Papers for

real-time ai application developers

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.

GPU sharing method predicts interference to ensure latency guarantees

Mosaic: GPU Sharing with Latency Guarantees through Kernel-Level Interference Prediction

Abstract: GPUs are increasingly in demand for AI workloads, yet often remain substantially underutilized, motivating workload colocation. However, colocation introduces interference that can degrade latency-critical workloads. Existing approaches mitigate interference using either heuristic-based scheduling or interference predictors. Heuristics rely on coarse-grained metrics that overlook important interference sources, while predictors often depend on simulator-specific or similarly coarse metrics. However, GPU interference is complex and arises from multiple mechanisms, including thread-block placement, memory hierarchy contention, and intra-SM resource contention. We present Mosaic, a kernel-level interference predictor that explicitly models these mechanisms using a combination of analytical and lightweight learned models. Across four GPU architectures, Mosaic reduces prediction error by up to an order of magnitude compared to prior predictors. We integrate Mosaic into a scheduler, MosaicSched, that performs online kernel admission control and selects between full-GPU colocation and SM partitioning to maximize best-effort throughput while satisfying latency SLOs. Across all workloads, MosaicSched keeps the p99 latency below or very close to the target SLO.

Mon 5 OctDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
GPUs are heavily used for artificial intelligence but are often not fully used, so people try to run multiple tasks on the same GPU. This can cause delays for tasks that need quick responses because they interfere with each other. The authors created Mosaic, a new way to predict this interference more accurately by looking at how different parts of the GPU interact. They use this prediction to schedule tasks smartly, making sure important tasks finish on time while still using the GPU efficiently.
Open → 2610.07504v1

VSkipper improves speed of large language model serving by skipping layers

vSkipper: Translating Dynamic Layer Skipping into LLM Serving Gains

Abstract: Dynamic layer skipping reduces LLM computation by allowing each token to execute only a subset of the model's layers. However, existing skippers rely on specialized generation loops and do not integrate with modern serving engines. As a result, fewer executed layers do not necessarily translate into lower serving latency: FlexiDepth skips 8 of Llama-3-8B's 32 layers on average, yet its standard generation loop decodes 14.6--21.0% more slowly than the base model. We present vSkipper, a virtualization layer that makes dynamic layer skippers pluggable in serving engines while preserving continuous batching, fixed-shape batches, paged KV caching, and captured decode graphs. At each routed layer, vSkipper groups tokens by the skipper's decision and uses routed execution only when predicted to be profitable. We implement vSkipper in SGLang and evaluate the released FlexiDepth checkpoint against upstream SGLang under identical prompts, arrivals, output lengths, and launch settings. At the knee of upstream's load curve, vSkipper reduces mean end-to-end latency by 36.8% on GSM8K and 13.6% on BBH. Under saturation, it increases request throughput by 11.3% and 7.4%. Serving adds no statistically resolved quality loss beyond the checkpoint's own. Across synthetic skip policies, two Qwen3 skippers, and three GPUs, we demonstrate reuse without workload-specific tuning. To our knowledge, vSkipper is the first system to realize serving-efficiency gains from per-token interior layer skipping within a modern LLM serving engine. The code is open-sourced as an SGLang fork at https://github.com/AKafakA/sglang-vskipper/tree/vskipper-ref

Tue 29 SeptDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingMachine Learning
The gist
Large language models process information by passing tokens through many layers, which uses a lot of computing power and time. Some methods skip processing certain layers for some tokens to save time, but they don’t always make the overall system faster because they are hard to fit into existing software. The authors introduce vSkipper, a software layer that fits these skipping methods into current systems efficiently, allowing real speed gains without hurting output quality. They tested vSkipper on popular language models and found it made serving responses faster and increased the number of requests handled at once.
Open → 2609.37062v1

LLM serving ensures fair token response times under load

Token Latency Fairness: Performance Isolation for Multi-Tenant LLM Serving

Abstract: LLM serving is typically offered as a shared, multi-tenant service, where high-demand workloads from one client can cause latency SLO violations for others. Existing solutions for performance isolation equalize client throughput in the long run, for example through queueing and batching fairness. However, these approaches do not provide latency isolation guarantees; as a result, well-behaved clients can still experience significant degradation to their token-level latencies. In this paper, we present FairInference, which provides the novel δ-token fairness guarantee: for a well-behaved client, if a token is generated in d time units in isolation, it will be generated within d + δ time units in multi-tenant execution, providing strong latency isolation guarantees for LLM serving. To achieve this, FairInference addresses a key challenge of LLM serving: bounding delays from sharing GPU resources without support for fine-grained scheduling or resource allocation. In FairInference, the scheduler enforces per-token deadlines, while bounding the delays from GPU compute sharing and accounting for the additional delays introduced by the shared KV caching in GPU memory. We show that FairInference effectively bounds token-level latency spikes for well-behaved clients and improves overall throughput compared to state-of-the-art LLM serving systems.

Wed 16 SeptDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingMachine Learning
The gist
When many users ask questions to large language models (LLMs) at the same time, some users can experience slower responses because the system gets busy. The authors show that current methods focus on fairness based on total work done, but that doesn't guarantee fast steps for each word generated. They introduce FairInference, which makes sure that if a word (token) normally appears in a certain time alone, it won't be much slower even when the system is busy with others. This helps keep response times consistent and improves overall system performance.
Open → 2609.18112v1