Papers for

ai infrastructure engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Coding agents struggle to develop complex ai infrastructure tasks

InfraDev: Can Coding Agents Develop AI Infrastructure, and How Can We Tell?

Abstract: Coding agents are beginning to develop the production-grade AI infrastructure that trains and serves large models, yet existing benchmarks cover only single kernels or single-GPU tasks, and grade with tests and prompts that misjudge both correct and incorrect patches. We introduce InfraDev, a benchmark of 36 tasks built from real-world pull requests to Megatron-LM, vLLM, and verl, covering infrastructure development for training, inference, and reinforcement learning. Each task asks an agent to reimplement a real change that spans many files and must run correctly across many GPUs. To grade such changes, we jointly synthesize hidden probes, which enforce the requirements the original tests leave unchecked, and a prompt that states every interface the probes call without revealing the solution. We also design a shared execution environment that reuses dependencies and artifacts across tasks, cutting storage by 52-57% and build time by 13-14% on Megatron-LM and vLLM. Across six frontier models, the best resolves only 38.9% of the tasks; the probes reject 32% of the submissions that pass every official test, and with the original pull request descriptions as prompts, no model resolves a single task. Failure analysis shows that structural and state errors dominate and that agents' own tests rarely check memory, time, or traffic. Turning these findings into an agent skill raises the resolved rate of a frontier model on the Megatron-LM tasks by 10.5%.

Tue 27 OctArtificial IntelligenceDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Building the software that trains and runs large AI models is very complex and involves many parts working together. The authors created InfraDev, a set of real-life coding problems where AI helpers try to make important fixes and improvements to this AI infrastructure. They found that current AI coding agents perform poorly on these tough tasks, often making mistakes that existing tests miss. The authors also showed that by teaching agents to better test for errors like memory usage and performance, the success rate improves noticeably.
Open → 2610.36589v1

ThinkBit cuts AI model size while keeping reasoning strong

ThinkBit: Search Codewords, Recalibrate Scales, Select by Reasoning

Abstract: Reasoning language models generate thousands of tokens per answer, and generation speed is limited by memory bandwidth, so storing weights in two bits instead of bfloat16 can potentially make inference 8$\times$ cheaper. Two-bit methods are usually judged by perplexity and multiple-choice question-answering accuracy, both of which say little about whether a model can still reason through more difficult problems. We present ThinkBit, a strictly scalar two-bit framework built to preserve reasoning, in which every weight is an integer codeword times a bfloat16 scale shared by a group of weights. We first use a sensitivity metric to assign each layer a ternary, 2-bit, or 3-bit tier to allocate bitwidths optimally among layers. This is followed by a layerwise Gumbel-softmax-based scalar quantization algorithm that searches for optimal codewords block by block. Since a layerwise scheme does not capture how quantized layers interact with each other, we recalibrate scales, with the codewords frozen, using a knowledge-distillation-based loss against the teacher model. We then perform a short quantization-aware training (QAT) stage that lets the model mimic the base model's distribution by reassigning codewords. Finally, a paired reasoning test on training problems selects the final checkpoint between the recalibration stage and the QAT stage. On Qwen3-1.7B at matched size, our recalibrated checkpoint scores 46.7 on MATH-500 against 30.0 for EfficientQAT trained on the same data, and 73.0 after QAT on reasoning traces; at 0.52 GB it is smaller than every published 2-bit GGUF of the model yet more accurate on MATH-500. We show that this framework scales and up to 14B, a 3.74 GB model scores 94.8 on MATH-500, against 97.5 for the 29.5 GB bfloat16 model.

Mon 26 OctArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
The gist
Big AI language models that can think carefully usually take up a lot of computer memory. This paper presents ThinkBit, a new way to shrink the memory needed by storing parts of the model using just two bits instead of larger formats. The authors show that ThinkBit keeps the model’s ability to solve tough math problems nearly as well as the full-size version, even though the model is much smaller. They do this by smartly picking how to store parts of the model, adjusting internal scales, and fine-tuning with special training.
Open → 2610.34886v1

Memory and communication approach improves large AI model inference

MCF: A Memory- and Communication-Aware Co-Designed Framework for Long-Context LLM Inference

Abstract: This paper presents Memory- and Communication-Aware Framework for Long-Context LLM Inference (MCF) that optimizes long-context inference through communication-aware and stage-adaptive KV-cache layout transitions. At the core of MCF is {Memory-Aware Replication and Scheduling} (MARS), a dynamic orchestration mechanism for chunked prefill. MARS exploits early-stage memory headroom by selectively replicating highly reused KV blocks, improving locality and hiding KV propagation latency behind attention computation. As prefill progresses and memory pressure increases, MARS progressively drains redundant replicas and converges the KV cache into a sharded decode-ready layout, avoiding expensive layout conversion at the prefill--decode boundary. For decoding, MCF adopts a query-centric execution model in which KV shards remain stationary while lightweight query tensors are routed across workers. This changes communication from KV-cache-dependent transfer to query-dependent transfer, reducing communication growth with context length. MCF further integrates a hardware-software co-designed execution layer based on an FPGA compute-NIC datapath, enabling metadata-driven KV routing and collective operations directly in the network path. Experiments show that MCF improves TTFT, throughput, and scalability over state-of-the-art distributed inference systems, with larger benefits as context length and cluster size increase.

Mon 26 OctHardware Architecture
The gist
Large language models (LLMs) need to remember and process long conversations, but this creates delays and heavy use of memory and communication between computers. The authors present MCF, a system that smartly manages memory and communication by changing how data is stored and shared during different stages of processing. MCF also uses specialized hardware to speed up data routing, reducing wait times and increasing efficiency as conversations get longer. Their tests show MCF performs better than existing methods, especially with longer context sizes and bigger computer clusters.
Open → 2610.34731v1

KV caching reduces latency and SSD wear for large language model agents

SARIA: Persistence-Aware KV Caching with Coordinated DRAM--SSD Reload for LLM Agents

Abstract: Multi-turn LLM agents usually reuse long context prefixes, making key value (KV) caching crucial for reducing prefill latency. SSDs provide a low-cost extension to limited DRAM capacity but introduce two key challenges. Eagerly persisting all KV cache blocks incurs substantial write traffic and rapidly consumes finite SSD endurance. Meanwhile, the small number of SSDs provisioned in typical GPU servers limits aggregate reload bandwidth, making SSD-resident KV cache much slower to retrieve than that in DRAM and inflating prefill latency. We present \textsc{Saria} (Selective Admission and Reload for Inference Acceleration), a KV caching system that jointly manages DRAM and SSD by exploiting the session-level temporal locality of LLM agents to reduce SSD writes and accelerate cache reload. On the write path, \textsc{Saria} uses eviction and reuse history to selectively persist KV cache blocks that exhibit reuse opportunities beyond their DRAM residency, avoiding unnecessary writes for KV cache already hosted in DRAM. On the read path, \textsc{Saria} promotes selected SSD-hit KV cache blocks from GPU memory into DRAM after prefill, allowing subsequent reuse within the same session to reduce SSD read traffic while limiting DRAM contention. A transfer coordinator paces DRAM reads while SSD transfers are active, allowing both paths to make progress and efficiently share GPU ingress bandwidth. We implement \textsc{Saria} on LMCache MP and evaluate it using workloads from TraceLab and WEKA, covering both full-attention and hybrid-attention models. The results show that \textsc{Saria} reduces SSD writes by 57.1--58.9\% compared with popular full duplicate caching and the mean time to first token (TTFT) by 42.3--79.7\% over DRAM-only caching.

Thu 22 OctOperating Systems
The gist
Long conversations with AI models often reuse parts of the prior discussion, so saving and reusing memory bits called key values (KV) helps speed things up. The researchers found that storing these keys on SSDs can save memory but causes extra wear and slowdowns due to too many writes and limited read speed. They designed SARIA, a system that carefully chooses which keys to save on SSD and when to load them back into faster memory, balancing speed and durability. Their tests showed it cuts down SSD writes by over half and speeds up first token response times significantly compared to existing methods.
Open → 2610.31169v1

Memory stacked chip boosts generative image model speed and efficiency

M3D-FLOW: A Monolithic 3-D-Stackable Processing-Near-DRAM Architecture for Generative Normalizing Flow Applications

Abstract: Normalizing Flows (NFs) have shown strong results in generative modeling, recently reaching state-of-the-art image generation performance. However, their repetitive, sequential operations limit the computational and memory efficiency achievable with GPUs and TPUs. We propose M3D-FLOW, a novel monolithic 3D-stackable (M3D) DRAM-based processing-near-memory (PNM) architecture that eliminates memory bottlenecks using a Cu-Cu hybrid-bonded logic die integrated with an M3D DRAM die. The M3D DRAM provides dense bank integration and a tiered organization with variable access latencies that M3D-FLOW exploits for the efficient processing of different NF workloads. To maximize compute density while minimizing area, energy, and thermal overhead, M3D-FLOW employs hybrid binary--stochastic floating-point multipliers, performing mantissa multiplication in the stochastic domain and exponent operations in the binary domain. A pipelined execution strategy maps sequential NF stages across dynamically partitioned PE groups, and together with the stochastic hardware, enables M3D-FLOW to achieve at least $6.6\times$ higher performance and $3\times$ better energy efficiency than prior PNM accelerators, with only a 2.2% bits-per-dimension (BPD) increase over bfloat16 and 4.1% over FP32. An analysis of stochastic hardware variants further shows that shorter stochastic bitstreams reduce execution time by up to $3.3\times$ at the cost of higher approximation error, providing a concrete design guide for latency--accuracy trade-offs.

Mon 19 OctHardware ArchitectureEmerging Technologies
The gist
Generating images using Normalizing Flows is slow and uses a lot of power because the process is repetitive and sequential. The authors present M3D-FLOW, a new computer architecture that stacks processing units directly on memory chips to reduce data bottlenecks. By using a mix of binary and stochastic calculations, and organizing tasks smartly across processing groups, this design speeds up image generation by over six times and uses one-third the energy of previous designs. They also show how shorter stochastic calculations can speed things up more at a slight cost in accuracy.
Open → 2610.27371v1

DropKV speeds up cache management in long context language models

DropKV: Decoupling Residual-Output Perturbation for Near-Optimal KV-Cache Eviction

Abstract: Key-value (KV) cache management has become a critical bottleneck for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) to long-context scenarios due to linear memory growth. While recent eviction methods have moved beyond simple attention-score heuristics to incorporate value representations, they typically face a fundamental trade-off: the underlying optimization for minimizing output perturbation is an NP-hard combinatorial problem, leading to mathematically suboptimal heuristics or implementations that are difficult to kernelize. In this work, we propose DropKV, a simple principled eviction framework based on Decoupled Residual-Output Perturbation. By decoupling the joint eviction decision into independent per-token scoring, DropKV circumvents combinatorial intractability and admits a provable constant-factor approximation guarantee under a cone condition that we empirically verify on three long-context LLMs. To ensure practical viability, we provide a high-performance implementation using fused Triton kernels that avoid materializing the full attention matrix, delivering a 19.8x scoring-kernel speedup that translates to up to a 9.9% matched-batch end-to-end prefill speedup. Extensive evaluations on the RULER and LongBench benchmarks demonstrate that DropKV consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines at equivalent cache budgets, achieving the lowest inference latency among eviction methods while also remaining faster than the dynamic cache baseline.

Thu 15 OctArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Managing memory in large language models takes more time and space as the context gets longer, which slows things down. The authors created DropKV, a new way to decide which parts of the memory to keep or remove that avoids complicated computations. DropKV is faster and more reliable, improving model speed without losing accuracy. They also built an efficient version that runs much quicker on hardware, tested on several benchmarks and models.
Open → 2610.22130v1

Energy use of input tokens rises sharply in large language models

The Cost of Context: Profiling the Energy Footprint of Input Tokens in Large Language Models

Abstract: The rapid adoption of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and long-context LLMs has shifted the computational burden toward the prefill phase---the initial stage where the model processes all input tokens in parallel before generating a response---yet its energy impact remains poorly characterised. We investigate the contradiction between massive hardware-level power spikes and the sub-linear marginal cost of input tokens reported in system-level studies. Through high-resolution telemetry of Llama-3.1 and Qwen-2 models on NVIDIA A100 hardware, we identify the efficiency threshold where $O(n^2)$ attention complexity overcomes GPU parallelisation. Our results quantify how optimised memory orchestration (PagedAttention) delays this scaling bottleneck across three orders of context scaling, yielding up to an 8.9$\times$ energy efficiency advantage at 112,000 tokens compared to standard baselines. Furthermore, we characterise the energy disparity between input and output tokens, demonstrating that optimised serving (vLLM) causes this ratio to narrow (from $\approx$850$\times$ to 750$\times$) as context scales due to high decode efficiency, whereas unoptimised baselines show a much smaller, roughly constant gap ($\approx$150--230$\times$) because their prefill is itself expensive. This work establishes context-scaling laws that differentiate engine-level optimisations from inherent model constraints, providing an empirical framework for sustainable LLM deployment.

Wed 14 OctDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Processing long inputs in large language models (LLMs) uses more energy than previously thought, especially in the initial stage where the model reads all the input tokens at once. The authors studied two LLMs running on Nvidia hardware and found that the way attention works causes energy use to increase faster than earlier system studies suggested. They also showed that special memory methods can make this process more efficient, delaying big energy spikes by a lot. Finally, they compared the energy cost of reading inputs versus producing outputs, finding that optimized systems can narrow this gap but unoptimized ones keep it large and constant.
Open → 2610.19819v1

Large language models cut costs by adapting layer expert usage

Spectral-MoE: Heterogeneous Per-Layer Expert Utilization in Dense-to-MoE Conversion

Abstract: Large language models impose substantial memory demands and arithmetic costs during inference. Dense-to-mixture-of-experts (MoE) conversion is a model optimization technique that aims to reduce these arithmetic costs. Dense-to-MoE conversion partitions pretrained feed-forward network (FFN) neurons into experts and selects a subset for each token. Leading methods fall into two categories: analytic methods produce a converted model quickly using heuristics, while learning methods produce a model much more slowly by optimizing via gradients. Both approaches, however, fix the same active expert count, or "utilization," at every layer. We introduce Spectral-MoE, which learns to allocate a utilization budget heterogeneously across layers. Its name draws a metaphor between separating a dense FFN into experts and separating a light beam into its spectrum. Spectral-MoE consists of two distinct approaches: a static approach that uses a single per-layer scalar which is shared across tokens, and a dynamic approach which emits a per-token schedule. We demonstrate that both allocators improve performance over uniform on both the analytic-based and learning-based SOTA dense-to-MoE methods. At 25% FFN utilization, dynamic allocation reduces WikiText-2 perplexity relative to uniform by 1.04, 2.96, and 2.71 points on the learned base for Llama-2-7B, Llama-3-8B, and Qwen2.5-7B, respectively. The corresponding reductions on the analytic base are 2.45, 6.26, and 2.17 points. On the learned base, dynamic allocation improves six-task mean accuracy over uniform by an average of 1.5, 4.2, and 3.6 percentage points across the three models at FFN utilizations of 12.5%, 25%, and 50%, respectively. These results establish per-layer expert utilization as a novel optimization axis in dense-to-MoE conversion.

Tue 13 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Large language models are expensive to run because they do a lot of calculations. To save on these costs, the authors study a way to split parts of these models into smaller groups called experts and choose only some to use for each word. Instead of using the same number of experts for every part of the model, they propose adjusting this number differently for each layer, like spreading colors in a rainbow. This approach improves performance and reduces errors in multiple language tasks compared to using a fixed number of experts.
Open → 2610.19232v1

Procedural weight generation boosts sparse expert model inference speed

FORGE: Procedural Weight Generation for Sparse MoE Inference

Abstract: We introduce FORGE (Fast On-chip Rotor Generation for Experts), a procedural weight generation system for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) inference. Rather than storing and loading every expert weight tensor from HBM, we show how a compact accelerator inside each Streaming Multiprocessor can regenerate them on-the-fly from $O(\log^2 d)$ rotor parameters per projection. Per replaced layer, gigabytes of stored expert weights are approximated with under a megabyte of seeds. This addresses the dual memory bottleneck of autoregressive Sparse MoE decode, where per-expert FFN operations are HBM-bandwidth-bound at small routed-token counts and the aggregate expert footprint forces multi-node Expert Parallelism (EP) with all-to-all traffic. We realize the approach as the Rotor Generation Unit (RGU), a fixed-function datapath that generates FFN weight tiles without competing with Tensor Core execution. With 30% of the MoE FFN layers replaced across five Sparse MoE models, we estimate 1.3-2.8x higher system throughput at matched GPU count and 1.10-1.15x lower per-user decode latency at short context. In exchange, downstream accuracy on three model families falls below that of the same model fine-tuned without rotor replacement, and the replacement ratio controls this tradeoff. FORGE also expands KV cache capacity by 1.2-2.6x. It is agnostic to the bit width at which weights are stored, so it can compose with quantization. The RGU is fully implemented/verified in SystemVerilog at ~0.9% SM area overhead (0.032 mm^2/SM, 7nm).

Mon 12 OctHardware ArchitectureDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingMachine Learning
The gist
Large AI models with many specialized parts, called experts, normally store huge amounts of information that makes them slow to run. The authors show how to recreate this expert information on-the-fly using very compact math settings, saving a lot of memory and speeding up the process. This approach trades a bit of accuracy for much faster and more memory-efficient performance. The system they built, called the Rotor Generation Unit, is a small chip addition that creates these weights quickly without slowing down the main computing units.
Open → 2610.16890v1

Caliper improves accuracy in high performance computing network simulators

CALIPER: Calibrating HPC/AI Network Simulators

Abstract: Network simulation plays an important role in HPC/AI system research by enabling exploration of network architectures, communication strategies, and system configurations at scales that may be impractical to study experimentally. Existing approaches to network simulator calibration and validation lack a principled methodology that combines parameter alignment, constrained inference, and independent validation for collective-centric HPC/AI networks. We present CALIPER, a methodology for systematic calibration and validation of HPC/AI network simulators. CALIPER distinguishes directly observable system parameters from auxiliary parameters which are configured via calibration and constrains the latter to feasible domains consistent with the target system. We evaluate CALIPER's hierarchical, scale-aware calibration and its effects on parameter identifiability and generalization using collective communication benchmarks on a reference system with up to 64-nodes at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. Validation results show that the calibrated parameter configurations identified by CALIPER predict system performance with less than 5% mean errors across scale-up and scale-out network domains. CALIPER demonstrates that hierarchical, constrained calibration can produce simulator configurations whose predictive accuracy persists beyond the observations used for fitting.

Mon 12 OctNetworking and Internet ArchitectureDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Simulating networks in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence systems helps researchers test ideas without building costly hardware. But these simulators need to be carefully tuned to match real-world systems accurately. The authors introduce CALIPER, a way to systematically adjust simulator settings using real measurements and logical constraints. This technique improves predictions across different network sizes, making simulations more reliable for designing future systems.
Open → 2610.16477v1

Better batches lead to improved privacy and accuracy in machine learning

Better Batches, Better Privacy: Random Allocation for DP-BandMF

Abstract: The current state of the art for batch selection and noise addition in differentially private training is a combination of DP-BandMF (informally, DP-SGD where the noise added in two different steps can be correlated if the steps are within $b$ of each other) and privacy amplification by sampling via Monte Carlo accounting. First, whereas prior batch selection strategies for DP-BandMF were inspired by Poisson sampling, random allocation is known to outperform Poisson sampling for DP-SGD. We therefore propose and analyze new batch selection strategies for DP-BandMF inspired by random allocation, improving RMSE by up to $1.85\times$ over previous work. Second, Monte Carlo accounting typically requires drawing $Ω(1/δ)$ samples from a privacy loss distribution, making accounting costly. We increase sampling and scoring throughput by two orders of magnitude through a carefully optimized GPU implementation. Finally, previous work chose the DP-BandMF strategy matrix and the batch selection strategy independently. We give a simple framework for choosing these parameters jointly, reducing RMSE by up to $13.4\%$ over fixed strategy matrices.

Thu 8 OctCryptography and Security
The gist
Training machine learning models while keeping data private often requires adding noise and carefully choosing batches of data. The authors studied and improved a method called DP-BandMF by using a new way to select batches called random allocation, which made the training more accurate. They also made the privacy calculations much faster by using a special GPU design. Finally, they showed that choosing batch selection and noise strategies together rather than separately can further reduce errors.
Open → 2610.12712v1

Quilt cuts memory and time for sparse attention in ai models

QUILT: Rethinking Sparse-Attention Prefill through Shared Query Execution

Abstract: Sparse attention reduces the cost of long-context attention, but existing kernels typically process queries independently, repeatedly loading and dequantizing KV entries shared across queries. We observe substantial overlap in the KV entries selected by neighboring queries, creating opportunities for cross-query reuse. We present QUILT, a workload-aware sparse-attention execution mechanism that jointly processes neighboring queries and reuses shared KV entries to reduce redundant memory traffic and computation. QUILT introduces Shift-and-Compare Set Decomposition (SCSD), which transforms irregular set operations into regular data-parallel primitives suitable for modern accelerators, and pipelines SCSD with attention computation to hide its overhead. Cascaded sharing captures reuse hierarchically at multiple granularities. A tile-aware execution strategy balances sharing granularity with hardware tile utilization and selectively removes low-importance query-specific tails to eliminate underutilized tiles. We evaluate QUILT on LongBench using GLM-5.3 and DeepSeek-3.2 under both tensor and sequence parallelism. Compared with the state-of-the-art sparse-attention kernel, QUILT reduces average kernel latency by up to 55.1% and processed KV data by up to 55.9%, while reducing time-to-first-token (TTFT) latency by up to 36.8% with negligible accuracy degradation.

Thu 8 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Processing long pieces of text quickly is hard because machines repeatedly handle the same information in inefficient ways. The authors noticed that nearby parts of the text often reuse the same data, so their system named QUILT groups these parts together to avoid repeated work. This approach reduces the time and memory needed, speeding up responses without losing accuracy. Their tests show significant improvements over previous methods for this kind of task.
Open → 2610.11134v1

Large language model remembers 50 million tokens faster and cheaper

Real Long-Term Memory for AI: A 50-Million-Token Window That Is Faster and Cheaper Than Recompute

Abstract: A large language model can only use the text that fits in its context window, and it recomputes its internal key-value (KV) state for a prompt every time the prompt is sent. We test a memory layer, the public package galahad-kv, that saves the KV state of each block of about 16,000 tokens to encrypted local NVMe disk and loads it back later, byte-exact, without recomputing it. We ran it on 50,000,000 tokens of real public text, served through vLLM on one NVIDIA H100, with Gemma 4 12B and Gemma 4 31B. Every block we probed was loaded back from the encrypted store with no recompute (100 of 100, at depths from 0 to 50M tokens) on both models. Loading a block was 2.8x to 4.3x faster than recomputing it and used 8.8x to 12.3x less GPU energy, and GPU memory stayed flat over the whole 50M-token stream. Asked about facts planted millions of tokens earlier, the 12B model gave the right answer 82 times out of 100 and the 31B model 98 times out of 100. Neither model made up an answer. The limits are as follows. This is reuse of stored state, not a wider attention window: one block is loaded at a time, and how well a question is answered depends on the model. Writing the memory is a one-time cost, and the store takes terabytes of local NVMe disk. We describe the test protocol, which is built to resist common ways of gaming long-context benchmarks, and give a single-GPU reproduction that uses public software and a free licence for the package.

Wed 7 OctComputation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Large language models usually have to re-read everything in their memory every time they answer, which takes time and energy. The authors tested a special memory system that saves parts of the model’s understanding on a fast encrypted disk, so it can quickly reload them without re-doing all the work. This system worked well on 50 million tokens and was much faster and less energy-hungry than the usual way. The models were also good at answering questions about information from very long ago, showing the system can support very long memories.
Open → 2610.10845v1

Lachesis improves cache memory lifetime for AI agent servers

Lachesis: Lifetime-Aware KV Cache Placement for Agent Serving across HBM and High-Bandwidth Flash

Abstract: Large language model (LLM) serving is increasingly dominated by agentic workloads, in which agents and their sub-agents accumulate context as KV cache across many requests, consuming substantial memory. High-bandwidth flash (HBF) is a promising solution, providing an order of magnitude greater capacity at HBM-class read bandwidth, but its finite write endurance is the key limiting factor. Our key insight is that KV cache should be placed across HBM and HBF by its lifetime. Placing shorter-lived data in HBM lets HBM absorb more of an agent run's writes and sends less of them to HBF. As the lifetime of KV cache in agentic serving is dictated by the harness, the program that orchestrates the agents, we analyze its behavior and identify three axes along which lifetime diverges, temporal, structural, and inter-worker. Guided by these observations, we present Lachesis, a lifetime-aware KV cache placement layer between the agent harness and the serving engine. At write time, it places each segment in HBM or HBF according to its lifetime, and frees its blocks once the segment is no longer read. In trace-driven simulation, Lachesis extends HBF lifetime by 1.19-3.13x over HBM-first placement, reaching 3.3-12.2 device-years. Even under continuous 24x7 operation at the full load a tight SLO admits, HBF outlasts its five-year warranty on the multi-agent trace.

Tue 6 OctHardware ArchitectureDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Serving AI language agents uses a lot of memory to store ongoing conversation context, which creates challenges for memory technology. The paper introduces Lachesis, a system that stores short-lived data in faster, smaller memory and long-lived data in larger, slower but durable memory. This approach extends the life of the storage hardware, especially high-bandwidth flash memory, by reducing wear from writes. The authors show through experiments that Lachesis can significantly prolong storage lifespan even under heavy, continuous use.
Open → 2610.08378v1

Multi-node LLM training scales down GPUs using CPU memory extension

TRANSIT: Transparent Scale-in for Multi-Node LLM Training

Abstract: TRANSIT is a transparent scale-in framework to enable multi-node model training on fewer GPUs while maintaining training efficiency by transparently leveraging CPU DRAM as an extension of GPU memory during distributed training. It achieves this through a user-space interposition layer, requiring no modifications to the application, training framework, cluster scheduler, device driver, or operating system. Furthermore, TRANSIT achieves higher efficiency by leveraging a zero-copy data path for CPU-GPU transfers. We evaluate TRANSIT on dense and MoE models across scales up to 64 NVIDIA H100 GPUs and multiple parallelism configurations over a RoCE network. Our evaluation shows that TRANSIT can: (a) outperform state-of-the-art framework-managed offloading techniques, achieving up to 68%, 59%, and 42% higher per-GPU throughput than TorchTitan, ZeRO-Offload, and ZeRO-Infinity, respectively, (b) enables training with 50% fewer GPUs while maintaining over 90% of baseline per-GPU throughput, (c) lower per-node network traffic by up to 33%, and (d) improve per-GPU throughput by up to 35% in communication-bound settings.

Tue 6 OctDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingHardware Architecture
The gist
Training large language models usually needs many graphics cards (GPUs), which can be expensive and hard to manage. The authors present TRANSIT, a system that lets training run efficiently using fewer GPUs by temporarily using regular computer memory (CPU DRAM) as extra space. Importantly, TRANSIT works without changing existing software or hardware setups, and moves data quickly between CPU and GPU. Their tests show that TRANSIT keeps most of the training speed while reducing hardware needs and network traffic.
Open → 2610.07593v1

RetainZ improves AI checkpoint storage on zoned SSDs

RetainZ: Reclaim-Time-Aware Placement for AI Checkpoints on Zoned SSDs

Abstract: Solid State Drives (SSDs) are becoming the dominant medium for performance-critical storage. Zoned Namespace (ZNS) SSDs are getting more and more attractive because sequential writes and explicit zone resets reduce address-mapping, over-provisioning, and internal garbage-collection costs. However, reclaiming space requires resetting an entire zone, so deleting one file does not free its space while other files there must be kept. This erase-before-write constraint becomes a bottleneck for write-intensive workloads, particularly AI checkpointing during model training, where frequent saves of model and optimizer state compete for space with long-retained checkpoints. We observe that retention policies inherently encode when data can be retired, avoiding the need for a learned lifetime predictor. We present RetainZ, a storage backend that translates these policies into explicit reclaim epochs. Its allocator isolates long-retained data and groups objects with nearby reclaim epochs, balancing delayed space reclamation against unused space at zone ends. Evaluated on FEMU with multi-tenant streams and checkpoint manifests up to Pythia-1B, RetainZ reduces space occupied by deleted data and unused zone tails by 41.7% and mean per-input checkpoint p99 latency by 47.5% at 84% target load compared with the allocator of ZenFS, an established lifetime-aware ZNS backend, and lowers host write amplification from 1.165 to 1.003.

Sun 4 OctOperating SystemsHardware Architecture
The gist
Saving AI model checkpoints often fills up storage too quickly because of how zoned SSDs manage space, making deletion inefficient. The authors show that data retention policies can predict when storage space can be reused without complicated predictions. They build RetainZ, a system that organizes saved data to better group files by when they can be deleted, freeing up space more efficiently. Their experiments demonstrate that RetainZ significantly reduces wasted storage and speeds up saving checkpoints compared to previous systems.
Open → 2610.05554v1

Coda speeds coding agent servers by smarter task admission

Coda: Exploiting Admission Flexibility for Coding-Agent Serving

Abstract: Coding agents powered by large language models (LLMs) repeatedly alternate between model inference and tool calls, creating long-lived sessions with reusable key-value (KV) states and asynchronous request resumptions. Logical readiness, however, does not ensure efficient admission in a shared serving system. Through direct trace analysis and trace-driven replay, we identify two mismatches: reusable KV states reside across storage tiers and incur unequal computational costs for state preparation, while requests with heterogeneous context lengths can decode inefficiently together. Our central insight is that exploiting admission flexibility can improve serving performance while preserving request progress. We present Coda, a coding-agent serving system that realizes this insight through a readiness-informed admission layer incorporating two mechanisms. Tiered-Aging state admission exploits bounded flexibility in admission order to improve admission efficiency and preserve request progress. Compatibility-Aware execution admission exploits flexibility in attention grouping within each model iteration to reduce mixed-context interference and improve shared decoding efficiency. For multi-worker configurations, Coda introduces a separate routing layer that considers KV-state residency, worker load, and request-to-worker context-length compatibility to guide efficient request placement. We evaluate Coda across different models and workloads against state-of-the-art coding-agent serving systems and vLLM. Across the single-worker and multi-worker experiments, Coda improves output-token and SLO-compliant throughput by 20.3% and 70.5% on average, with peak gains of 29.3% and 140.2%.

Fri 2 OctDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Serving coding agents powered by large language models can be slow due to uneven costs of preparing memory states and mixing tasks with different lengths inefficiently. The authors identify that being flexible about when and how requests start can save time and resources without losing progress. Their system, Coda, manages the order and grouping of tasks to reduce computational waste and improve throughput. Experiments show that Coda delivers significantly better performance compared to existing systems.
Open → 2610.03088v1

WakeKV improves memory use for changing AI attention heads

WakeKV: Reactive, Reversible KV Residency for Heads That Change Their Minds

Abstract: Most KV-cache compression methods classify attention heads once, either offline or during prefill, and keep this classification fixed throughout generation. Across three models (1.5B-8B) and three regimes (needle retrieval, long chain-of-thought, and multi-turn recall), we measure head behavior on four model-regime combinations and find that most heads change their reading behavior at least once during generation. We introduce WakeKV, a reactive residency policy that moves cooling heads to a recoverable CPU reservoir rather than freezing or permanently evicting their state. At matched memory or budget, WakeKV consistently improves miss rate over frozen classification and destructive eviction, evaluated across five model-regime combinations and over three cited baselines (SnapKV, uniform R-KV, and ReasonAlloc) across four eligible combinations. A FlexiCache/vLLM implementation on Mistral-7B confirms the benefit on real hardware, improving throughput while retaining LongBench quality.

Fri 2 OctComputation and LanguageHardware ArchitectureDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Many AI models use attention heads that help decide what parts of information to focus on, but these heads often change how they work during a task. Existing methods label these heads once and keep that label fixed, which can waste memory or slow down the model. The authors created WakeKV, a system that moves attention heads to a special memory area when they 'cool down' instead of freezing or discarding them permanently. This approach improves memory efficiency and keeps model quality high during tasks like long reasoning or recall.
Open → 2610.02713v1

Adaptive sparsity method improves large language model efficiency

TopK-Guided: Adaptive, Budget-Aware Activation Sparsity for Efficient LLM Inference

Abstract: Activation sparsity speeds up large language model (LLM) inference by setting unimportant activations to zero so that the corresponding computations can be skipped. Existing training-free methods, however, make different trade-offs: threshold-based methods such as TEAL adapt the sparsity level to each token but do not tightly control the realised sparsity, while TopK-based methods such as WINA enforce a fixed sparsity level but use the same sparsity budget for every token. Both also apply the same budget across transformer blocks, despite large differences in block sensitivity. We introduce TopK-Guided, a training-free method that addresses both limitations by combining bounded token-level sparsity adaptation with sensitivity-aware block-level budget allocation. Across Llama-2 and Llama-3 models, TopK-Guided consistently improves perplexity and downstream accuracy over TEAL and WINA while preserving essentially the same sparsitydependent projection compute as WINA, with the largest gains at high sparsity. Ablations show that both components provide complementary improvements.

Thu 1 OctArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Large language models can run faster by ignoring less important parts of their calculations. Existing methods either change how much they ignore for each word but can’t control how much is skipped, or fix a skipping amount that applies to every word and part of the model the same way. The authors introduce a new approach that combines careful control over how much each word skips with adjustments based on how sensitive each part of the model is to skipping. Their method improves accuracy and speeds up processing, especially when skipping a lot of calculations.
Open → 2610.01763v1

How large language models manage and remember context efficiently

The Evolution of Attention in Large Language Models: Mechanisms, Trade-offs, and Emerging Trends

Abstract: Self-attention gives LLMs fine-grained, query-dependent access to context, but dense token interactions incur quadratic prefill cost and a key--value cache growing with context length. Research thus spans explicit-memory compression, sparse access, recurrent state construction, structured state dynamics, and heterogeneous mechanism composition. This survey analyzes these developments as model-internal contextual memory. We introduce a five-dimensional lens---Memory Representation, Memory Update, Access, Readout, and Integration---describing what is represented, how it changes, what is query-eligible, how it is read, and how readouts form outputs. This lens compares overlapping research lines without imposing one computational model. We reconstruct mechanism-level developments and architectural adoption using 59 release-level records from 14 major model lineages and 11 high-performing open-weight endpoints. First, explicit-memory and recurrent-state methods retain distinct interfaces but increasingly control overlapping memory functions. Second, heterogeneous architectures increasingly coordinate across network depth: layer-wise composition distributes complementary memory processing across representational stages, while cross-layer reuse carries selected memory and routing artifacts forward. Depth thus becomes a dimension along which contextual memory is constructed and managed. Third, these developments motivate a stateful multidimensional memory-routing hypothesis: persistent memory is organized across temporal scope, network depth, substrate type, and representation granularity, while coordinated Sparse Write and Sparse Read determine what is maintained and what contributes to each query. Overall, efficient sequence architecture design increasingly concerns the organization, lifecycle, and selective use of contextual memory rather than an isolated Attention operator.

Wed 30 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Large language models need to pay attention to lots of information to understand and respond accurately. The authors review many ways these models handle this huge amount of information without slowing down too much or running out of memory. They describe different methods to store, update, and access the model’s memory across layers and time. They show that newer designs treat memory as something built and managed across multiple dimensions, not just a single attention step. This helps models handle longer and more complex text more efficiently.
Open → 2609.39661v1

Model-free controller reduces token delay in AI text generation

Decode-Latency Feedback Prefill: A Model-Free Controller and Its Generalization Limits

Abstract: Concurrent autoregressive inference creates a fundamental interference problem: prefilling a newly arrived long prompt can delay tokens for requests that are already decoding. Fixed prefill chunks reduce this interference, but the best chunk size depends on the model, hardware, load, and latency objective. We introduce Decode-Latency Feedback Prefill (DLFP), a model-free controller that changes only prefill work that overlaps active decodes. After a guarded scheduling cycle, DLFP uses the observed interval as proportional feedback to resize the next prefill chunk; isolated prefills remain unrestricted. We implement DLFP in vLLM and evaluate it with open-loop Poisson arrivals, exact token accounting, raw request traces, and NVIDIA telemetry. On Qwen3-0.6B in BF16 on one A100 80 GB GPU, three paired 100-request trials reduce P99 inter-token latency by 24.8%, 30.1%, and 28.2% (mean 27.7%, paired 95% confidence interval 21.0% to 34.3%) with exact output agreement, no failures, and unchanged SLO compliance. The benefit is not free: mean P99 time to first token increases 34.8% while remaining inside the declared SLO. Crucially, the mechanism does not generalize to Qwen3-8B, Qwen3-32B, or a two-GPU tensor-parallel configuration. We trace the failure to an asynchronous scheduler-call interval that is only a proxy for completed GPU iteration time. This negative result defines the boundary of the contribution and motivates a completion-timed controller for concurrent CPU and on-device inference. We do not claim mobile-device performance; the present work is a reproducible proof-of-concept and generalization study.

Tue 29 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
When computers generate text, handling multiple requests at once can slow down some responses. The authors introduce a method called Decode-Latency Feedback Prefill (DLFP) that adjusts workload dynamically to help reduce waiting times for some tokens in the output. They tested DLFP on a smaller language model running on a single GPU and saw significant improvements in speeding up outputs without errors. However, the method does not work well on larger models or multi-GPU setups, which points to limits in its design and suggests future improvements.
Open → 2609.38386v1

Cache compression improves large language model memory use and accuracy

KV-Kaizen: Learning Context-Adaptive Cache Compression Choices

Abstract: As the context size of text processed with an LLM grows, the size of KV caches can outstrip the memory allocated for the original model weights. This impacts LLM throughput negatively, since decoding is memory-bound and decode cost grows with cache size. Recent work alleviates this bottleneck by discarding the least relevant tokens. Eviction introduces a tension, since a one-off decision to discard content may prove detrimental later. Instead, we focus on alternative choices that can lead to cache compression without evicting tokens. We achieve this by learning a selector that is able to produce, based on context, a per-layer cache configuration towards an overall compression budget. The selector operates along three axes: sharing one cache across layers (depth), caching at fewer bits (precision), or truncating the low-rank latent cache representations (rank). We call the resulting method KV-Kaizen, for the many small per-layer choices it compounds. We observe that these interventions taken independently and uniformly over all layers limit achievable compression because they degrade accuracy. Crucially, composing them locally and adaptively to the context can instead preserve accuracy while achieving large memory savings. At inference, the selector runs once, before pre-fill. In evaluations on instruction following and reasoning tasks, our selectors reach the Pareto frontier of accuracy against cache size, against learning-free and post-hoc baselines. On long-context tasks, KV-Kaizen improves on eviction and can be composed with it, reaching a 32x smaller decode-time cache on a 14B model while preserving accuracy. A 4x cache size reduction incurs no accuracy degradation from 7B parameters up, and a compressed model is more accurate than a smaller uncompressed one with the same cache size. Together, these findings support pre-training large models and compressing them only afterwards.

Tue 29 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Large language models (LLMs) keep track of recent words using memory called KV caches, which grow big and slow down the model. The authors found a way to shrink this memory without throwing away any stored words by choosing the best compression method for each part of the model based on the current text. Their method, called KV-Kaizen, mixes three ways to reduce memory without hurting the model’s accuracy. This approach works better than just removing old words and can make big models run faster while keeping their performance.
Open → 2609.37988v1

Janus speeds up large language model sessions using SSD storage

Efficient Agentic LLM Serving over SSD-based Sparse KV Storage

Abstract: Agentic sessions driven by Large language models (LLMs) often alternate between model inference and tool use, accumulating long histories across successive rounds. Serving these sessions efficiently requires reducing attention computation and retaining history key-value (KV) caches to avoid recomputation. Recently, frontier open-source LLMs adopt sparse attention to reduce computation by selecting only part of the history, while SSDs provide a cheaper alternative to CPU DRAM for storing KV caches. However, sparse KV selection depends on the ad hoc intermediate values during model inference, so it forces SSD reads to lie on the inference critical path. These reads are further slowed by fragmented accesses and read-write interference in SSDs. To address these challenges, we present Janus, an agentic serving framework for sparse attention LLMs with SSD-centric KV storage. Janus focuses on append prefill, which processes each round's newly added inputs and accounts for most history KV loading. To move SSD reads out of the critical path, Janus runs the model's own KV selection module on earlier intermediate values, predicting KV demand without additional training. The predicted reads overlap with model computation, and any prediction misses are fetched before attention executes to preserve model outputs. To improve SSD efficiency, Janus coalesces adjacent reads, packs scattered KV pages into sequential writes on the CPU, and limits background writes while reads are active. Across three models and three agentic traces, Janus outperforms existing works by up to 1.57-3.69 times (1.22-1.85 times on average) in terms of the time to first token latency, while maintaining decode efficiency.

Tue 29 SeptDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Long conversations with large language models (LLMs) need a lot of memory to remember what was said before. The authors found a way to store and access these memories more efficiently by predicting which information the model will need next. They use fast solid-state drives (SSDs) smartly to avoid slowing down the model while it works. Their new system, Janus, helps LLMs respond faster without missing important details.
Open → 2609.36938v1

Compile-time settings optimize waiting and batch costs in llm serving

Tool Waiting and Re-arrival in Compile-Time-Static LLM Serving: Cost Mechanisms and Configuration Selection

Abstract: In agentic LLM services, a session calls an external tool, waits for it, and re-arrives to continue inference. Statically compiled NPU serving can fix the batch bucket set, the maximum batch size, and the number of KV cache slots at compile time. We define such an environment as a compile-time-static serving substrate and analyze the execution-time cost that tool waiting and re-arrival incur in it. On a single LLM instance, we run synthetic workloads following a measured tool waiting time distribution and compare, on the same inputs, a baseline configuration with settings {1, 2, 4, 8}, 8, and 8 against configurations that change some of them. Because re-arrival times differ across configurations, we build a simulator that replays request processing in time order, select the candidate with the lowest predicted cost among 2,077 configurations, and validate it on new inputs. We identify three mechanisms: discrete batch alignment, KV cache survival, and prefill interference. At a concurrency of 6, absent from the bucket set, tool waiting lowered the padding ratio (0.235 to 0.120) yet increased decode execution time 1.51-fold, so padding alone did not indicate cost. On new inputs at a concurrency of 8, where the baseline reused KV in 9 of 24 re-arrivals, enlarging the maximum batch size alone cut execution cost by 8.25%, and the selected configuration, which also adjusted the bucket set, by 9.72%. Where 17 of 18 re-arrivals were already reused, the effect was 0.59%. Compile-time configurations should thus be selected by diagnosing KV reuse loss and the resulting change in execution.

Mon 28 SeptPerformance
The gist
Large language models often use external tools during their work, which makes them pause and then continue afterward. The paper studies how fixed settings decided before running—like batch sizes and memory slots—affect the cost of these pauses and resumptions in specialized hardware. The authors created a simulator to test over two thousand different configurations and found that changing these settings can reduce the waiting cost by up to about 10%. They explain why some adjustments help and why simply looking at batch padding isn't enough to estimate efficiency.
Open → 2609.34663v1

Kv cache correction speeds multi-agent shared context processing

KVCMAS: Efficient KV cache Correction for Shared Context in Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract: Prompt-specialized multi-agent systems enable multiple agents to share a model while performing complementary roles to solve complex tasks. However, agent-specific prefixes change the KV cache generated for the same shared context, causing each agent to repeatedly prefill the growing context and construct a separate cache with high computation and memory overhead. Selective recomputation reduces this redundancy but still retains substantial model execution, while existing delta correction methods either support only recurring context relations or maintain memory-intensive online correction states for dynamically changing context. For first seen shared context, these methods also construct a reference cache outside the agent workflow, and an approximate correction at the first agent affects the outputs passed to subsequent agents. We present KVCMAS, an online KV cache correction framework that represents cross-agent cache deviations using compact low-rank states and seamlessly chains corrections along the agent workflow without an additional reference prefill. This design supports dynamically changing shared context while preserving an exact first-agent cache. Across multiple language and vision-language workloads, KVCMAS matches or improves the accuracy of prior KV cache sharing methods while achieving the lowest TTFT under highly concurrent serving. Under controlled serving traces, it provides a 2.0x TTFT speedup over inference without KV cache sharing and reduces peak GPU memory by up to 3.7x relative to a prior KV cache correction method. These results establish KVCMAS as an accurate and scalable KV cache sharing approach for prompt-specialized multi-agent serving.

Mon 28 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Multi-agent systems share a model to work on complex tasks, but they often repeat costly memory work because each agent starts its cache separately. The authors propose KVCMAS, which corrects cache differences efficiently across agents without repeating the full work. This makes the process faster and uses less memory while keeping result accuracy. Their tests show big improvements in speed and memory for language and vision tasks when many agents work at once.
Open → 2609.34060v1

ElasticKV reduces GPU memory stalls for faster language model responses

Does Execution Require Target KV Fidelity? A Mixed-Fidelity KV Runtime for LLM Serving

Abstract: Large language model (LLM) serving is increasingly constrained by the GPU memory consumed by key-value (KV) caches. Existing compression, eviction, and offloading techniques alleviate this pressure, but serving runtimes typically treat only the configured target KV representation as execution-ready. Under memory pressure, this target-only contract can turn KV shortage into request stalls and preemptions. We present ElasticKV, a mixed-fidelity KV runtime built on the observation that target fidelity need not gate execution. ElasticKV introduces a compact intermediate KV state, making fidelity a runtime-managed execution property. To realize this state in a paged serving runtime, ElasticKV combines (i) a pair-structured layout that turns fidelity reduction into reusable GPU capacity, (ii) a dual-mode attention backend that directly consumes the compact state while preserving the native target-only path, and (iii) pressure-aware fidelity management that adapts KV fidelity to memory pressure. Our extensive evaluation across diverse workloads, model families and scales, and GPU platforms demonstrates the effectiveness and generality of ElasticKV. Under high concurrency, ElasticKV achieves 3.8-4.0$\times$ lower time-to-first-token (TTFT) and 9.1$\times$ lower P90 TTFT than vLLM while preserving generation quality.

Sun 27 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Large language models often slow down because their memory gets overloaded with data needed to keep track of the conversation. The authors found that by using a clever way to store some of this data in a simpler form during high memory use, the models can keep running smoothly without waiting for all the detailed information. They built a system called ElasticKV that changes how much detail is kept based on available memory, making responses faster. Their tests show big speed improvements with no loss in the quality of generated text.
Open → 2609.33536v1

AgentReplay improves fairness in AI agent performance testing

AgentReplay: Token-Wise Trace Replay Is Essential for Fair Serving System Performance Benchmarking

Abstract: LLM-based agents execute multi-turn workflows with interleaved model inference and tool calls, making efficient serving increasingly important. However, evaluating serving optimizations is challenging because identical tasks can produce different execution trajectories. Changes in generated tokens can alter subsequent prompts, tool calls, and reasoning turns, making it difficult to distinguish system improvements from workload variation. Greedy decoding does not guarantee identical outputs, while replaying only sequence lengths loses token information that affects prefix caching and mixture-of-experts (MoE) routing. To address these problems, we propose AgentReplay, a configurable trace record-and-replay framework for agent serving. AgentReplay records input/output tokens, expert selections, request dependencies, and tool durations. During replay, it forces the recorded output tokens while performing normal autoregressive computation, with optional controls for MoE expert selection and tool delays. This allows different systems to execute the same recorded workload while retaining their own batching, scheduling, and parallelization decisions. We further separate trajectory generation from performance evaluation, enabling compatible smaller models to replay long-horizon traces collected with more capable models. Our experiments show that token-wise replay in AgentReplay effectively eliminates workload variation that greedy decoding and length-wise replay cannot avoid, enabling fairer performance comparisons across serving configurations.

Sat 26 SeptDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Evaluating how well AI agents perform is tricky because small differences in their generated responses can change the whole process they follow. The authors created AgentReplay, a system that records every token (word or piece of text) generated by an AI agent and then replays the exact same sequence when testing different setups. This ensures that differences in performance come from the system itself, not from changes in what the AI says or does. AgentReplay also separates the task of creating test data from measuring performance, letting smaller AI models replay tasks made by bigger ones for fair comparisons.
Open → 2609.32283v1

Flexible layer routing improves transformer model performance on questions

Programs-of-Layers in LLMs through the Lens of Cortical Areas

Abstract: Inference in LLMs is conventionally a fixed-depth, fixed-order forward pass through every layer, regardless of how difficult the input is. The human brain does not work this way: using the thalamus as a central hub, it routes information flexibly to all regions of the cortex according to demand. Li et al. (2026) recently showed, with a system they call program-of-layers (PoLar), that transformers can be given an analogous flexibility if their layers are treated as a library of functions rather than a fixed sequence. Performance improves over the standard forward pass when each input is dynamically routed through an adaptive sequence of skipped or repeated contiguous layer blocks. We reconstructed PoLar's diagnostic MCTS in more detail than the original paper and applied it across 5 models. We reproduced several of PoLar's findings: skipping outperformed the standard pass, repeating outperformed skipping, and combining both outperformed either alone. Shorter programs sufficed for easier questions, while harder questions required more layer repeats. However, we failed to replicate the main claim regarding their learned router for single-shot inference: its top-ranked prediction consistently collapsed back to the standard pass, even though its top-k predicted programs, taken together, did show a real accuracy gain. Beyond reproduction, we find that a small number of generic programs are enough to solve most of the questions. We also provide a much deeper analysis of these programs' structure and robustness: for example, we found that programs that correct errors are highly brittle: undoing even a single edit inside a program typically breaks the correction. Connecting this to the brain's routing mechanisms, PoLar mirrors principles of thalamo-cortical coordination between cortical-area-like transformer layers. We publicly release the code at https://datexis.github.io/RE-PoLar/

Fri 25 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Large language models (LLMs) usually run through all their layers the same way every time, no matter how easy or hard a question is. Inspired by how the human brain routes information differently based on what’s needed, the authors study a method called PoLar that lets the model skip or repeat parts of its layers for each input. They confirmed that skipping and repeating layers can improve accuracy, and that easier questions need fewer layers than harder ones. However, the part that chooses the best path in one try often defaults to the normal process, and the programs that fix errors are fragile. They also show that just a few common layer programs solve most questions and compare this process to how the brain’s cortex works.
Open → 2609.31360v1

DeepSeek Elastic Compute scales sandboxes for training large language agents

DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec): A Sandbox Infrastructure for Effective Agentic Training at Scale

Abstract: Large-scale agentic training and evaluation with large language models (LLMs) rely on isolated, stateful execution environments in which models inspect repositories, invoke tools, execute commands, and interact with task-specific services. These workloads create sandboxes in large bursts, span heterogeneous functionality and isolation requirements, retain state across long interactions, and draw from large image corpora with limited reuse. Supporting them therefore requires an elastic execution platform rather than a single sandbox runtime. This report presents DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec), a production sandbox platform that exposes FnCall, container, microVM, and full-VM sandbox backends through a unified SDK. DSec coordinates placement and lifecycle management across the cluster, composes environments from independently versioned layers, combines memory sharing, reclamation, and CPU scheduling for high-density execution, and loads image data on demand from Fire-Flyer File System (3FS), a cluster-wide distributed filesystem. DSec is co-designed with the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, decouples stateful rollout execution from preemptible GPU training, coordinates sandbox lifecycle with training to preserve rollout state while reclaiming idle resources, and mitigates agent misbehavior such as reward hacking. A single production-scale unit of DSec spans around 160 nodes, serving about 3 million sandboxes per day; in production, it supports over 380,000 concurrent sandboxes and sustains over 5,000 sandbox creations per second. Our evaluation and deployment experience show that these mechanisms reduce environment setup and image-distribution overhead, improve memory efficiency, and preserve latency-sensitive performance under high-density overcommit.

Sat 19 SeptDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Training and testing smart AI agents that use large language models needs many safe, controlled spaces (called sandboxes) where they can try things without causing problems. The authors created DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec), a system that quickly manages millions of these sandboxes across many computers, making it easier and faster to run large AI training at once. DSec handles different types of sandbox environments together, shares memory efficiently, and saves time loading data. It also keeps AI training running smoothly by managing resources and preventing AI agents from gaming the system.
Open → 2609.22978v1

DeepSeek model cuts memory for long inputs by up to eight times

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash: Pushing the Limits of KV Cache Compression

Abstract: The widespread adoption of long-horizon agents has made model workloads increasingly input-heavy. Although prior work has substantially reduced the cost of long-context computation, prefill remains computationally expensive, and large KV caches continue to strain HBM and SSD capacity and data-transfer bandwidth. Together, these compute, storage, and bandwidth demands constitute the primary bottleneck to further lowering deployment costs. To address this challenge, we introduce DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, a multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 552B backbone parameters and support for contexts of up to one million tokens. With its Causal Encoder-Decoder (CED) architecture, the model activates 16B parameters per token during decode but only 8B parameters during prefill, substantially improving cost efficiency for agentic workloads. To push the limits of KV cache compression, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash combines cross-layer KV cache reuse in Compressed Sparse Attention 2 (CSA2) with FP4 KV caching. These designs reduce its global KV cache footprint (always in HBM) to 890 bytes per token, roughly 1/4 of the corresponding footprint of DeepSeek-V4-Flash. Further, through a dedicated deployment optimization known as SWA Bounded Replay, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash reduces its persistent KV cache footprint (always on SSD or in host memory) to roughly 1/8 of that of DeepSeek-V4-Flash. Despite its much smaller KV cache footprint, the model delivers substantially better performance than the baseline. In addition, we streamline the DeepSeek-V4 architecture and introduce several efficient architectural extensions. We pretrain DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on a multimodal corpus comprising 45T tokens and conduct comprehensive post-training, yielding strong performance across diverse text-based and multimodal agentic scenarios. Model checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash.

Thu 17 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Handling very long inputs in AI models creates heavy demands on memory and computation, which makes these systems costly and slower. The authors introduce DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, a large AI model designed to manage extremely long text and multimodal inputs more efficiently by compressing its memory use during processing. Their approach reduces the key-value cache size significantly, lowering both storage and bandwidth needs without sacrificing performance. This makes it easier and cheaper to deploy advanced AI agents that work with very long documents or multimodal data.
Open → 2609.19969v1

Zero I O fault recovery improves distributed deep learning performance

Zero-I/O Fault Recovery for Sharded Deep Learning via Dynamic Framework Dependency Rebinding

Abstract: Distributed model training at scale is frequently interrupted by transient network failures, conventionally forcing cluster managers to abort all processes and roll back to the latest checkpoint. While periodic checkpointing provides durability, frequent snapshotting introduces severe storage backpressure: our measurements on a 1.216B-parameter decoder reveal that per-update asynchronous checkpointing incurs up to a +656.7% latency overhead, consumes 32.5 GiB of host memory, and generates 3.39 TB/hour of storage traffic. To eliminate this overhead, we present AccelPact, a parallel runtime enabling zero-I/O in-memory fault recovery for sharded distributed training. When communication fails at a committed optimizer step, device memory remains quiescent and uncorrupted, yet continuation fails because frameworks like PyTorch FSDP cache internal communication handles across module wrappers and parameter hierarchies. AccelPact resolves this dependency invalidation via a non-invasive reference-rebinding mechanism coordinated by an out-of-band Gloo consensus protocol. On 16 NVIDIA RTX 5880 GPUs training full-parameter Mistral-7B, AccelPact eliminates checkpoint replay, yielding a 1.197x whole-run goodput improvement over cold restart and 1.194x over NVRx checkpoint restoration at checkpoint age 5, rising to 1.698x at age 18. Across ten successive fault injections, all 16 ranks maintain bit-identical parameter state with zero numerical drift. Across 4-to-16 GPU cluster topologies, reference rebinding executes in constant time (0.493-0.518 ms). Operating directly on native communicator instances, AccelPact requires zero application-code modifications and avoids compiler graph breaks under torch.compile, providing an efficient foundation for resilient deep learning.

Wed 16 SeptDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Training large AI models across many computers often stops suddenly due to network problems, forcing a restart from saved snapshots, which slows things down a lot and uses lots of storage. The authors created AccelPact, a system that fixes these interruptions without writing to storage by cleverly reconnecting communication paths in memory. This means training can continue immediately after a failure without losing any progress or accuracy. Their tests show faster training and perfect recovery across multiple GPUs without changing the existing code.
Open → 2609.18178v1

Long context language model decoding sped up with asynchronous self-speculation

ASPIRE: Asynchronous Batched Self-Speculative Decoding for Long-Context LLM Inference

Abstract: Long-context LLM inference is bottlenecked by attention, whose repeated KV-cache reads make decoding memory-bound. Self-speculative decoding alleviates this by drafting tokens with sparse attention and verifying them with full attention, but existing batched methods remain synchronized: all requests in a batch share a single draft-verify schedule, even though the optimal draft length varies widely across requests and changes dynamically within each request. We propose ASPIRE, a non-synchronized batched self-speculative decoding framework built on three components. First, a unified mixed forward allows drafting and verifying requests to coexist in the same batched forward pass, removing the need for global draft-verify phases. Second, a lightweight online speculation scheduler uses per-request acceptance-rate estimates and a batch-aware cost model to let each request independently choose when to verify. Third, an intra-draft refresh layer performs full attention at a single designated layer during drafting, updating the sparse context at every draft step to reduce staleness during drafting. Across three models and five reasoning and long-context benchmarks, ASPIRE achieves $1.70$-$4.58\times$ speedup in decoding throughput over autoregressive baselines and improves average speedup by approximately $27\%$ over the strongest prior self-speculative baselines.

Wed 16 SeptMachine LearningComputation and LanguageDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Language models that read long texts are slowed down by repeatedly checking previous memory, which takes a lot of time. The authors introduce a method called ASPIRE that lets the model guess multiple words faster by updating guesses independently and checking them more flexibly. This approach mixes quick guesses with careful checks in the same step and refreshes memory during guessing to keep things accurate. Their tests show ASPIRE makes decoding 1.7 to 4.6 times faster than usual methods and improves speed compared to past guessing techniques.
Open → 2609.17943v1

Gpu cpu and ssd caching choices cut memory costs for ai sessions

Where Should the KV Cache Live? Placement Policies Across GPU, CPU, and SSD for Long-Lived Sessions

Abstract: GPU high bandwidth memory is scarce and expensive, and KV caches consume much of it as chats, agent loops, and document question answering accumulate state. Systems such as Mooncake, LMCache, FlexGen, InfiniGen, and AttentionStore extend GPU memory with CPU DRAM and SSD. The harder question is which blocks belong in each tier, when to move or evict them, and whether prefetching helps. We study these choices in a discrete event simulator spanning GPU HBM, CPU DRAM, and SSD, calibrated against a random forest execution time predictor. We compare recency, reuse frequency, predicted reuse, and an EWMA predictor with prefetch lookahead across chat, agent, and document question answering workloads. Tiering supports 73.02 times more concurrent sessions per GPU and lowers cost per session by 62.04 times. These gains come from tier capacities of 1 plus 8 plus 64, not placement policy. Decode is compute bound at batch size one in our setup, so placement barely affects throughput. It mainly changes PCIe migration traffic and time to first token. Recency produces 2.30 times less migration traffic than reuse frequency for chat. Reuse frequency performs best for agents and document question answering. The existing predicted reuse policy is byte identical to recency, making its agent recommendation effectively recency. A genuine EWMA predictor changes behavior but still ranks behind reuse frequency on the workloads prediction was expected to help. Prefetching does not justify its bandwidth cost. Across the policy and cache size grid, even an oracle with knowledge of future requests never beats no prefetch on migration traffic. Workload specific placement can reduce data movement, but the predicted reuse and prefetch recommendations are not supported as implemented.

Mon 14 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Large AI models running chats and document answering keep track of past interactions using memory, but fast GPU memory is limited and expensive. The authors studied how best to store pieces of this memory across GPU, CPU, and SSD to support many sessions cheaply. They tested different ways to decide which memory parts stay where and when to move them using a detailed simulator. Their findings show smart memory tiering greatly increases session capacity and cuts cost, but complex placement policies and prefetching add little benefit. Simpler recency or reuse frequency rules save most data movement depending on the task.
Open → 2609.16215v1

Language models manage their own tasks to speed up inference

Self-Orchestrating Language Models: Leveraging Semantic Dependence for Efficient Inference

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities, but their deployment presents significant efficiency challenges. Autoregressive decoding imposes substantial inference latency and under-utilizes hardware accelerators in low batch size regimes. Discrete diffusion models can generate in parallel but struggle to match autoregressive quality without many diffusion denoising steps. Long-context reasoning creates memory bottlenecks that strain even state-of-the-art accelerators. My thesis is that language models can direct their own inference execution strategy by annotating semantic dependence -- which tokens depend on which others -- in their generation. I call such models self-orchestrating language models. For each system, I design a runtime that acts on these annotations to parallelize autoregressive decoding, evict intermediate context, or derive denoising orders, achieving Pareto-optimal quality-efficiency trade-offs. I demonstrate this approach through three self-orchestrating systems. First, PASTA uses semantic dependence to parallelize autoregressive decoding, training the model to annotate which output chunks can generate independently. Second, TIP uses semantic dependence to evict intermediate reasoning steps from the KV cache, reducing memory consumption while preserving accuracy. Third, Planned Diffusion uses semantic dependence to derive a denoising order for discrete diffusion, autoregressively generating a plan that specifies which chunks to denoise in parallel.

Sun 13 SeptArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
The gist
Large language models are powerful but slow because they generate one word at a time, which makes them hard to use efficiently. The authors propose models that mark which words depend on others while they generate text, letting the computer run some parts in parallel or free up memory earlier. They build three systems showing how this idea can make language models faster or use less memory without losing quality. This way, the models decide for themselves how to balance speed, memory use, and accuracy during generation.
Open → 2609.14850v1

Cpu gpu load balancing boosts long context MoE model speed

Physically Partitioned KVCache Format for CPU--GPU Load Balancing in MoE Inference

Abstract: Single-GPU long-context inference with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models requires spilling the key-value cache (KVCache) to CPU memory. The spilled KV serves two complementary purposes---transferring to the GPU for attention computation, or computing in-place on the CPU---which demand opposing physical states. The optimal split between them varies with workload, yet existing KVCache abstractions offer only storage semantics over a monolithic object of a single physical state, and cannot express dynamic load balancing. We propose InplaceKVCache, the first KVCache abstraction whose format fixes each byte's physical residency at write time, so that the CPU--GPU load balance can be adjusted without moving data after placement. It realizes this as a four-region layout along two dimensions---device affinity and access pattern---turning load balancing into pure scheduling. Built on this abstraction, WriteScope splits CPU--GPU shares along the sequence dimension, and a portable roofline performance model determines the optimal CPU share as sequence length evolves, with online feedback tracking CPU cost drift. On three MoE models (DeepSeek-V2-Lite, Qwen3-30B-A3B, Mixtral-8$\times$7B) with a 32~GB VRAM budget, WriteScope supports end-to-end inference at the 1M-token aggregate scale. In the long-context regime ($\ge$8K), it achieves geometric-mean speedups of $1.5\times$--$2.5\times$ on A100 and $1.4\times$--$1.7\times$ on V100 over four reproduced baselines, while vLLM, SGLang, and KTransformers fail even with a doubled KV budget. A DeepSeek-V4-Flash case study validates composition with native sparse attention.

Sun 13 SeptDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingMachine Learning
The gist
Large AI models called Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) need to manage memory between the CPU and GPU when processing very long inputs. The authors found that existing methods handle this key memory in a single way, causing inefficiencies. They created a new method, InplaceKVCache, that physically partitions this memory so parts can be optimized separately for CPU or GPU use. This lets them dynamically balance computation between the CPU and GPU without moving data. This results in faster processing speeds on various tested models when handling long input sequences.
Open → 2609.14507v1

Simple attention sparsification improves transformer efficiency under tight budgets

SAS: Simple Attention Sparsification via End-to-End Optimization of Context Ranking

Abstract: Post-training attention sparsification reduces the quadratic cumulative attention cost of pretrained Transformers by selecting a small set of context units (tokens or blocks) for each query. Existing trainable methods usually use a lightweight selector to score context units, followed by hard Top-K selection that blocks gradients from the language modeling loss. Consequently, these methods commonly distill layer-wise dense attention distributions. Although this encourages the selector to rank context units by dense attention weights in the original model, the ranking is not directly aligned with their impact on predictions under a fixed attention budget (i.e., the number of attended context units per query), potentially wasting the limited budget on less useful units. To address this misalignment, we propose Simple Attention Sparsification (SAS), a gated sparse attention mechanism that optimizes context ranking end-to-end with the language modeling loss. The key idea is to inject the selector's continuous scores into attention logits during training, allowing the loss to update the selector through standard backpropagation. We identify several choices crucial for this simple design to work well in practice: placing the gate inside the attention softmax in log form, using normalized softmax gates to calibrate historical context against the always-retained current block, and preserving continuous selector scores so the model learns relative priorities rather than only hard selections. To support long-sequence training, we implement a memory-efficient Triton kernel that integrates SAS into FlashAttention-style computation. Across reasoning, long-context understanding, and agentic tasks, SAS consistently outperforms trainable sparse attention baselines across attention budgets, with especially large gains under tight budgets, demonstrating more effective context ranking for downstream tasks.

Fri 11 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Transformers, a type of AI model, spend a lot of time looking at all parts of a text to understand it. This is slow because they compare every part to every other part, which takes a lot of work. The authors found a way to teach the model to pay attention to just the most useful parts during training, which helps the model focus better and work faster without losing accuracy. Their method lets the model learn which parts are important by itself, instead of copying old habits. This makes the model better at tasks that need understanding of long texts or reasoning.
Open → 2609.13141v1

Gpu utilization for large language model inference breaks down efficiency factors

Dissecting GPU Utilization for LLM Inference on Nvidia Hopper

Abstract: A single SM utilization percentage can make an LLM inference workload look compute-saturated while hiding how much useful work is being done. The problem is not that the counter is wrong, but that it collapses several different mechanisms into one number. This is most severe during decode, where each request contributes only one new token and dense projection GEMMs become small-row matrix multiplications. On Hopper, the bfloat16 GMMA path executes these operations in fixed 64-row matrix fragments, so small-batch decode can fill only a small fraction of each fragment with real token rows. In this paper, we profile vLLM with FlashAttention-3 and cuBLASLt on an H100 NVL across cold prefill, warm prefill, and decode, sweeping sequence length and batch size. We replace the usual single utilization number with eight counter-validated views derived from raw Nsight Compute reports, each pinned to an NCU counter or explicit formula. Together, these views map utilization gaps to concrete mechanisms - fragment fill, occupancy limits, stall signatures, wave quantization, and kernel selection - across four production models and six per-layer kernel roles.

Fri 11 SeptPerformanceHardware ArchitectureDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Measuring how busy a GPU is during large language model (LLM) use can be misleading because a single percentage doesn't show all the details. The authors explain that during tasks like generating text (decoding), GPU operations handle small pieces inefficiently, leading to underused GPU power. They studied Nvidia's Hopper GPU running models with different settings and used detailed counters to explain why the GPU isn't fully efficient. This helps reveal what exactly limits GPU performance during these tasks.
Open → 2609.12923v1

RoofLang enables AI to design faster large language model inference systems

RoofLang: Enabling AI-Driven Architecting of LLM Inference Systems

Abstract: AI is beginning to make substantive contributions to LLM inference optimization. Existing AI optimizations are predominantly profiling-based. Profiling-bound feedback confines the search to the capabilities and performance of an existing software stack, preventing a fundamentally better architecture of LLM inference systems from being identified. To enable the AI-driven LLM inference system architecting loop, we argue that a general workload representation, a verifiable mutation space, and an implementation-independent evaluator are required. We present the RoofLang domain-specific language (DSL) that provides these features. In our evaluation, RoofLang reveals that DeepSeek V4-series models could achieve 3.5-39.5$\times$ higher peak decode throughput than other representative models. This gap is disproportionate to their total parameter counts and arises largely from compact KV-cache designs that support larger batches and reduce memory traffic. A persistent optimizer agent further discovered several new architectures that improved both throughput and interactivity of DeepSeek V4 Pro on NVIDIA B300 by 6.23-50.1%.

Fri 11 SeptDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Optimizing how large language models (LLMs) generate answers is tricky because current AI improvements rely on measuring existing software, which limits new ideas. To fix this, the authors created RoofLang, a specialized programming language that describes computing tasks in a way that allows AI to explore entirely new system designs. Using RoofLang, they found specific LLM designs that can be 3.5 to almost 40 times faster than others, mainly by improving memory use. The system also automatically discovered better designs that further boosted speed and responsiveness on real hardware.
Open → 2609.12551v1

Kv cache quantization reduces memory use for omni-modal language models

OmniKVQuant: KV Cache Quantization for Omni-LLMs

Abstract: As Omni-modal large language models (Omni-LLMs) take in audio, video and text together, their KV cache memory cost grows. KV cache quantization is the de facto approach in text-only LLMs, but its application to Omni-LLMs remains unexplored. In this paper, we analyze how TurboQuant, a representative rotation-based KV cache quantization method, behaves on multimodal caches and identify two critical issues: temporal key drift and heterogeneous value geometry. To address these, we propose OmniKVQuant, a training-free framework that (i) sets the key quantization range over each short window of the input stream; and (ii) rotates values separately per modality. On Qwen2.5-Omni and Qwen3-Omni, OmniKVQuant enables 2-bit KV caches while substantially preserving performance across seven audio-visual benchmarks. We further provide a fused Triton decode kernel that unpacks the 2-bit cache during attention, so no dense FP16 cache is ever built. Code: https://github.com/kaistmm/OmniKVQuant

Thu 10 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Large language models that process text, audio, and video need to remember a lot of information, which uses a lot of memory. The authors studied a popular method to compress this memory, called TurboQuant, and found it didn’t work well for these multi-modal models because of two problems with how information changes over time and differs between types of data. They created a new method, OmniKVQuant, which fixes these issues by adjusting how the memory is compressed over short time windows and separately handling different data types. Their method keeps the model’s performance while cutting memory use dramatically, and they also built a tool to efficiently use this compressed memory during computations.
Open → 2609.11582v1

Benchmark suite evaluates communication compression in HPC and AI workloads

Tools-CC-Bench: a Benchmark Suite for Collective Communication with Compression in HPC and AI Workloads

Abstract: Distributed HPC and LLM workloads increasingly require efficient communication for scalability, yet growing data movement has become a major performance bottleneck. Communication compression can reduce this overhead and complement execution-level optimizations, but its benefits remain difficult to assess because existing benchmarks lack support for diverse backends, realistic datasets, application-specific accuracy metrics, and overlap-induced resource contention. We present CC-Bench, a lightweight, extensible, and application-oriented benchmark suite for evaluating communication compression under realistic execution conditions. CC-Bench uses declarative application-environment modeling to decouple profiling logic from communication libraries, datasets, and fidelity metrics, enabling portable cross-library evaluation. It further combines function-level interception and hardware counter monitoring to characterize per-phase latency, hardware utilization, numerical fidelity, and computation interference. With representative datasets from HPC and LLM workloads, CC-Bench evaluates three compression-enabled communication libraries on CPU and GPU clusters, revealing accuracy-performance trade-offs and bottlenecks to guide practical deployment and optimization.

Tue 8 SeptDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Moving large amounts of data quickly is a challenge in high-performance computing (HPC) and large AI models. Compressing communication can help, but it's hard to measure how well this works with current tests. The authors created CC-Bench, a suite that mimics real-world conditions to test and compare different compression methods during communication. It looks at speed, resource use, and accuracy using real datasets, helping people find the best choices for their computing tasks.
Open → 2609.08739v1

Kv cache eviction improves long context inference in large language models

Jacap: Robust KV Cache Eviction via Jacobian-Based Nonlinear Information Capacity Preservation

Abstract: Key-value (KV) cache eviction is essential for scaling long-context inference in Large Language Models. However, existing policies predominantly rely on empirical heuristics, lacking a rigorous characterization of token utility under the inherently nonlinear softmax attention mechanism. In this work, we rethink KV cache eviction through the lens of local information geometry, modeling the attention process as a nonlinear Gaussian communication channel. By performing a first-order Taylor expansion of the attention mapping, we derive the Jacobian Information Capacity, a novel objective that explicitly captures query relevance, softmax sensitivity, and structural diversity. Guided by this theory, we introduce Jacap, a capacity-aware eviction method that utilizes softmax-aware importance weighting and statistical leverage scores for subset selection. Extensive experiments across diverse architectures and benchmarks demonstrate that \textsc{Jacap} delivers superior performance in most scenarios, particularly in high-compression regimes.

Tue 8 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Large language models use key-value caches to remember what they have seen so far, but these caches have limited space and need to decide what to keep or remove. Existing methods use simple rules that don’t fully consider how attention works in these models. The authors thought about this problem using ideas from information theory and geometry to better understand which cached tokens are most useful. They created a new method called Jacap that smartly chooses which tokens to keep, leading to better performance, especially when the cache is very limited.
Open → 2609.08131v1