time state-of-the-art performance on standard language model benchmarks and long-context evaluations. Remarkably, the model presents strong results for up to 256K tokens context length. We study various architectural decisions, such as how to combine Transformer and Mamba layers, and how to mix experts, and show that some of them are crucial in large scale modeling. We also describe several interesting properties of these architectures which the training and evaluation of Jamba have revealed, and plan to release checkpoints from various ablation runs, to encourage further exploration of this novel architecture. We make the weights of our implementation of Jamba publicly available under a permissive license.
StreamDiffusion: A Pipeline-level Solution for Real-time Interactive Generation
We introduce StreamDiffusion, a real-time diffusion pipeline designed for interactive image generation. Existing diffusion models are adept at creating images from text or image prompts, yet they often fall short in real-time interaction. This limitation becomes particularly evident in scenarios involving continuous input, such as Metaverse, live video streaming, and broadcasting, where high throughput is imperative. To address this, we present a novel approach that transforms the original sequential denoising into the batching denoising process. Stream Batch eliminates the conventional wait-and-interact approach and enables fluid and high throughput streams. To handle the frequency disparity between data input and model throughput, we design a novel input-output queue for parallelizing the streaming process. Moreover, the existing diffusion pipeline uses classifier-free guidance(CFG), which requires additional U-Net computation. To mitigate the redundant computations, we propose a novel residual classifier-free guidance (RCFG) algorithm that reduces the number of negative conditional denoising steps to only one or even zero. Besides, we introduce a stochastic similarity filter(SSF) to optimize power consumption. Our Stream Batch achieves around 1.5x speedup compared to the sequential denoising method at different denoising levels. The proposed RCFG leads to speeds up to 2.05x higher than the conventional CFG. Combining the proposed strategies and existing mature acceleration tools makes the image-to-image generation achieve up-to 91.07fps on one RTX4090, improving the throughputs of AutoPipline developed by Diffusers over 59.56x. Furthermore, our proposed StreamDiffusion also significantly reduces the energy consumption by 2.39x on one RTX3060 and 1.99x on one RTX4090, respectively.
Pipeline Parallelism with Controllable Memory
Pipeline parallelism has been widely explored, but most existing schedules lack a systematic methodology. In this paper, we propose a framework to decompose pipeline schedules as repeating a building block and we show that the lifespan of the building block decides the peak activation memory of the pipeline schedule. Guided by the observations, we find that almost all existing pipeline schedules, to the best of our knowledge, are memory inefficient. To address this, we introduce a family of memory efficient building blocks with controllable activation memory, which can reduce the peak activation memory to 1/2 of 1F1B without sacrificing efficiency, and even to 1/3 with comparable throughput. We can also achieve almost zero pipeline bubbles while maintaining the same activation memory as 1F1B. Our evaluations demonstrate that in pure pipeline parallelism settings, our methods outperform 1F1B by from 7% to 55% in terms of throughput. When employing a grid search over hybrid parallelism hyperparameters in practical scenarios, our proposed methods demonstrate a 16% throughput improvement over the 1F1B baseline for large language models.
Faster Inference of LLMs using FP8 on the Intel Gaudi
Low-precision data types are essential in modern neural networks during both training and inference as they enhance throughput and computational capacity by better exploiting available hardware resources. Despite the incorporation of FP8 in commercially available neural network accelerators, a comprehensive exposition of its underlying mechanisms, along with rigorous performance and accuracy evaluations, is still lacking. In this work, we contribute in three significant ways. First, we analyze the implementation details and quantization options associated with FP8 for inference on the Intel Gaudi AI accelerator. Second, we empirically quantify the throughput improvements afforded by the use of FP8 at both the operator level and in end-to-end scenarios. Third, we assess the accuracy impact of various FP8 quantization methods. Our experimental results indicate that the Intel Gaudi 2 accelerator consistently achieves high computational unit utilization, frequently exceeding 90% MFU, while incurring an accuracy degradation of less than 1%.
Matbench Discovery -- An evaluation framework for machine learning crystal stability prediction
Matbench Discovery simulates the deployment of machine learning (ML) energy models in a high-throughput search for stable inorganic crystals. We address the disconnect between (i) thermodynamic stability and formation energy and (ii) in-domain vs out-of-distribution performance. Alongside this paper, we publish a Python package to aid with future model submissions and a growing online leaderboard with further insights into trade-offs between various performance metrics. To answer the question which ML methodology performs best at materials discovery, our initial release explores a variety of models including random forests, graph neural networks (GNN), one-shot predictors, iterative Bayesian optimizers and universal interatomic potentials (UIP). Ranked best-to-worst by their test set F1 score on thermodynamic stability prediction, we find CHGNet > M3GNet > MACE > ALIGNN > MEGNet > CGCNN > CGCNN+P > Wrenformer > BOWSR > Voronoi tessellation fingerprints with random forest. The top 3 models are UIPs, the winning methodology for ML-guided materials discovery, achieving F1 scores of ~0.6 for crystal stability classification and discovery acceleration factors (DAF) of up to 5x on the first 10k most stable predictions compared to dummy selection from our test set. We also highlight a sharp disconnect between commonly used global regression metrics and more task-relevant classification metrics. Accurate regressors are susceptible to unexpectedly high false-positive rates if those accurate predictions lie close to the decision boundary at 0 eV/atom above the convex hull where most materials are. Our results highlight the need to focus on classification metrics that actually correlate with improved stability hit rate.
TrimR: Verifier-based Training-Free Thinking Compression for Efficient Test-Time Scaling
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate exceptional capability in tackling complex mathematical, logical, and coding tasks by leveraging extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Test-time scaling methods, such as prolonging CoT with explicit token-level exploration, can push LRMs' accuracy boundaries, but they incur significant decoding overhead. A key inefficiency source is LRMs often generate redundant thinking CoTs, which demonstrate clear structured overthinking and underthinking patterns. Inspired by human cognitive reasoning processes and numerical optimization theories, we propose TrimR, a verifier-based, training-free, efficient framework for dynamic CoT compression to trim reasoning and enhance test-time scaling, explicitly tailored for production-level deployment. Our method employs a lightweight, pretrained, instruction-tuned verifier to detect and truncate redundant intermediate thoughts of LRMs without any LRM or verifier fine-tuning. We present both the core algorithm and asynchronous online system engineered for high-throughput industrial applications. Empirical evaluations on Ascend NPUs and vLLM show that our framework delivers substantial gains in inference efficiency under large-batch workloads. In particular, on the four MATH500, AIME24, AIME25, and GPQA benchmarks, the reasoning runtime of Pangu Pro MoE, Pangu-R-38B, QwQ-32B, and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B is improved by up to 70% with negligible impact on accuracy.
Orb-v3: atomistic simulation at scale
We introduce Orb-v3, the next generation of the Orb family of universal interatomic potentials. Models in this family expand the performance-speed-memory Pareto frontier, offering near SoTA performance across a range of evaluations with a >10x reduction in latency and > 8x reduction in memory. Our experiments systematically traverse this frontier, charting the trade-off induced by roto-equivariance, conservatism and graph sparsity. Contrary to recent literature, we find that non-equivariant, non-conservative architectures can accurately model physical properties, including those which require higher-order derivatives of the potential energy surface. This model release is guided by the principle that the most valuable foundation models for atomic simulation will excel on all fronts: accuracy, latency and system size scalability. The reward for doing so is a new era of computational chemistry driven by high-throughput and mesoscale all-atom simulations.
NovoBench: Benchmarking Deep Learning-based De Novo Peptide Sequencing Methods in Proteomics
Tandem mass spectrometry has played a pivotal role in advancing proteomics, enabling the high-throughput analysis of protein composition in biological tissues. Many deep learning methods have been developed for de novo peptide sequencing task, i.e., predicting the peptide sequence for the observed mass spectrum. However, two key challenges seriously hinder the further advancement of this important task. Firstly, since there is no consensus for the evaluation datasets, the empirical results in different research papers are often not comparable, leading to unfair comparison. Secondly, the current methods are usually limited to amino acid-level or peptide-level precision and recall metrics. In this work, we present the first unified benchmark NovoBench for de novo peptide sequencing, which comprises diverse mass spectrum data, integrated models, and comprehensive evaluation metrics. Recent impressive methods, including DeepNovo, PointNovo, Casanovo, InstaNovo, AdaNovo and pi-HelixNovo are integrated into our framework. In addition to amino acid-level and peptide-level precision and recall, we evaluate the models' performance in terms of identifying post-tranlational modifications (PTMs), efficiency and robustness to peptide length, noise peaks and missing fragment ratio, which are important influencing factors while seldom be considered. Leveraging this benchmark, we conduct a large-scale study of current methods, report many insightful findings that open up new possibilities for future development.
Neural Foundations of Mental Simulation: Future Prediction of Latent Representations on Dynamic Scenes
Humans and animals have a rich and flexible understanding of the physical world, which enables them to infer the underlying dynamical trajectories of objects and events, plausible future states, and use that to plan and anticipate the consequences of actions. However, the neural mechanisms underlying these computations are unclear. We combine a goal-driven modeling approach with dense neurophysiological data and high-throughput human behavioral readouts to directly impinge on this question. Specifically, we construct and evaluate several classes of sensory-cognitive networks to predict the future state of rich, ethologically-relevant environments, ranging from self-supervised end-to-end models with pixel-wise or object-centric objectives, to models that future predict in the latent space of purely static image-based or dynamic video-based pretrained foundation models. We find strong differentiation across these model classes in their ability to predict neural and behavioral data both within and across diverse environments. In particular, we find that neural responses are currently best predicted by models trained to predict the future state of their environment in the latent space of pretrained foundation models optimized for dynamic scenes in a self-supervised manner. Notably, models that future predict in the latent space of video foundation models that are optimized to support a diverse range of sensorimotor tasks, reasonably match both human behavioral error patterns and neural dynamics across all environmental scenarios that we were able to test. Overall, these findings suggest that the neural mechanisms and behaviors of primate mental simulation are thus far most consistent with being optimized to future predict on dynamic, reusable visual representations that are useful for embodied AI more generally.
Table Detection in the Wild: A Novel Diverse Table Detection Dataset and Method
Recent deep learning approaches in table detection achieved outstanding performance and proved to be effective in identifying document layouts. Currently, available table detection benchmarks have many limitations, including the lack of samples diversity, simple table structure, the lack of training cases, and samples quality. In this paper, we introduce a diverse large-scale dataset for table detection with more than seven thousand samples containing a wide variety of table structures collected from many diverse sources. In addition to that, we also present baseline results using a convolutional neural network-based method to detect table structure in documents. Experimental results show the superiority of applying convolutional deep learning methods over classical computer vision-based methods. The introduction of this diverse table detection dataset will enable the community to develop high throughput deep learning methods for understanding document layout and tabular data processing.
Integer Quantization for Deep Learning Inference: Principles and Empirical Evaluation
Quantization techniques can reduce the size of Deep Neural Networks and improve inference latency and throughput by taking advantage of high throughput integer instructions. In this paper we review the mathematical aspects of quantization parameters and evaluate their choices on a wide range of neural network models for different application domains, including vision, speech, and language. We focus on quantization techniques that are amenable to acceleration by processors with high-throughput integer math pipelines. We also present a workflow for 8-bit quantization that is able to maintain accuracy within 1% of the floating-point baseline on all networks studied, including models that are more difficult to quantize, such as MobileNets and BERT-large.
The Open Molecules 2025 (OMol25) Dataset, Evaluations, and Models
Machine learning (ML) models hold the promise of transforming atomic simulations by delivering quantum chemical accuracy at a fraction of the computational cost. Realization of this potential would enable high-throughout, high-accuracy molecular screening campaigns to explore vast regions of chemical space and facilitate ab initio simulations at sizes and time scales that were previously inaccessible. However, a fundamental challenge to creating ML models that perform well across molecular chemistry is the lack of comprehensive data for training. Despite substantial efforts in data generation, no large-scale molecular dataset exists that combines broad chemical diversity with a high level of accuracy. To address this gap, Meta FAIR introduces Open Molecules 2025 (OMol25), a large-scale dataset composed of more than 100 million density functional theory (DFT) calculations at the omegaB97M-V/def2-TZVPD level of theory, representing billions of CPU core-hours of compute. OMol25 uniquely blends elemental, chemical, and structural diversity including: 83 elements, a wide-range of intra- and intermolecular interactions, explicit solvation, variable charge/spin, conformers, and reactive structures. There are ~83M unique molecular systems in OMol25 covering small molecules, biomolecules, metal complexes, and electrolytes, including structures obtained from existing datasets. OMol25 also greatly expands on the size of systems typically included in DFT datasets, with systems of up to 350 atoms. In addition to the public release of the data, we provide baseline models and a comprehensive set of model evaluations to encourage community engagement in developing the next-generation ML models for molecular chemistry.
RSL-RL: A Learning Library for Robotics Research
RSL-RL is an open-source Reinforcement Learning library tailored to the specific needs of the robotics community. Unlike broad general-purpose frameworks, its design philosophy prioritizes a compact and easily modifiable codebase, allowing researchers to adapt and extend algorithms with minimal overhead. The library focuses on algorithms most widely adopted in robotics, together with auxiliary techniques that address robotics-specific challenges. Optimized for GPU-only training, RSL-RL achieves high-throughput performance in large-scale simulation environments. Its effectiveness has been validated in both simulation benchmarks and in real-world robotic experiments, demonstrating its utility as a lightweight, extensible, and practical framework to develop learning-based robotic controllers. The library is open-sourced at: https://github.com/leggedrobotics/rsl_rl.
Toward AI-Driven Digital Organism: Multiscale Foundation Models for Predicting, Simulating and Programming Biology at All Levels
We present an approach of using AI to model and simulate biology and life. Why is it important? Because at the core of medicine, pharmacy, public health, longevity, agriculture and food security, environmental protection, and clean energy, it is biology at work. Biology in the physical world is too complex to manipulate and always expensive and risky to tamper with. In this perspective, we layout an engineering viable approach to address this challenge by constructing an AI-Driven Digital Organism (AIDO), a system of integrated multiscale foundation models, in a modular, connectable, and holistic fashion to reflect biological scales, connectedness, and complexities. An AIDO opens up a safe, affordable and high-throughput alternative platform for predicting, simulating and programming biology at all levels from molecules to cells to individuals. We envision that an AIDO is poised to trigger a new wave of better-guided wet-lab experimentation and better-informed first-principle reasoning, which can eventually help us better decode and improve life.
Self-Referencing Embedded Strings (SELFIES): A 100% robust molecular string representation
The discovery of novel materials and functional molecules can help to solve some of society's most urgent challenges, ranging from efficient energy harvesting and storage to uncovering novel pharmaceutical drug candidates. Traditionally matter engineering -- generally denoted as inverse design -- was based massively on human intuition and high-throughput virtual screening. The last few years have seen the emergence of significant interest in computer-inspired designs based on evolutionary or deep learning methods. The major challenge here is that the standard strings molecular representation SMILES shows substantial weaknesses in that task because large fractions of strings do not correspond to valid molecules. Here, we solve this problem at a fundamental level and introduce SELFIES (SELF-referencIng Embedded Strings), a string-based representation of molecules which is 100\% robust. Every SELFIES string corresponds to a valid molecule, and SELFIES can represent every molecule. SELFIES can be directly applied in arbitrary machine learning models without the adaptation of the models; each of the generated molecule candidates is valid. In our experiments, the model's internal memory stores two orders of magnitude more diverse molecules than a similar test with SMILES. Furthermore, as all molecules are valid, it allows for explanation and interpretation of the internal working of the generative models.
LongLLaVA: Scaling Multi-modal LLMs to 1000 Images Efficiently via Hybrid Architecture
Expanding the long-context capabilities of Multi-modal Large Language Models~(MLLMs) is crucial for video understanding, high-resolution image understanding, and multi-modal agents. This involves a series of systematic optimizations, including model architecture, data construction and training strategy, particularly addressing challenges such as degraded performance with more images and high computational costs. In this paper, we adapt the model architecture to a hybrid of Mamba and Transformer blocks, approach data construction with both temporal and spatial dependencies among multiple images and employ a progressive training strategy. The released model LongLLaVA~(Long-Context Large Language and Vision Assistant) is the first hybrid MLLM, which achieved a better balance between efficiency and effectiveness. LongLLaVA not only achieves competitive results across various benchmarks, but also maintains high throughput and low memory consumption. Especially, it could process nearly a thousand images on a single A100 80GB GPU, showing promising application prospects for a wide range of tasks.
Jamba-1.5: Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Models at Scale
We present Jamba-1.5, new instruction-tuned large language models based on our Jamba architecture. Jamba is a hybrid Transformer-Mamba mixture of experts architecture, providing high throughput and low memory usage across context lengths, while retaining the same or better quality as Transformer models. We release two model sizes: Jamba-1.5-Large, with 94B active parameters, and Jamba-1.5-Mini, with 12B active parameters. Both models are fine-tuned for a variety of conversational and instruction-following capabilties, and have an effective context length of 256K tokens, the largest amongst open-weight models. To support cost-effective inference, we introduce ExpertsInt8, a novel quantization technique that allows fitting Jamba-1.5-Large on a machine with 8 80GB GPUs when processing 256K-token contexts without loss of quality. When evaluated on a battery of academic and chatbot benchmarks, Jamba-1.5 models achieve excellent results while providing high throughput and outperforming other open-weight models on long-context benchmarks. The model weights for both sizes are publicly available under the Jamba Open Model License and we release ExpertsInt8 as open source.
Prot2Token: A Unified Framework for Protein Modeling via Next-Token Prediction
The diverse nature of protein prediction tasks has traditionally necessitated specialized models, hindering the development of broadly applicable and computationally efficient Protein Language Models (PLMs). In this work, we introduce Prot2Token, a unified framework that overcomes these challenges by converting a wide spectrum of protein-related predictions, from sequence-level properties and residue-specific attributes to complex inter-protein interactions, into a standardized next-token prediction format. At its core, Prot2Token employs an autoregressive decoder, conditioned on embeddings from pre-trained protein encoders and guided by learnable task tokens, to perform diverse predictions. This architecture uniquely facilitates multi-task learning, enabling a single model to master numerous tasks with improved efficiency. We present extensive experimental validation across a variety of benchmarks, demonstrating Prot2Tokens strong predictive power in different types of protein-prediction tasks. Key results include significant speedups (e.g., near 1000x over AlphaFold2 with MSA) and performance often matching or exceeding specialized approaches. Beyond that, we introduce an auxiliary self-supervised decoder pre-training approach to improve spatially sensitive task performance. Prot2Token thus offers a significant step towards a versatile, high-throughput paradigm for protein modeling, promising to accelerate biological discovery and the development of novel therapeutics. The code is available at https://github.com/mahdip72/prot2token .
The Languini Kitchen: Enabling Language Modelling Research at Different Scales of Compute
The Languini Kitchen serves as both a research collective and codebase designed to empower researchers with limited computational resources to contribute meaningfully to the field of language modelling. We introduce an experimental protocol that enables model comparisons based on equivalent compute, measured in accelerator hours. The number of tokens on which a model is trained is defined by the model's throughput and the chosen compute class. Notably, this approach avoids constraints on critical hyperparameters which affect total parameters or floating-point operations. For evaluation, we pre-process an existing large, diverse, and high-quality dataset of books that surpasses existing academic benchmarks in quality, diversity, and document length. On it, we compare methods based on their empirical scaling trends which are estimated through experiments at various levels of compute. This work also provides two baseline models: a feed-forward model derived from the GPT-2 architecture and a recurrent model in the form of a novel LSTM with ten-fold throughput. While the GPT baseline achieves better perplexity throughout all our levels of compute, our LSTM baseline exhibits a predictable and more favourable scaling law. This is due to the improved throughput and the need for fewer training tokens to achieve the same decrease in test perplexity. Extrapolating the scaling laws leads of both models results in an intersection at roughly 50,000 accelerator hours. We hope this work can serve as the foundation for meaningful and reproducible language modelling research.
Locality-aware Fair Scheduling in LLM Serving
Large language model (LLM) inference workload dominates a wide variety of modern AI applications, ranging from multi-turn conversation to document analysis. Balancing fairness and efficiency is critical for managing diverse client workloads with varying prefix patterns. Unfortunately, existing fair scheduling algorithms for LLM serving, such as Virtual Token Counter (VTC), fail to take prefix locality into consideration and thus suffer from poor performance. On the other hand, locality-aware scheduling algorithms in existing LLM serving frameworks tend to maximize the prefix cache hit rate without considering fair sharing among clients. This paper introduces the first locality-aware fair scheduling algorithm, Deficit Longest Prefix Match (DLPM), which can maintain a high degree of prefix locality with a fairness guarantee. We also introduce a novel algorithm, Double Deficit LPM (D^2LPM), extending DLPM for the distributed setup that can find a balance point among fairness, locality, and load-balancing. Our extensive evaluation demonstrates the superior performance of DLPM and D^2LPM in ensuring fairness while maintaining high throughput (up to 2.87times higher than VTC) and low per-client (up to 7.18times lower than state-of-the-art distributed LLM serving system) latency.
FlashInfer: Efficient and Customizable Attention Engine for LLM Inference Serving
Transformers, driven by attention mechanisms, form the foundation of large language models (LLMs). As these models scale up, efficient GPU attention kernels become essential for high-throughput and low-latency inference. Diverse LLM applications demand flexible and high-performance attention solutions. We present FlashInfer: a customizable and efficient attention engine for LLM serving. FlashInfer tackles KV-cache storage heterogeneity using block-sparse format and composable formats to optimize memory access and reduce redundancy. It also offers a customizable attention template, enabling adaptation to various settings through Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation. Additionally, FlashInfer's load-balanced scheduling algorithm adjusts to dynamism of user requests while maintaining compatibility with CUDAGraph which requires static configuration. FlashInfer have been integrated into leading LLM serving frameworks like SGLang, vLLM and MLC-Engine. Comprehensive kernel-level and end-to-end evaluations demonstrate FlashInfer's ability to significantly boost kernel performance across diverse inference scenarios: compared to state-of-the-art LLM serving solutions, FlashInfer achieve 29-69% inter-token-latency reduction compared to compiler backends for LLM serving benchmark, 28-30% latency reduction for long-context inference, and 13-17% speedup for LLM serving with parallel generation.
Optimizing Distributed Training on Frontier for Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success as foundational models, benefiting various downstream applications through fine-tuning. Recent studies on loss scaling have demonstrated the superior performance of larger LLMs compared to their smaller counterparts. Nevertheless, training LLMs with billions of parameters poses significant challenges and requires considerable computational resources. For example, training a one trillion parameter GPT-style model on 20 trillion tokens requires a staggering 120 million exaflops of computation. This research explores efficient distributed training strategies to extract this computation from Frontier, the world's first exascale supercomputer dedicated to open science. We enable and investigate various model and data parallel training techniques, such as tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism, and sharded data parallelism, to facilitate training a trillion-parameter model on Frontier. We empirically assess these techniques and their associated parameters to determine their impact on memory footprint, communication latency, and GPU's computational efficiency. We analyze the complex interplay among these techniques and find a strategy to combine them to achieve high throughput through hyperparameter tuning. We have identified efficient strategies for training large LLMs of varying sizes through empirical analysis and hyperparameter tuning. For 22 Billion, 175 Billion, and 1 Trillion parameters, we achieved GPU throughputs of 38.38%, 36.14%, and 31.96%, respectively. For the training of the 175 Billion parameter model and the 1 Trillion parameter model, we achieved 100% weak scaling efficiency on 1024 and 3072 MI250X GPUs, respectively. We also achieved strong scaling efficiencies of 89% and 87% for these two models.
SmoothQuant+: Accurate and Efficient 4-bit Post-Training WeightQuantization for LLM
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various tasks. However their huge model size and the consequent demand for computational and memory resources also pose challenges to model deployment. Currently, 4-bit post-training quantization (PTQ) has achieved some success in LLMs, reducing the memory footprint by approximately 75% compared to FP16 models, albeit with some accuracy loss. In this paper, we propose SmoothQuant+, an accurate and efficient 4-bit weight-only PTQ that requires no additional training, which enables lossless in accuracy for LLMs for the first time. Based on the fact that the loss of weight quantization is amplified by the activation outliers, SmoothQuant+ smoothes the activation outliers by channel before quantization, while adjusting the corresponding weights for mathematical equivalence, and then performs group-wise 4-bit weight quantization for linear layers. We have integrated SmoothQuant+ into the vLLM framework, an advanced high-throughput inference engine specially developed for LLMs, and equipped it with an efficient W4A16 CUDA kernels, so that vLLM can seamlessly support SmoothQuant+ 4-bit weight quantization. Our results show that, with SmoothQuant+, the Code Llama-34B model can be quantized and deployed on a A100 40GB GPU, achieving lossless accuracy and a throughput increase of 1.9 to 4.0 times compared to the FP16 model deployed on two A100 40GB GPUs. Moreover, the latency per token is only 68% of the FP16 model deployed on two A100 40GB GPUs. This is the state-of-the-art 4-bit weight quantization for LLMs as we know.
PIM-GPT: A Hybrid Process-in-Memory Accelerator for Autoregressive Transformers
Decoder-only Transformer models such as GPT have demonstrated superior performance in text generation, by autoregressively predicting the next token. However, the performance of GPT is bounded by low compute-to-memory-ratio and high memory access. Throughput-oriented architectures such as GPUs target parallel processing rather than sequential token generation, and are not efficient for GPT acceleration, particularly on-device inference applications. Process-in-memory (PIM) architectures can significantly reduce data movement and provide high computation parallelism, and are promising candidates to accelerate GPT inference. In this work, we propose PIM-GPT that aims to achieve high throughput, high energy efficiency and end-to-end acceleration of GPT inference. PIM-GPT leverages DRAM-based PIM solutions to perform multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations on the DRAM chips, greatly reducing data movement. A compact application-specific integrated chip (ASIC) is designed and synthesized to initiate instructions to PIM chips and support data communication along with necessary arithmetic computations. At the software level, the mapping scheme is designed to maximize data locality and computation parallelism by partitioning a matrix among DRAM channels and banks to utilize all in-bank computation resources concurrently. We develop an event-driven clock-cycle accurate simulator to validate the efficacy of the proposed PIM-GPT architecture. Overall, PIM-GPT achieves 41-137times, 631-1074times speedup and 339-1085times, 890-1632times energy efficiency over GPU and CPU baseline, respectively, on 8 GPT models with up to 1.4 billion parameters.
PCBDet: An Efficient Deep Neural Network Object Detection Architecture for Automatic PCB Component Detection on the Edge
There can be numerous electronic components on a given PCB, making the task of visual inspection to detect defects very time-consuming and prone to error, especially at scale. There has thus been significant interest in automatic PCB component detection, particularly leveraging deep learning. However, deep neural networks typically require high computational resources, possibly limiting their feasibility in real-world use cases in manufacturing, which often involve high-volume and high-throughput detection with constrained edge computing resource availability. As a result of an exploration of efficient deep neural network architectures for this use case, we introduce PCBDet, an attention condenser network design that provides state-of-the-art inference throughput while achieving superior PCB component detection performance compared to other state-of-the-art efficient architecture designs. Experimental results show that PCBDet can achieve up to 2times inference speed-up on an ARM Cortex A72 processor when compared to an EfficientNet-based design while achieving sim2-4\% higher mAP on the FICS-PCB benchmark dataset.
Triangle Multiplication Is All You Need For Biomolecular Structure Representations
AlphaFold has transformed protein structure prediction, but emerging applications such as virtual ligand screening, proteome-wide folding, and de novo binder design demand predictions at a massive scale, where runtime and memory costs become prohibitive. A major bottleneck lies in the Pairformer backbone of AlphaFold3-style models, which relies on computationally expensive triangular primitives-especially triangle attention-for pairwise reasoning. We introduce Pairmixer, a streamlined alternative that eliminates triangle attention while preserving higher-order geometric reasoning capabilities that are critical for structure prediction. Pairmixer substantially improves computational efficiency, matching state-of-the-art structure predictors across folding and docking benchmarks, delivering up to 4x faster inference on long sequences while reducing training cost by 34%. Its efficiency alleviates the computational burden of downstream applications such as modeling large protein complexes, high-throughput ligand and binder screening, and hallucination-based design. Within BoltzDesign, for example, Pairmixer delivers over 2x faster sampling and scales to sequences ~30% longer than the memory limits of Pairformer.
Efficient Discriminative Joint Encoders for Large Scale Vision-Language Reranking
Multimodal retrieval still leans on embedding-based models like CLIP for fast vector search over pre-computed image embeddings. Yet, unlike text retrieval, where joint-encoder rerankers are standard, comparable vision--language rerankers are largely absent. We find that seminal joint encoders such as BLIP are severely bottlenecked by an expensive visual feature-extraction stage, preventing practical deployment at scale. Motivated by this bottleneck, we introduce EDJE, an Efficient Discriminative Joint Encoder that precomputes vision tokens offline and compresses them via a lightweight attention-based adapter, so online inference runs only a compact joint encoder over a small set of visual tokens plus the text. EDJE preserves strong retrieval performance while drastically reducing storage and online compute, enabling high-throughput inference. Specifically, EDJE processes 50k image--text pairs/second while requiring 49kB of disk storage per image, matching prior art on Flickr (zero-shot) and COCO (fine-tuned) retrieval. The implementation and checkpoints will be made publicly available shortly.
HGCA: Hybrid GPU-CPU Attention for Long Context LLM Inference
Scaling inference for large language models (LLMs) is increasingly constrained by limited GPU memory, especially due to growing key-value (KV) caches required for long-context generation. While existing approaches offload KV caches to CPU memory or apply sparse attention to reduce GPU load, they often underutilize CPU compute resources and compromise accuracy. We present HGCA, a hybrid CPU-GPU attention mechanism that enables scalable, high-throughput LLM inference with near-full attention quality. HGCA performs dense attention on recently generated KV entries retained in GPU memory and parallel sparse attention on selected, salient KV entries in CPU memory. The attention outputs are efficiently merged using log-sum-exp fusion, minimizing PCIe transfer overhead. HGCA also introduces a finegrained, per-head sparsification strategy optimized for CPU execution, preserving contextual relevance while reducing computation. Our implementation seamlessly integrates into existing LLM frameworks without requiring model retraining. Experiments across diverse models and workloads show that HGCA achieves superior scalability, supports longer sequences and larger batch sizes, and outperforms existing sparse attention baselines in both performance and accuracy -- all on commodity GPU hardware.
Towards Fully FP8 GEMM LLM Training at Scale
Despite the significant potential of FP8 data formats for large language model (LLM) pre-training, their adoption has been limited due to challenges in maintaining stability at scale. Existing approaches often rely on suboptimal fine-grained FP8 kernels or fall back to higher-precision matrix multiplications (GEMMs) in sensitive components, such as attention projections, compromising potential throughput gains. We introduce a new class of LLM architectures that, for the first time, support FP8 computation for all GEMMs within transformer blocks during both forward and backward passes. This enables unprecedented throughput gains, particularly at scale, while matching the downstream performance of standard BF16 training. Our architecture design reduces large outlier activations, promoting stable long-term FP8 training. In addition, we identify key metrics to monitor low-precision training and predict potential future divergences.
MOFA: Discovering Materials for Carbon Capture with a GenAI- and Simulation-Based Workflow
We present MOFA, an open-source generative AI (GenAI) plus simulation workflow for high-throughput generation of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) on large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) systems. MOFA addresses key challenges in integrating GPU-accelerated computing for GPU-intensive GenAI tasks, including distributed training and inference, alongside CPU- and GPU-optimized tasks for screening and filtering AI-generated MOFs using molecular dynamics, density functional theory, and Monte Carlo simulations. These heterogeneous tasks are unified within an online learning framework that optimizes the utilization of available CPU and GPU resources across HPC systems. Performance metrics from a 450-node (14,400 AMD Zen 3 CPUs + 1800 NVIDIA A100 GPUs) supercomputer run demonstrate that MOFA achieves high-throughput generation of novel MOF structures, with CO_2 adsorption capacities ranking among the top 10 in the hypothetical MOF (hMOF) dataset. Furthermore, the production of high-quality MOFs exhibits a linear relationship with the number of nodes utilized. The modular architecture of MOFA will facilitate its integration into other scientific applications that dynamically combine GenAI with large-scale simulations.
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence(AGI) in Semiconductor Material Science: Early Explorations into the Next Frontier of Generative AI-Assisted Electron Micrograph Analysis
Characterizing materials with electron micrographs poses significant challenges for automated labeling due to the complex nature of nanomaterial structures. To address this, we introduce a fully automated, end-to-end pipeline that leverages recent advances in Generative AI. It is designed for analyzing and understanding the microstructures of semiconductor materials with effectiveness comparable to that of human experts, contributing to the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in nanomaterial identification. Our approach utilizes Large MultiModal Models (LMMs) such as GPT-4V, alongside text-to-image models like DALLE-3. We integrate a GPT-4 guided Visual Question Answering (VQA) method to analyze nanomaterial images, generate synthetic nanomaterial images via DALLE-3, and employ in-context learning with few-shot prompting in GPT-4V for accurate nanomaterial identification. Our method surpasses traditional techniques by enhancing the precision of nanomaterial identification and optimizing the process for high-throughput screening.
Astrocyte-Enabled Advancements in Spiking Neural Networks for Large Language Modeling
Within the complex neuroarchitecture of the brain, astrocytes play crucial roles in development, structure, and metabolism. These cells regulate neural activity through tripartite synapses, directly impacting cognitive processes such as learning and memory. Despite the growing recognition of astrocytes' significance, traditional Spiking Neural Network (SNN) models remain predominantly neuron-centric, overlooking the profound influence of astrocytes on neural dynamics. Inspired by these biological insights, we have developed an Astrocyte-Modulated Spiking Unit (AM-SU), an innovative framework that integrates neuron-astrocyte interactions into the computational paradigm, demonstrating wide applicability across various hardware platforms. Our Astrocyte-Modulated Spiking Neural Network (AstroSNN) exhibits exceptional performance in tasks involving memory retention and natural language generation, particularly in handling long-term dependencies and complex linguistic structures. The design of AstroSNN not only enhances its biological authenticity but also introduces novel computational dynamics, enabling more effective processing of complex temporal dependencies. Furthermore, AstroSNN shows low latency, high throughput, and reduced memory usage in practical applications, making it highly suitable for resource-constrained environments. By successfully integrating astrocytic dynamics into intelligent neural networks, our work narrows the gap between biological plausibility and neural modeling, laying the groundwork for future biologically-inspired neural computing research that includes both neurons and astrocytes.
TurboViT: Generating Fast Vision Transformers via Generative Architecture Search
Vision transformers have shown unprecedented levels of performance in tackling various visual perception tasks in recent years. However, the architectural and computational complexity of such network architectures have made them challenging to deploy in real-world applications with high-throughput, low-memory requirements. As such, there has been significant research recently on the design of efficient vision transformer architectures. In this study, we explore the generation of fast vision transformer architecture designs via generative architecture search (GAS) to achieve a strong balance between accuracy and architectural and computational efficiency. Through this generative architecture search process, we create TurboViT, a highly efficient hierarchical vision transformer architecture design that is generated around mask unit attention and Q-pooling design patterns. The resulting TurboViT architecture design achieves significantly lower architectural computational complexity (>2.47times smaller than FasterViT-0 while achieving same accuracy) and computational complexity (>3.4times fewer FLOPs and 0.9% higher accuracy than MobileViT2-2.0) when compared to 10 other state-of-the-art efficient vision transformer network architecture designs within a similar range of accuracy on the ImageNet-1K dataset. Furthermore, TurboViT demonstrated strong inference latency and throughput in both low-latency and batch processing scenarios (>3.21times lower latency and >3.18times higher throughput compared to FasterViT-0 for low-latency scenario). These promising results demonstrate the efficacy of leveraging generative architecture search for generating efficient transformer architecture designs for high-throughput scenarios.
From structure mining to unsupervised exploration of atomic octahedral networks
Networks of atom-centered coordination octahedra commonly occur in inorganic and hybrid solid-state materials. Characterizing their spatial arrangements and characteristics is crucial for relating structures to properties for many materials families. The traditional method using case-by-case inspection becomes prohibitive for discovering trends and similarities in large datasets. Here, we operationalize chemical intuition to automate the geometric parsing, quantification, and classification of coordination octahedral networks. We find axis-resolved tilting trends in ABO_{3} perovskite polymorphs, which assist in detecting oxidation state changes. Moreover, we develop a scale-invariant encoding scheme to represent these networks, which, combined with human-assisted unsupervised machine learning, allows us to taxonomize the inorganic framework polytypes in hybrid iodoplumbates (A_xPb_yI_z). Consequently, we uncover a violation of Pauling's third rule and the design principles underpinning their topological diversity. Our results offer a glimpse into the vast design space of atomic octahedral networks and inform high-throughput, targeted screening of specific structure types.
Snapshot hyperspectral imaging of intracellular lasers
Intracellular lasers are emerging as powerful biosensors for multiplexed tracking and precision sensing of cells and their microenvironment. This sensing capacity is enabled by quantifying their narrow-linewidth emission spectra, which is presently challenging to do at high speeds. In this work, we demonstrate rapid snapshot hyperspectral imaging of intracellular lasers. Using integral field mapping with a microlens array and a diffraction grating, we obtain images of the spatial and spectral intensity distribution from a single camera acquisition. We demonstrate widefield hyperspectral imaging over a 3times3 mm^2 field of view and volumetric imaging over 250times250times800 mum^3 volumes with a spatial resolution of 5 mum and a spectral resolution of less than 0.8 nm. We evaluate the performance and outline the challenges and strengths of snapshot methods in the context of characterising the emission from intracellular lasers. This method offers new opportunities for a diverse range of applications, including high-throughput and long-term biosensing with intracellular lasers.
KAIROS: Building Cost-Efficient Machine Learning Inference Systems with Heterogeneous Cloud Resources
Online inference is becoming a key service product for many businesses, deployed in cloud platforms to meet customer demands. Despite their revenue-generation capability, these services need to operate under tight Quality-of-Service (QoS) and cost budget constraints. This paper introduces KAIROS, a novel runtime framework that maximizes the query throughput while meeting QoS target and a cost budget. KAIROS designs and implements novel techniques to build a pool of heterogeneous compute hardware without online exploration overhead, and distribute inference queries optimally at runtime. Our evaluation using industry-grade deep learning (DL) models shows that KAIROS yields up to 2X the throughput of an optimal homogeneous solution, and outperforms state-of-the-art schemes by up to 70%, despite advantageous implementations of the competing schemes to ignore their exploration overhead.
DeepSpeed Inference: Enabling Efficient Inference of Transformer Models at Unprecedented Scale
The past several years have witnessed the success of transformer-based models, and their scale and application scenarios continue to grow aggressively. The current landscape of transformer models is increasingly diverse: the model size varies drastically with the largest being of hundred-billion parameters; the model characteristics differ due to the sparsity introduced by the Mixture-of-Experts; the target application scenarios can be latency-critical or throughput-oriented; the deployment hardware could be single- or multi-GPU systems with different types of memory and storage, etc. With such increasing diversity and the fast-evolving pace of transformer models, designing a highly performant and efficient inference system is extremely challenging. In this paper, we present DeepSpeed Inference, a comprehensive system solution for transformer model inference to address the above-mentioned challenges. DeepSpeed Inference consists of (1) a multi-GPU inference solution to minimize latency while maximizing the throughput of both dense and sparse transformer models when they fit in aggregate GPU memory, and (2) a heterogeneous inference solution that leverages CPU and NVMe memory in addition to the GPU memory and compute to enable high inference throughput with large models which do not fit in aggregate GPU memory. DeepSpeed Inference reduces latency by up to 7.3X over the state-of-the-art for latency-oriented scenarios and increases throughput by over 1.5x for throughput-oriented scenarios. Moreover, it enables trillion parameter scale inference under real-time latency constraints by leveraging hundreds of GPUs, an unprecedented scale for inference. It can inference 25x larger models than with GPU-only solutions, while delivering a high throughput of 84 TFLOPS (over 50% of A6000 peak).
Gmail Smart Compose: Real-Time Assisted Writing
In this paper, we present Smart Compose, a novel system for generating interactive, real-time suggestions in Gmail that assists users in writing mails by reducing repetitive typing. In the design and deployment of such a large-scale and complicated system, we faced several challenges including model selection, performance evaluation, serving and other practical issues. At the core of Smart Compose is a large-scale neural language model. We leveraged state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for language model training which enabled high-quality suggestion prediction, and constructed novel serving infrastructure for high-throughput and real-time inference. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed system design and deployment approach. This system is currently being served in Gmail.
Efficient LLM inference solution on Intel GPU
Transformer based Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used in many fields, and the efficiency of LLM inference becomes hot topic in real applications. However, LLMs are usually complicatedly designed in model structure with massive operations and perform inference in the auto-regressive mode, making it a challenging task to design a system with high efficiency. In this paper, we propose an efficient LLM inference solution with low latency and high throughput. Firstly, we simplify the LLM decoder layer by fusing data movement and element-wise operations to reduce the memory access frequency and lower system latency. We also propose a segment KV cache policy to keep key/value of the request and response tokens in separate physical memory for effective device memory management, helping enlarge the runtime batch size and improve system throughput. A customized Scaled-Dot-Product-Attention kernel is designed to match our fusion policy based on the segment KV cache solution. We implement our LLM inference solution on Intel GPU and publish it publicly. Compared with the standard HuggingFace implementation, the proposed solution achieves up to 7x lower token latency and 27x higher throughput for some popular LLMs on Intel GPU.
A Heat Diffusion Perspective on Geodesic Preserving Dimensionality Reduction
Diffusion-based manifold learning methods have proven useful in representation learning and dimensionality reduction of modern high dimensional, high throughput, noisy datasets. Such datasets are especially present in fields like biology and physics. While it is thought that these methods preserve underlying manifold structure of data by learning a proxy for geodesic distances, no specific theoretical links have been established. Here, we establish such a link via results in Riemannian geometry explicitly connecting heat diffusion to manifold distances. In this process, we also formulate a more general heat kernel based manifold embedding method that we call heat geodesic embeddings. This novel perspective makes clearer the choices available in manifold learning and denoising. Results show that our method outperforms existing state of the art in preserving ground truth manifold distances, and preserving cluster structure in toy datasets. We also showcase our method on single cell RNA-sequencing datasets with both continuum and cluster structure, where our method enables interpolation of withheld timepoints of data. Finally, we show that parameters of our more general method can be configured to give results similar to PHATE (a state-of-the-art diffusion based manifold learning method) as well as SNE (an attraction/repulsion neighborhood based method that forms the basis of t-SNE).
ADAPT: Lightweight, Long-Range Machine Learning Force Fields Without Graphs
Point defects play a central role in driving the properties of materials. First-principles methods are widely used to compute defect energetics and structures, including at scale for high-throughput defect databases. However, these methods are computationally expensive, making machine-learning force fields (MLFFs) an attractive alternative for accelerating structural relaxations. Most existing MLFFs are based on graph neural networks (GNNs), which can suffer from oversmoothing and poor representation of long-range interactions. Both of these issues are especially of concern when modeling point defects. To address these challenges, we introduce the Accelerated Deep Atomic Potential Transformer (ADAPT), an MLFF that replaces graph representations with a direct coordinates-in-space formulation and explicitly considers all pairwise atomic interactions. Atoms are treated as tokens, with a Transformer encoder modeling their interactions. Applied to a dataset of silicon point defects, ADAPT achieves a roughly 33 percent reduction in both force and energy prediction errors relative to a state-of-the-art GNN-based model, while requiring only a fraction of the computational cost.
ToxBench: A Binding Affinity Prediction Benchmark with AB-FEP-Calculated Labels for Human Estrogen Receptor Alpha
Protein-ligand binding affinity prediction is essential for drug discovery and toxicity assessment. While machine learning (ML) promises fast and accurate predictions, its progress is constrained by the availability of reliable data. In contrast, physics-based methods such as absolute binding free energy perturbation (AB-FEP) deliver high accuracy but are computationally prohibitive for high-throughput applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce ToxBench, the first large-scale AB-FEP dataset designed for ML development and focused on a single pharmaceutically critical target, Human Estrogen Receptor Alpha (ERalpha). ToxBench contains 8,770 ERalpha-ligand complex structures with binding free energies computed via AB-FEP with a subset validated against experimental affinities at 1.75 kcal/mol RMSE, along with non-overlapping ligand splits to assess model generalizability. Using ToxBench, we further benchmark state-of-the-art ML methods, and notably, our proposed DualBind model, which employs a dual-loss framework to effectively learn the binding energy function. The benchmark results demonstrate the superior performance of DualBind and the potential of ML to approximate AB-FEP at a fraction of the computational cost.
Precise Legal Sentence Boundary Detection for Retrieval at Scale: NUPunkt and CharBoundary
We present NUPunkt and CharBoundary, two sentence boundary detection libraries optimized for high-precision, high-throughput processing of legal text in large-scale applications such as due diligence, e-discovery, and legal research. These libraries address the critical challenges posed by legal documents containing specialized citations, abbreviations, and complex sentence structures that confound general-purpose sentence boundary detectors. Our experimental evaluation on five diverse legal datasets comprising over 25,000 documents and 197,000 annotated sentence boundaries demonstrates that NUPunkt achieves 91.1% precision while processing 10 million characters per second with modest memory requirements (432 MB). CharBoundary models offer balanced and adjustable precision-recall tradeoffs, with the large model achieving the highest F1 score (0.782) among all tested methods. Notably, NUPunkt provides a 29-32% precision improvement over general-purpose tools while maintaining exceptional throughput, processing multi-million document collections in minutes rather than hours. Both libraries run efficiently on standard CPU hardware without requiring specialized accelerators. NUPunkt is implemented in pure Python with zero external dependencies, while CharBoundary relies only on scikit-learn and optional ONNX runtime integration for optimized performance. Both libraries are available under the MIT license, can be installed via PyPI, and can be interactively tested at https://sentences.aleainstitute.ai/. These libraries address critical precision issues in retrieval-augmented generation systems by preserving coherent legal concepts across sentences, where each percentage improvement in precision yields exponentially greater reductions in context fragmentation, creating cascading benefits throughout retrieval pipelines and significantly enhancing downstream reasoning quality.
Text2Topic: Multi-Label Text Classification System for Efficient Topic Detection in User Generated Content with Zero-Shot Capabilities
Multi-label text classification is a critical task in the industry. It helps to extract structured information from large amount of textual data. We propose Text to Topic (Text2Topic), which achieves high multi-label classification performance by employing a Bi-Encoder Transformer architecture that utilizes concatenation, subtraction, and multiplication of embeddings on both text and topic. Text2Topic also supports zero-shot predictions, produces domain-specific text embeddings, and enables production-scale batch-inference with high throughput. The final model achieves accurate and comprehensive results compared to state-of-the-art baselines, including large language models (LLMs). In this study, a total of 239 topics are defined, and around 1.6 million text-topic pairs annotations (in which 200K are positive) are collected on approximately 120K texts from 3 main data sources on Booking.com. The data is collected with optimized smart sampling and partial labeling. The final Text2Topic model is deployed on a real-world stream processing platform, and it outperforms other models with 92.9% micro mAP, as well as a 75.8% macro mAP score. We summarize the modeling choices which are extensively tested through ablation studies, and share detailed in-production decision-making steps.
Branch-Train-MiX: Mixing Expert LLMs into a Mixture-of-Experts LLM
We investigate efficient methods for training Large Language Models (LLMs) to possess capabilities in multiple specialized domains, such as coding, math reasoning and world knowledge. Our method, named Branch-Train-MiX (BTX), starts from a seed model, which is branched to train experts in embarrassingly parallel fashion with high throughput and reduced communication cost. After individual experts are asynchronously trained, BTX brings together their feedforward parameters as experts in Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) layers and averages the remaining parameters, followed by an MoE-finetuning stage to learn token-level routing. BTX generalizes two special cases, the Branch-Train-Merge method, which does not have the MoE finetuning stage to learn routing, and sparse upcycling, which omits the stage of training experts asynchronously. Compared to alternative approaches, BTX achieves the best accuracy-efficiency tradeoff.
SpecExec: Massively Parallel Speculative Decoding for Interactive LLM Inference on Consumer Devices
As large language models gain widespread adoption, running them efficiently becomes crucial. Recent works on LLM inference use speculative decoding to achieve extreme speedups. However, most of these works implicitly design their algorithms for high-end datacenter hardware. In this work, we ask the opposite question: how fast can we run LLMs on consumer machines? Consumer GPUs can no longer fit the largest available models (50B+ parameters) and must offload them to RAM or SSD. When running with offloaded parameters, the inference engine can process batches of hundreds or thousands of tokens at the same time as just one token, making it a natural fit for speculative decoding. We propose SpecExec (Speculative Execution), a simple parallel decoding method that can generate up to 20 tokens per target model iteration for popular LLM families. It utilizes the high spikiness of the token probabilities distribution in modern LLMs and a high degree of alignment between model output probabilities. SpecExec takes the most probable tokens continuation from the draft model to build a "cache" tree for the target model, which then gets validated in a single pass. Using SpecExec, we demonstrate inference of 50B+ parameter LLMs on consumer GPUs with RAM offloading at 4-6 tokens per second with 4-bit quantization or 2-3 tokens per second with 16-bit weights.
TinyChart: Efficient Chart Understanding with Visual Token Merging and Program-of-Thoughts Learning
Charts are important for presenting and explaining complex data relationships. Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various chart understanding tasks. However, the sheer size of these models in terms of parameters and computational requirements limits their use in resource-constrained environments. In this paper, we present TinyChart, an efficient MLLM for chart understanding with only 3B parameters. TinyChart overcomes two key challenges in efficient chart understanding: (1) reduce the burden of learning numerical computations through a Program-of-Thoughts (PoT) learning strategy, which trains the model to generate Python programs for numerical calculations, and (2) reduce lengthy vision feature sequences produced by the vision transformer for high-resolution images through a Vision Token Merging module, which gradually merges most similar vision tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our 3B TinyChart achieves SOTA performance on a variety of chart understanding benchmarks including ChartQA, Chart-to-Text, Chart-to-Table, OpenCQA, and ChartX. It outperforms several chart understanding MLLM with up to 13B parameters such as ChartLlama and ChartAst, and close-sourced general-purpose MLLM GPT-4V on ChartQA. It also demonstrates its superior efficiency with higher throughput during inference due to a smaller model scale and more efficient vision encoding. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/X-PLUG/mPLUG-DocOwl/tree/main/TinyChart.
Scissorhands: Exploiting the Persistence of Importance Hypothesis for LLM KV Cache Compression at Test Time
Large language models(LLMs) have sparked a new wave of exciting AI applications. Hosting these models at scale requires significant memory resources. One crucial memory bottleneck for the deployment stems from the context window. It is commonly recognized that model weights are memory hungry; however, the size of key-value embedding stored during the generation process (KV cache) can easily surpass the model size. The enormous size of the KV cache puts constraints on the inference batch size, which is crucial for high throughput inference workload. Inspired by an interesting observation of the attention scores, we hypothesize the persistence of importance: only pivotal tokens, which had a substantial influence at one step, will significantly influence future generations. Based on our empirical verification and theoretical analysis around this hypothesis, we propose Scissorhands, a system that maintains the memory usage of the KV cache at a fixed budget without finetuning the model. In essence, Scissorhands manages the KV cache by storing the pivotal tokens with a higher probability. We validate that Scissorhands reduces the inference memory usage of the KV cache by up to 5X without compromising model quality. We further demonstrate that Scissorhands can be combined with 4-bit quantization, traditionally used to compress model weights, to achieve up to 20X compression.
Closed-loop Error Correction Learning Accelerates Experimental Discovery of Thermoelectric Materials
The exploration of thermoelectric materials is challenging considering the large materials space, combined with added exponential degrees of freedom coming from doping and the diversity of synthetic pathways. Here we seek to incorporate historical data and update and refine it using experimental feedback by employing error-correction learning (ECL). We thus learn from prior datasets and then adapt the model to differences in synthesis and characterization that are otherwise difficult to parameterize. We then apply this strategy to discovering thermoelectric materials where we prioritize synthesis at temperatures < 300{\deg}C. We document a previously unreported chemical family of thermoelectric materials, PbSe:SnSb, finding that the best candidate in this chemical family, 2 wt% SnSb doped PbSe, exhibits a power factor more than 2x that of PbSe. Our investigations show that our closed-loop experimentation strategy reduces the required number of experiments to find an optimized material by as much as 3x compared to high-throughput searches powered by state-of-the-art machine learning models. We also observe that this improvement is dependent on the accuracy of prior in a manner that exhibits diminishing returns, and after a certain accuracy is reached, it is factors associated with experimental pathways that dictate the trends.
An Efficient Memory-Augmented Transformer for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks
Access to external knowledge is essential for many natural language processing tasks, such as question answering and dialogue. Existing methods often rely on a parametric model that stores knowledge in its parameters, or use a retrieval-augmented model that has access to an external knowledge source. Parametric and retrieval-augmented models have complementary strengths in terms of computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. To combine the strength of both approaches, we propose the Efficient Memory-Augmented Transformer (EMAT) -- it encodes external knowledge into a key-value memory and exploits the fast maximum inner product search for memory querying. We also introduce pre-training tasks that allow EMAT to encode informative key-value representations, and to learn an implicit strategy to integrate multiple memory slots into the transformer. Experiments on various knowledge-intensive tasks such as question answering and dialogue datasets show that, simply augmenting parametric models (T5-base) using our method produces more accurate results (e.g., 25.8 -> 44.3 EM on NQ) while retaining a high throughput (e.g., 1000 queries/s on NQ). Compared to retrieval-augmented models, EMAT runs substantially faster across the board and produces more accurate results on WoW and ELI5. Our code and datasets are available at https://github. com/uclnlp/EMAT.
Performance-Guided LLM Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Text Classification at Scale
Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges at inference time due to their high computational demands. To address this, we present Performance-Guided Knowledge Distillation (PGKD), a cost-effective and high-throughput solution for production text classification applications. PGKD utilizes teacher-student Knowledge Distillation to distill the knowledge of LLMs into smaller, task-specific models. PGKD establishes an active learning routine between the student model and the LLM; the LLM continuously generates new training data leveraging hard-negative mining, student model validation performance, and early-stopping protocols to inform the data generation. By employing a cyclical, performance-aware approach tailored for highly multi-class, sparsely annotated datasets prevalent in industrial text classification, PGKD effectively addresses training challenges and outperforms traditional BERT-base models and other knowledge distillation methods on several multi-class classification datasets. Additionally, cost and latency benchmarking reveals that models fine-tuned with PGKD are up to 130X faster and 25X less expensive than LLMs for inference on the same classification task. While PGKD is showcased for text classification tasks, its versatile framework can be extended to any LLM distillation task, including language generation, making it a powerful tool for optimizing performance across a wide range of AI applications.
Mnemosyne: Parallelization Strategies for Efficiently Serving Multi-Million Context Length LLM Inference Requests Without Approximations
As large language models (LLMs) evolve to handle increasingly longer contexts, serving inference requests for context lengths in the range of millions of tokens presents unique challenges. While existing techniques are effective for training, they fail to address the unique challenges of inference, such as varying prefill and decode phases and their associated latency constraints - like Time to First Token (TTFT) and Time Between Tokens (TBT). Furthermore, there are no long context inference solutions that allow batching requests to increase the hardware utilization today. In this paper, we propose three key innovations for efficient interactive long context LLM inference, without resorting to any approximation: adaptive chunking to reduce prefill overheads in mixed batching, Sequence Pipeline Parallelism (SPP) to lower TTFT, and KV Cache Parallelism (KVP) to minimize TBT. These contributions are combined into a 3D parallelism strategy, enabling Mnemosyne to scale interactive inference to context lengths at least up to 10 million tokens with high throughput enabled with batching. To our knowledge, Mnemosyne is the first to be able to achieve support for 10 million long context inference efficiently, while satisfying production-grade SLOs on TBT (30ms) on contexts up to and including 10 million.
PackMamba: Efficient Processing of Variable-Length Sequences in Mamba training
With the evolution of large language models, traditional Transformer models become computationally demanding for lengthy sequences due to the quadratic growth in computation with respect to the sequence length. Mamba, emerging as a groundbreaking architecture in the field of generative AI, demonstrates remarkable proficiency in handling elongated sequences with reduced computational and memory complexity. Nevertheless, the existing training framework of Mamba presents inefficiency with variable-length sequence inputs. Either single-sequence training results in low GPU utilization, or batched processing of variable-length sequences to a maximum length incurs considerable memory and computational overhead. To address this problem, we analyze the performance of bottleneck operators in Mamba under diverse tensor shapes and proposed PackMamba, a high-throughput Mamba that efficiently handles variable-length sequences. Diving deep into state-space models (SSMs), we modify the parallel operators to avoid passing information between individual sequences while maintaining high performance. Experimental results on an NVIDIA A100 GPU demonstrate throughput exceeding the baseline single-sequence processing scheme: 3.06x speedup on the 1.4B model and 2.62x on the 2.8B model.
LRQ: Optimizing Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models by Learning Low-Rank Weight-Scaling Matrices
With the commercialization of large language models (LLMs), weight-activation quantization has emerged to compress and accelerate LLMs, achieving high throughput while reducing inference costs. However, existing post-training quantization (PTQ) techniques for quantizing weights and activations of LLMs still suffer from non-negligible accuracy drops, especially on massive multitask language understanding. To address this issue, we propose Low-Rank Quantization (LRQ) - a simple yet effective post-training weight quantization method for LLMs that reconstructs the outputs of an intermediate Transformer block by leveraging low-rank weight-scaling matrices, replacing the conventional full weight-scaling matrices that entail as many learnable scales as their associated weights. Thanks to parameter sharing via low-rank structure, LRQ only needs to learn significantly fewer parameters while enabling the individual scaling of weights, thus boosting the generalization capability of quantized LLMs. We show the superiority of LRQ over prior LLM PTQ works under (i) 8-bit weight and per-tensor activation quantization, (ii) 4-bit weight and 8-bit per-token activation quantization, and (iii) low-bit weight-only quantization schemes. Our code is available at https://github.com/onliwad101/FlexRound_LRQ to inspire LLM researchers and engineers.
Mixed-TD: Efficient Neural Network Accelerator with Layer-Specific Tensor Decomposition
Neural Network designs are quite diverse, from VGG-style to ResNet-style, and from Convolutional Neural Networks to Transformers. Towards the design of efficient accelerators, many works have adopted a dataflow-based, inter-layer pipelined architecture, with a customised hardware towards each layer, achieving ultra high throughput and low latency. The deployment of neural networks to such dataflow architecture accelerators is usually hindered by the available on-chip memory as it is desirable to preload the weights of neural networks on-chip to maximise the system performance. To address this, networks are usually compressed before the deployment through methods such as pruning, quantization and tensor decomposition. In this paper, a framework for mapping CNNs onto FPGAs based on a novel tensor decomposition method called Mixed-TD is proposed. The proposed method applies layer-specific Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Canonical Polyadic Decomposition (CPD) in a mixed manner, achieving 1.73x to 10.29x throughput per DSP to state-of-the-art CNNs. Our work is open-sourced: https://github.com/Yu-Zhewen/Mixed-TD
Similarity search in the blink of an eye with compressed indices
Nowadays, data is represented by vectors. Retrieving those vectors, among millions and billions, that are similar to a given query is a ubiquitous problem, known as similarity search, of relevance for a wide range of applications. Graph-based indices are currently the best performing techniques for billion-scale similarity search. However, their random-access memory pattern presents challenges to realize their full potential. In this work, we present new techniques and systems for creating faster and smaller graph-based indices. To this end, we introduce a novel vector compression method, Locally-adaptive Vector Quantization (LVQ), that uses per-vector scaling and scalar quantization to improve search performance with fast similarity computations and a reduced effective bandwidth, while decreasing memory footprint and barely impacting accuracy. LVQ, when combined with a new high-performance computing system for graph-based similarity search, establishes the new state of the art in terms of performance and memory footprint. For billions of vectors, LVQ outcompetes the second-best alternatives: (1) in the low-memory regime, by up to 20.7x in throughput with up to a 3x memory footprint reduction, and (2) in the high-throughput regime by 5.8x with 1.4x less memory.
xTrimoABFold: De novo Antibody Structure Prediction without MSA
In the field of antibody engineering, an essential task is to design a novel antibody whose paratopes bind to a specific antigen with correct epitopes. Understanding antibody structure and its paratope can facilitate a mechanistic understanding of its function. Therefore, antibody structure prediction from its sequence alone has always been a highly valuable problem for de novo antibody design. AlphaFold2, a breakthrough in the field of structural biology, provides a solution to predict protein structure based on protein sequences and computationally expensive coevolutionary multiple sequence alignments (MSAs). However, the computational efficiency and undesirable prediction accuracy of antibodies, especially on the complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) of antibodies limit their applications in the industrially high-throughput drug design. To learn an informative representation of antibodies, we employed a deep antibody language model (ALM) on curated sequences from the observed antibody space database via a transformer model. We also developed a novel model named xTrimoABFold to predict antibody structure from antibody sequence based on the pretrained ALM as well as efficient evoformers and structural modules. The model was trained end-to-end on the antibody structures in PDB by minimizing the ensemble loss of domain-specific focal loss on CDR and the frame-aligned point loss. xTrimoABFold outperforms AlphaFold2 and other protein language model based SOTAs, e.g., OmegaFold, HelixFold-Single, and IgFold with a large significant margin (30+\% improvement on RMSD) while performing 151 times faster than AlphaFold2. To the best of our knowledge, xTrimoABFold achieved state-of-the-art antibody structure prediction. Its improvement in both accuracy and efficiency makes it a valuable tool for de novo antibody design and could make further improvements in immuno-theory.
DC-BERT: Decoupling Question and Document for Efficient Contextual Encoding
Recent studies on open-domain question answering have achieved prominent performance improvement using pre-trained language models such as BERT. State-of-the-art approaches typically follow the "retrieve and read" pipeline and employ BERT-based reranker to filter retrieved documents before feeding them into the reader module. The BERT retriever takes as input the concatenation of question and each retrieved document. Despite the success of these approaches in terms of QA accuracy, due to the concatenation, they can barely handle high-throughput of incoming questions each with a large collection of retrieved documents. To address the efficiency problem, we propose DC-BERT, a decoupled contextual encoding framework that has dual BERT models: an online BERT which encodes the question only once, and an offline BERT which pre-encodes all the documents and caches their encodings. On SQuAD Open and Natural Questions Open datasets, DC-BERT achieves 10x speedup on document retrieval, while retaining most (about 98%) of the QA performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches for open-domain question answering.
