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Xiaofeng Hou

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaofeng Hou.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

MoE-Prism: Disentangling Monolithic Experts for Elastic MoE Services via Model-System Co-Designs

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scales model capacity through sparse activation, and is becoming an important architecture for large language models (LLMs). However, existing MoE serving systems typically execute all requests under a fixed routing configuration, limiting their ability to exploit heterogeneous computation requirements across requests. Routing top-$k$, which determines the number of routed experts activated per token, directly controls routed-expert computation and provides a natural mechanism for request-level compute elasticity. Realizing this capability, however, requires finer-grained routing units and efficient runtime execution for heterogeneous routing budgets. We present \textsc{MoE-Prism}, a model and system support framework for request-level compute elasticity in MoE serving. \textsc{MoE-Prism}decomposes monolithic experts into fine-grained sub-experts to expose denser routing operating points and provides a $k$-aware serving runtime that effectively serves heterogeneous routing budgets under both throughput-oriented and latency-sensitive workloads. We implement \textsc{MoE-Prism} on top of vLLM and evaluate it on three representative MoE models. \textsc{MoE-Prism} expands the number of available routing operating points by $4\times$, improves offline inference throughput by up to 33.9\%, and reduces online serving TTFT under heterogeneous workloads. These results demonstrate practical elastic MoE serving with request-level routing targets.

cs.CL

VisMMOE: Exploiting Visual-Expert Affinity for Efficient Visual-Language MoE Offloading

Large-scale vision-language mixture-of-experts (VL-MoE) models provide strong multimodal capability, but efficient deployment on memory-constrained platforms remains difficult. Existing MoE offloading systems are largely designed for text-centric workloads and become much less effective for visual-heavy inputs, where large numbers of visual tokens induce broader and less predictable expert accesses. We present VisMMoE, a VL-MoE offloading system built on a single systems insight: pruning redundant visual tokens can improve offloading not only by reducing computation, but also by reshaping expert demand. We refer to this effect as \textit{visual-expert affinity}: token pruning makes expert accesses more concentrated within layers and more stable across layers, producing a smaller and more predictable expert working set. Guided by this insight, VisMMoE combines affinity-aware token compression, lookahead expert prediction, and cache/pipeline orchestration to improve expert locality and prefetch effectiveness under tight memory budgets. We implement VisMMoE on multiple frameworks and evaluate it on representative VL-MoE models and benchmarks. VisMMoE improves end-to-end inference performance by up to 2.68x and 1.61x, respectively, over strong baselines for today's VL-MoE deployments while maintaining competitive accuracy.

cs.LG

CODO: An Automated Compiler for Comprehensive Dataflow Optimization

FPGAs are well-suited for dataflow architectures that process data in a streaming or pipelined manner, thus satisfying the high computational and communication demands of emerging applications. However, manually implementing an efficient dataflow architecture for large-scale applications is still challenging, even for specialists who use high-level synthesis (HLS) to simplify FPGA programming. To address this, we introduce CODO, an automated compiler that generates feasible and efficient dataflow accelerators on FPGAs. CODO features a systematic method for detecting and eliminating both coarse-grained and fine-grained dataflow violations. Building on this, CODO performs both on- and off-chip data movement optimizations to maximize transfer efficiency. To guarantee a higher design quality, CODO performs automatic scheduling to generate high-performance dataflow accelerators, ensuring a balanced performance-resource trade-off. Synthesis results show that CODO delivers $1.45\times$ to $4.52\times$ latency speedups on typical computation kernels and $3.7\times$ to $33.8\times$ speedups on DNN models compared to SOTA frameworks. In on-board evaluations, CODO achieves $7.3\times$ average speedup on CNN models and $2.07\times$ average speedup on the GPT-2 model over SOTA frameworks. The compiler is open-sourced at https://github.com/sjtu-zhao-lab/codo-artifact.

cs.AR

PCR: A Prefetch-Enhanced Cache Reuse System for Low-Latency RAG Serving

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating supplementary retrieved documents, enabling more accurate and context-aware responses. However, integrating these external documents often results in very long input sequences, which significantly increases computation costs during the prefill stage, where key-value (KV) representations for all input tokens are generated. This latency bottleneck becomes especially pronounced under high-throughput serving scenarios. KV-cache reuse offers a promising solution by storing previously computed KV states for shared input prefixes, thereby avoiding redundant computation across requests that contain overlapping context. Yet, the effectiveness of cache reuse is often limited by three practical challenges: low cache hit rates due to naive eviction policies, high CPU-GPU data transfer overhead, and slow SSD I/O when caches spill to storage. To address these issues, we propose PCR, a system designed to maximize KV-cache reuse efficiency through intelligent prefetching and pipelined data movement. Specifically, PCR introduces three key techniques: (1) a prefix-tree caching structure with a look-ahead LRU replacement policy that uses pending requests in the scheduler queue to improve cache hit ratios; (2) layer-wise overlapping that pipelines KV-cache loading and GPU computation across CUDA streams to hide communication latency; and (3) queue-based prefetching that proactively loads relevant KV caches from SSD into DRAM before they are needed. Extensive experiments show that PCR outperforms existing KV-cache reuse methods, achieving up to a 2.47x speedup in terms of average TTFT.

cs.DC

MoE-SpeQ: Speculative Quantized Decoding with Proactive Expert Prefetching and Offloading for Mixture-of-Experts

The immense memory requirements of state-of-the-art Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models present a significant challenge for inference, often exceeding the capacity of a single accelerator. While offloading experts to host memory is a common solution, it introduces a severe I/O bottleneck over the PCIe bus, as the data-dependent nature of expert selection places these synchronous transfers directly on the critical path of execution, crippling performance. This paper argues that the I/O bottleneck can be overcome by trading a small amount of cheap, on-device computation to hide the immense cost of data movement. We present MoE-SpeQ, a new inference system built on a novel co-design of speculative execution and expert offloading. MoE-SpeQ employs a small, on-device draft model to predict the sequence of required experts for future tokens. This foresight enables a runtime orchestrator to prefetch these experts from host memory, effectively overlapping the expensive I/O with useful computation and hiding the latency from the critical path. To maximize performance, an adaptive governor, guided by an Amortization Roofline Model, dynamically tunes the speculation strategy to the underlying hardware. Our evaluation on memory-constrained devices shows that for the Phi-MoE model, MoE-SpeQ achieves at most 2.34x speedup over the state-of-the-art offloading framework. Our work establishes a new, principled approach for managing data-dependent memory access in resource-limited environments, making MoE inference more accessible on commodity hardware.

cs.LG

A Survey on Inference Optimization Techniques for Mixture of Experts Models

The emergence of large-scale Mixture of Experts (MoE) models represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence, offering enhanced model capacity and computational efficiency through conditional computation. However, deploying and running inference on these models presents significant challenges in computational resources, latency, and energy efficiency. This comprehensive survey analyzes optimization techniques for MoE models across the entire system stack. We first establish a taxonomical framework that categorizes optimization approaches into model-level, system-level, and hardware-level optimizations. At the model level, we examine architectural innovations including efficient expert design, attention mechanisms, various compression techniques such as pruning, quantization, and knowledge distillation, as well as algorithm improvement including dynamic routing strategies and expert merging methods. At the system level, we investigate distributed computing approaches, load balancing mechanisms, and efficient scheduling algorithms that enable scalable deployment. Furthermore, we delve into hardware-specific optimizations and co-design strategies that maximize throughput and energy efficiency. This survey provides both a structured overview of existing solutions and identifies key challenges and promising research directions in MoE inference optimization. To facilitate ongoing updates and the sharing of cutting-edge advances in MoE inference optimization research, we have established a repository accessible at https://github.com/MoE-Inf/awesome-moe-inference/.

cs.LG

HOBBIT: A Mixed Precision Expert Offloading System for Fast MoE Inference

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture has demonstrated significant advantages in the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), offering enhanced capabilities with reduced inference costs. However, deploying MoE-based LLMs on memoryconstrained edge devices remains challenging due to their substantial memory requirements. While existing expertoffloading methods alleviate the memory requirements, they often incur significant expert-loading costs or compromise model accuracy. We present HOBBIT, a mixed precision expert offloading system to enable flexible and efficient MoE inference. Our key insight is that dynamically replacing less critical cache-miss experts with low precision versions can substantially reduce expert-loading latency while preserving model accuracy. HOBBIT introduces three innovative techniques that map the natural hierarchy of MoE computation: (1) a token-level dynamic expert loading mechanism, (2) a layer-level adaptive expert prefetching technique, and (3) a sequence-level multidimensional expert caching policy. These innovations fully leverage the benefits of mixedprecision expert inference. By implementing HOBBIT on top of the renowned LLM inference framework Llama.cpp, we evaluate its performance across different edge devices with representative MoE models. The results demonstrate that HOBBIT achieves up to a 9.93x speedup in decoding compared to state-of-the-art MoE offloading systems.

cs.LG

Potamoi: Accelerating Neural Rendering via a Unified Streaming Architecture

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has emerged as a promising alternative for photorealistic rendering. Despite recent algorithmic advancements, achieving real-time performance on today's resource-constrained devices remains challenging. In this paper, we identify the primary bottlenecks in current NeRF algorithms and introduce a unified algorithm-architecture co-design, Potamoi, designed to accommodate various NeRF algorithms. Specifically, we introduce a runtime system featuring a plug-and-play algorithm, SpaRW, which significantly reduces the per-frame computational workload and alleviates compute inefficiencies. Furthermore, our unified streaming pipeline coupled with customized hardware support effectively tames both SRAM and DRAM inefficiencies by minimizing repetitive DRAM access and completely eliminating SRAM bank conflicts. When evaluated against a baseline utilizing a dedicated DNN accelerator, our framework demonstrates a speed-up and energy reduction of 53.1$\times$ and 67.7$\times$, respectively, all while maintaining high visual quality with less than a 1.0 dB reduction in peak signal-to-noise ratio.

cs.AR

AutoVCoder: A Systematic Framework for Automated Verilog Code Generation using LLMs

Recently, the use of large language models (LLMs) for software code generation, e.g., C/C++ and Python, has proven a great success. However, LLMs still suffer from low syntactic and functional correctness when it comes to the generation of register-transfer level (RTL) code, such as Verilog. To address this issue, in this paper, we develop AutoVCoder, a systematic open-source framework that significantly improves the LLMs' correctness of generating Verilog code and enhances the quality of its output at the same time. Our framework integrates three novel techniques, including a high-quality hardware dataset generation approach, a two-round LLM fine-tuning method and a domain-specific retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that AutoVCoder outperforms both industrial and academic LLMs in Verilog code generation. Specifically, AutoVCoder shows a 0.5% and 2.2% improvement in functional correctness on the EvalMachine and EvalHuman benchmarks compared with BetterV, and also achieves a 3.4% increase in syntax correctness and a 3.4% increase in functional correctness on the RTLLM benchmark compared with RTLCoder.

cs.AR

FlowWalker: A Memory-efficient and High-performance GPU-based Dynamic Graph Random Walk Framework

Dynamic graph random walk (DGRW) emerges as a practical tool for capturing structural relations within a graph. Effectively executing DGRW on GPU presents certain challenges. First, existing sampling methods demand a pre-processing buffer, causing substantial space complexity. Moreover, the power-law distribution of graph vertex degrees introduces workload imbalance issues, rendering DGRW embarrassed to parallelize. In this paper, we propose FlowWalker, a GPU-based dynamic graph random walk framework. FlowWalker implements an efficient parallel sampling method to fully exploit the GPU parallelism and reduce space complexity. Moreover, it employs a sampler-centric paradigm alongside a dynamic scheduling strategy to handle the huge amounts of walking queries. FlowWalker stands as a memory-efficient framework that requires no auxiliary data structures in GPU global memory. We examine the performance of FlowWalker extensively on ten datasets, and experiment results show that FlowWalker achieves up to 752.2x, 72.1x, and 16.4x speedup compared with existing CPU, GPU, and FPGA random walk frameworks, respectively. Case study shows that FlowWalker diminishes random walk time from 35% to 3% in a pipeline of ByteDance friend recommendation GNN training.

cs.DC

MMBench: Benchmarking End-to-End Multi-modal DNNs and Understanding Their Hardware-Software Implications

The explosive growth of various types of big data and advances in AI technologies have catalyzed a new type of workloads called multi-modal DNNs. Multi-modal DNNs are capable of interpreting and reasoning about information from multiple modalities, making them more applicable to real-world AI scenarios. In recent research, multi-modal DNNs have outperformed the best uni-modal DNN in a wide range of distributed computing applications from traditional multimedia systems to emerging autonomous edge systems. However, despite their importance and superiority, very limited research attention has been devoted to understand the characteristics of multi-modal DNNs and their implications on current computing software/hardware platforms. Existing benchmarks either target uni-modal DNNs or only focus on the algorithm characteristics of multi-modal DNNs. There lacks representative benchmark suites that provide comprehensive system and architecture level analysis of multi-modal networks. To advance the understanding of these multi-modal DNN workloads and facilitate related research, we present MMBench, an open-source, end-to-end benchmark suite consisting of a set of real-world multi-modal DNN workloads with relevant performance metrics for evaluation. We then use MMBench to conduct an in-depth analysis on the characteristics of multi-modal DNNs. We demonstrate their unique characteristics of clear multi-stage execution, frequent synchronization and high heterogeneity, which distinguish them from conventional uni-modal DNNs. Finally, we conduct a case study and extend our benchmark to edge devices. We hope that our work can provide insights for future software/hardware design and optimization to underpin multi-modal DNNs on both cloud and edge computing platforms.

cs.PF

DataCLUE: A Benchmark Suite for Data-centric NLP

Data-centric AI has recently proven to be more effective and high-performance, while traditional model-centric AI delivers fewer and fewer benefits. It emphasizes improving the quality of datasets to achieve better model performance. This field has significant potential because of its great practicability and getting more and more attention. However, we have not seen significant research progress in this field, especially in NLP. We propose DataCLUE, which is the first Data-Centric benchmark applied in NLP field. We also provide three simple but effective baselines to foster research in this field (improve Macro-F1 up to 5.7% point). In addition, we conduct comprehensive experiments with human annotators and show the hardness of DataCLUE. We also try an advanced method: the forgetting informed bootstrapping label correction method. All the resources related to DataCLUE, including datasets, toolkit, leaderboard, and baselines, is available online at https://github.com/CLUEbenchmark/DataCLUE

cs.CL

A method using deep learning to discover new predictors of CRT response from mechanical dyssynchrony on gated SPECT MPI

Background. Studies have shown that the conventional left ventricular mechanical dyssynchrony (LVMD) parameters have their own statistical limitations. The purpose of this study is to extract new LVMD parameters from the phase analysis of gated SPECT MPI by deep learning to help CRT patient selection. Methods. One hundred and three patients who underwent rest gated SPECT MPI were enrolled in this study. CRT response was defined as a decrease in left ventricular end-systolic volume (LVESV) >= 15% at 6 +- 1 month follow up. Autoencoder (AE), an unsupervised deep learning method, was trained by the raw LV systolic phase polar maps to extract new LVMD parameters, called AE-based LVMD parameters. Correlation analysis was used to explain the relationships between new parameters with conventional LVMD parameters. Univariate and multivariate analyses were used to establish a multivariate model for predicting CRT response. Results. Complete data were obtained in 102 patients, 44.1% of them were classified as CRT responders. AE-based LVMD parameter was significant in the univariate (OR 1.24, 95% CI 1.07 - 1.44, P = 0.006) and multivariate analyses (OR 1.03, 95% CI 1.01 - 1.06, P = 0.006). Moreover, it had incremental value over PSD (AUC 0.72 vs. 0.63, LH 8.06, P = 0.005) and PBW (AUC 0.72 vs. 0.64, LH 7.87, P = 0.005), combined with significant clinic characteristics, including LVEF and gender. Conclusions. The new LVMD parameters extracted by autoencoder from the baseline gated SPECT MPI has the potential to improve the prediction of CRT response.

physics.med-ph

Global classical solution to 3D isentropic compressible Navier-Stokes equations with large initial data and vacuum

In this paper, we investigate the existence of a global classical solution to 3D Cauchy problem of the isentropic compressible Navier-Stokes equations with large initial data and vacuum. Precisely, when the far-field density is vacuum ($\widetildeρ=0$), we get the global classical solution under the assumption that $(γ-1)^\frac{1}{3}E_0μ^{-1}$ is suitably small. In the case that the far-field density is away from vacuum ($\widetildeρ>0$), the global classical solution is also obtained when $\left((γ-1)^\frac{1}{36}+\widetildeρ^\frac{1}{6}\right)E_0^{\frac{1}{4}}μ^{-\frac{1}{3}}$ is suitably small. The above results show that the initial energy $E_0$ could be large if $γ-1$ and $\widetildeρ$ are small or the viscosity coefficient $μ$ is taken to be large. These results improve the one obtained by Huang-Li-Xin in \cite{Huang-Li-Xin}, where the existence of the classical solution is proved with small initial energy. It should be noted that in the theorems obtained in this paper, no smallness restriction is put upon the initial data. It can be viewed the first result on the existence of the global classical solution to three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations with large initial energy and vacuum when $γ$ is near $1$.

math.AP

Global classical solution to 3D compressible magnetohydrodynamic equations with large initial data and vacuum

In this paper, we study the Cauchy problem of the isentropic compressible magnetohydrodynamic equations in $\mathbb{R}^{3}$. When $(γ-1)^{\frac{1}{6}}E_{0}^{\frac{1}{2}}$, together with the $\|H_{0}\|_{L^{2}}$, is suitably small, a result on the existence of global classical solutions is obtained. It should be pointed out that the initial energy $E_{0}$ except the $L^{2}$- norm of $H_{0}$ can be large as $γ$ goes to 1, and that throughout the proof of the theorem in the present paper, we make no restriction upon the initial data $(ρ_{0},u_{0})$. Our result improves the one established by Li-Xu-Zhang in \cite{H.L. L}, where, with small initial engergy, the existence of classical solution was proved.

math.AP