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Oct 16

Flash-KMeans: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact K-Means

k-means has historically been positioned primarily as an offline processing primitive, typically used for dataset organization or embedding preprocessing rather than as a first-class component in online systems. In this work, we revisit this classical algorithm under the lens of modern AI system design and enable k-means as an online primitive. We point out that existing GPU implementations of k-means remain fundamentally bottlenecked by low-level system constraints rather than theoretical algorithmic complexity. Specifically, the assignment stage suffers from a severe IO bottleneck due to the massive explicit materialization of the N times K distance matrix in High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Simultaneously, the centroid update stage is heavily penalized by hardware-level atomic write contention caused by irregular, scatter-style token aggregations. To bridge this performance gap, we propose flash-kmeans, an IO-aware and contention-free k-means implementation for modern GPU workloads. Flash-kmeans introduces two core kernel-level innovations: (1) FlashAssign, which fuses distance computation with an online argmin to completely bypass intermediate memory materialization; (2) sort-inverse update, which explicitly constructs an inverse mapping to transform high-contention atomic scatters into high-bandwidth, segment-level localized reductions. Furthermore, we integrate algorithm-system co-designs, including chunked-stream overlap and cache-aware compile heuristics, to ensure practical deployability. Extensive evaluations on NVIDIA H200 GPUs demonstrate that flash-kmeans achieves up to 17.9times end-to-end speedup over best baselines, while outperforming industry-standard libraries like cuML and FAISS by 33times and over 200times, respectively.

Berkeley UC Berkeley
·
Mar 10 3

Hallo-Live: Real-Time Streaming Joint Audio-Video Avatar Generation with Asynchronous Dual-Stream and Human-Centric Preference Distillation

Real-time text-driven joint audio-video avatar generation requires jointly synthesizing portrait video and speech with high fidelity and precise synchronization, yet existing audio-visual diffusion models remain too slow for interactive use and often degrade noticeably after aggressive acceleration. We present Hallo-Live, a streaming framework for joint audio-visual avatar generation that combines asynchronous dual-stream diffusion with human-centric preference-guided distillation. To reduce articulation lag in causal generation, we introduce Future-Expanding Attention, which allows each video block to access synchronous audio together with a short horizon of future phonetic cues. To mitigate the quality loss of few-step distillation, we further propose Human-Centric Preference-Guided DMD (HP-DMD), which reweights training samples using rewards from visual fidelity, speech naturalness, and audio-visual synchronization. On two NVIDIA H200 GPUs, Hallo-Live runs at 20.38 FPS with 0.94 seconds latency, yielding 16.0x higher throughput and 99.3x lower latency than the teacher model Ovi. Despite this speedup, it retains strong generation quality, reaching comparable VideoAlign overall score and Sync Confidence score while outperforming other accelerated baselines in the overall quality-efficiency trade-off. Qualitative results further show robust generalization across photorealistic, multi-speaker, and stylized scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, Hallo-Live is the first framework to combine streaming dual-stream diffusion with preference-guided distillation for real-time, text-driven audio-visual generation.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 25

MISA: Mixture of Indexer Sparse Attention for Long-Context LLM Inference

DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) sets the state of the art for fine-grained inference-time sparse attention by introducing a learned token-wise indexer that scores every prefix token and selects the most relevant ones for the main attention. To remain expressive, the indexer uses many query heads (for example, 64 on DeepSeek-V3.2) that share the same selected token set; this multi-head design is precisely what makes the indexer the dominant cost on long contexts. We propose MISA (Mixture of Indexer Sparse Attention), a drop-in replacement for the DSA indexer that treats its indexer heads as a pool of mixture-of-experts. A lightweight router uses cheap block-level statistics to pick a query-dependent subset of only a few active heads, and only those heads run the heavy token-level scoring. This preserves the diversity of the original indexer pool while reducing the per-query cost from scoring every prefix token with every head to scoring it with only a handful of routed heads, plus a negligible router term computed on a small set of pooled keys. We further introduce a hierarchical variant of MISA that uses the routed pass to keep an enlarged candidate set and then re-ranks it with the original DSA indexer to recover the final selected tokens almost exactly. With only eight active heads and no additional training, MISA matches the dense DSA indexer on LongBench across DeepSeek-V3.2 and GLM-5 while running with eight and four times fewer indexer heads respectively, and outperforms HISA on average. It also preserves fully green Needle-in-a-Haystack heatmaps up to a 128K-token context and recovers more than 92% of the tokens selected by the DSA indexer per layer. Our TileLang kernel delivers roughly a 3.82 times speedup over DSA's original indexer kernel on a single NVIDIA H200 GPU.

How Much Do LLMs Hallucinate in Document Q&A Scenarios? A 172-Billion-Token Study Across Temperatures, Context Lengths, and Hardware Platforms

How much do large language models actually hallucinate when answering questions grounded in provided documents? Despite the critical importance of this question for enterprise AI deployments, reliable measurement has been hampered by benchmarks that rely on static datasets vulnerable to contamination, LLM-based judges with documented biases, or evaluation scales too small for statistical confidence. We address this gap using RIKER, a ground-truth-first evaluation methodology that enables deterministic scoring without human annotation. Across 35 open-weight models, three context lengths (32K, 128K, and 200K tokens), four temperature settings, and three hardware platforms (NVIDIA H200, AMD MI300X, and Intel Gaudi 3), we conducted over 172 billion tokens of evaluation - an order of magnitude beyond prior work. Our findings reveal that: (1) even the best-performing models fabricate answers at a non-trivial rate - 1.19% at best at 32K, with top-tier models at 5 - 7% - and fabrication rises steeply with context length, nearly tripling at 128K and exceeding 10% for all models at 200K; (2) model selection dominates all other factors, with overall accuracy spanning a 72-percentage-point range and model family predicting fabrication resistance better than model size; (3) temperature effects are nuanced - T=0.0 yields the best overall accuracy in roughly 60% of cases, but higher temperatures reduce fabrication for the majority of models and dramatically reduce coherence loss (infinite generation loops), which can reach 48x higher rates at T=0.0 versus T=1.0; (4) grounding ability and fabrication resistance are distinct capabilities - models that excel at finding facts may still fabricate facts that do not exist; and (5) results are consistent across hardware platforms, confirming that deployment decisions need not be hardware-dependent.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 8

Forcing-KV: Hybrid KV Cache Compression for Efficient Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models

Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion models adopt a streaming generation framework, enabling long-horizon video generation with real-time responsiveness, as exemplified by the Self Forcing training paradigm. However, existing AR video diffusion models still suffer from significant attention complexity and severe memory overhead due to the redundant key-value (KV) caches across historical frames, which limits scalability. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by introducing KV cache compression into autoregressive video diffusion. We observe that attention heads in mainstream AR diffusion models exhibit markedly distinct attention patterns and functional roles that remain stable across samples and denoising steps. Building on our empirical study of head-wise functional specialization, we divide the attention heads into two categories: static heads, which focus on transitions across autoregressive chunks and intra-frame fidelity, and dynamic heads, which govern inter-frame motion and consistency. We then propose Forcing-KV, a hybrid KV cache compression strategy that performs structured static pruning for static heads and dynamic pruning based on segment-wise similarity for dynamic heads. While maintaining output quality, our method achieves a generation speed of over 29 frames per second on a single NVIDIA H200 GPU along with 30% cache memory reduction, delivering up to 1.35x and 1.50x speedups on LongLive and Self Forcing at 480P resolution, and further scaling to 2.82x speedup at 1080P resolution. Code and demo videos are provided at https://zju-jiyicheng.github.io/Forcing-KV-Page.

OSP-Next: Efficient High-Quality Video Generation with Sparse Sequence Parallelism, HiF8 Quantization, and Reinforcement Learning

Diffusion Transformers achieve strong video generation quality, but the quadratic cost of full attention limits efficiency. We introduce OSP-Next, an efficient text-to-video generation model that integrates sparse attention, parallelism, quantization, and reinforcement learning. OSP-Next uses a hybrid full-sparse attention architecture, where the sparse component is implemented with Skiparse-2D Attention. This fixed-pattern mechanism applies token-wise and group-wise sparse attention along spatial dimensions, leveraging locality while maintaining native compatibility with FlashAttention kernels. Based on the local equivalence of rearrangement in Skiparse-2D Attention, we further propose Sparse Sequence Parallelism (SSP), which partitions subsequences across ranks and switches sparse patterns through a single All-to-All communication. Compared with Ulysses Sequence Parallelism (SP), SSP provides a native parallel strategy for sparse attention and reduces communication volume by 75%. OSP-Next also incorporates HiF8 quantization to enable stable joint training with 8-bit quantization and sparse fine-tuning, and applies Mix-GRPO post-training to improve the performance of the sparse model. Experiments show that OSP-Next achieves a VBench total score of 83.73%, surpassing the Wan2.1 baseline. Under the 5-second 720P and 5-second 768P settings, OSP-Next achieves up to 1.64times single-GPU speedup and over 1.52times eight-GPU speedup on NVIDIA H200 GPUs. In addition, with only a 0.4% drop in VBench total score, OSP-Next-HiF8 achieves 1.69times and 2.27times speedups under the two settings on a single Ascend 950PR, demonstrating the efficiency and performance of OSP-Next across hardware platforms.

CineMobile: On-Device Image-to-Video Diffusion for Cinematic Camera Motion Generation

The growing demand for image-to-video creation on mobile devices has increasingly focused on cinematic motion effects like bullet time, dolly zoom, slow motion, etc. While Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) exhibit strong performance in video generation, their large parameter sizes and multi-step iterative denoising processes lead to substantial computational overhead, making efficient generation on mobile devices challenging. We propose CineMobile to bridge the gap. In particular, CineMobile adopts a three-fold optimization strategy: (1) leveraging a distillation-guided pruning approach to derive a compact yet efficient model that retains the essential video generation capabilities required for cinematic effects; (2) optimizing the compressed model into a 4-step generator via a combination of diffusion distillation and reinforcement learning; (3) employing a hybrid post-training quantization strategy to compress the model footprint to under 1 GB. Experimental results show that compared to the teacher model with the Wan 2.1 architecture, CineMobile achieves a 40x speedup in generation while maintaining comparable visual quality. Specifically, CineMobile generates 49-frame 480p videos with a per-step denoising latency of 0.6s on an NVIDIA H200 GPU and 20s on the MediaTek Dimensity 8400 Ultimate 5G platform, with a peak memory usage of 1.8 GB, demonstrating its practical applicability for mobile-based image-to-video creation.

Workload Identification with Physical Side Channels for AI Governance

AI compute verification is one of the first tangible and tractable points for international policy aimed at AI governance. Determining whether frontier labs, or any operator, comply with agreements requires the regulating authority to discern how their compute is used. The elementary building block of AI compute is the GPU, and any activity it executes leaves a physical trace. Here, we show that an external observer can identify the class of the workload running on an NVIDIA H200 from its power draw. Unlike on-chip NVML telemetry, which can be spoofed or replayed, such a physical channel can in principle be observed independently of operator cooperation. We recorded 930 five-second traces at sim 10 MHz, covering seventeen open LLM families and twenty-five non-AI workloads. Over this corpus we separate training from inference and from non-AI computation with an accuracy of 97% and a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.955, evaluated on model families unseen during training. AI workload spectral content predominantly lies below sim 20kHz and training is particularly recognizable through the memory-bound optimizer update. The GPU operator is then treated as adversarial and able to reshape the physical computation itself. Four evasion strategies are tested to disguise training as inference, producing an additional 680 adversarial traces. A detector hardened against evasion strategies, with the tested strategy held out, catches training geq 99% of the time for three of the four strategies. The fourth, diluted low-rank adaptation (LoRA), is detected 48--88% of the time with a hardened classifier, rising to geq 98% with an additional rescue rule. While these attacks are not a comprehensive evaluation against adversarial behaviour, they offer initial insights beyond genuine activities and a dataset for developing and testing stronger evasion mechanisms.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 30

SoulX-LiveAct: Towards Hour-Scale Real-Time Human Animation with Neighbor Forcing and ConvKV Memory

Autoregressive (AR) diffusion models offer a promising framework for sequential generation tasks such as video synthesis by combining diffusion modeling with causal inference. Although they support streaming generation, existing AR diffusion methods struggle to scale efficiently. In this paper, we identify two key challenges in hour-scale real-time human animation. First, most forcing strategies propagate sample-level representations with mismatched diffusion states, causing inconsistent learning signals and unstable convergence. Second, historical representations grow unbounded and lack structure, preventing effective reuse of cached states and severely limiting inference efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose Neighbor Forcing, a diffusion-step-consistent AR formulation that propagates temporally adjacent frames as latent neighbors under the same noise condition. This design provides a distribution-aligned and stable learning signal while preserving drifting throughout the AR chain. Building upon this, we introduce a structured ConvKV memory mechanism that compresses the keys and values in causal attention into a fixed-length representation, enabling constant-memory inference and truly infinite video generation without relying on short-term motion-frame memory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves training convergence, hour-scale generation quality, and inference efficiency compared to existing AR diffusion methods. Numerically, LiveAct enables hour-scale real-time human animation and supports 20 FPS real-time streaming inference on as few as two NVIDIA H100 or H200 GPUs. Quantitative results demonstrate that our method attains state-of-the-art performance in lip-sync accuracy, human animation quality, and emotional expressiveness, with the lowest inference cost.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 12

Scaling DoRA: High-Rank Adaptation via Factored Norms and Fused Kernels

Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation (DoRA) extends LoRA by decoupling weight magnitude from direction, but its forward pass requires the row-wise norm of W + sBA, a computation that every major framework we surveyed implements by materializing the dense [d_out, d_in] product BA. At d_in = 8192 and rank r = 384, a single module's norm requires about 512 MB of transient working memory in bf16, making high-rank DoRA costly and often infeasible on common single-GPU setups once hundreds of adapted modules and checkpointing are involved. We present two systems contributions. A factored norm decomposes the squared norm into base, cross, and Gram terms computable through O(d_out r + r^2) intermediates, eliminating the dense product. Fused Triton kernels collapse the four-kernel DoRA composition into a single pass, reducing memory traffic by about 4x and using a numerically stable form that avoids catastrophic cancellation in the near-unity rescaling regime where magnitude scales concentrate in practice. Across six 8-32B vision-language models (VLMs) on three NVIDIA GPUs (RTX 6000 PRO, H200, B200) at r = 384 in bf16, the fused implementation is 1.5-2.0x faster than Hugging Face PEFT's DoRA implementation for inference and 1.5-1.9x faster for gradient computation (optimizer step excluded), with up to 7 GB lower peak VRAM. Microbenchmarks on six GPUs spanning four architecture generations (L40S, A100, RTX 6000 PRO, H200, B200, B300) confirm 1.5-2.7x compose-kernel speedup. Final-logit cosine similarity exceeds 0.9999 across all model/GPU pairs, and multi-seed training curves match within 7.1 x 10^-4 mean per-step loss delta over 2000 steps.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 23 2

GPU-Initiated Communication: Dissecting Down to the Bone

GPU-initiated communication lets GPU threads post RDMA operations directly to the NIC. It underpins NVSHMEM, NCCL GIN, and DeepEP, which serve the fine-grained, latency-critical communication of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, yet its performance characteristics and optimizations remain scarcely documented beyond source code, and library comparisons fail to separate the costs of the hardware mechanism from those of the library around it. This paper dissects GPU-initiated communication at the GPU-NIC boundary. We first detail the GPU-side network path: queue placement, work-request construction, doorbell ordering, and completion semantics. We then introduce mini-gda and mini-proxy, minimal transports for the GPU and CPU-proxy submission paths, and measure them alongside NVSHMEM IBGDA, NCCL GIN, DeepEP, UCCL-EP, MSCCL++, and fabric-lib on NVIDIA H100, H200, B200, and GB200 platforms. A minimal GPU path issues an operation in 0.7 μs and completes in 4.0 μs; libraries add up to 4.6 μs of issue time through queue management, memory ordering, and completion scope, and issue time scales with the SM clock. A tuned CPU proxy matches or beats the GPU path at idle, at the cost of a dedicated core whose operating state sets its latency and throughput. On either path, sharing a queue with bulk traffic raises latency by one to three orders of magnitude. Reaching the 260 M msg/s ceiling of our InfiniBand platform requires doorbell batching and queue parallelism, and both have resource costs: communication code can reduce GPU block residency even when unused, and all-to-all traffic loses 59% of its NIC message rate at about 3,000 active connections. The submission path alone therefore does not predict communication performance. Our experiment code and results are available at https://github.com/ParCoreLab/Dissecting-GPU-Communication-Experiments.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 30

Training Agents to Evolve with Their Harness: TaoLive Digital Avatar Agent Technical Report

AI-powered digital avatar streamers must answer product questions, engage viewers, and execute marketing strategies in real time, demanding low latency, frequent strategy updates, and accurate yet effective responses. Evolvable Harnesses, whose Skills, Hooks, prompts, and tools can be updated independently of model weights, enable rapid iteration but expose a trade-off: large models adapt zero-shot yet are too slow, whereas compact models meet latency targets but overfit to fixed Harness configurations. We propose Harness-Aware Training (HAT), which trains compact models to adapt to changing Harnesses. Its key component, Harness-State Augmentation (HSA), applies task-preserving transformations to Skill identifiers and content, tool schemas, prompt structures, and Hook functions. Training proceeds in three stages: HSA-SFT learns reasoning and tool use from strong-model trajectories across diverse environments; General On-Policy Distillation restores generalization lost during SFT; and HSA-RL improves robustness to changing Harnesses through reinforcement learning in augmented environments. Across four evaluation sets, HAT achieves 94.8 on Live-Stream QA (base: 80.3; strongest general LLM: 93.0) and 94.6 on Harness-Variant QA (base: 75.4). Unlike Fixed-Harness SFT, which lowers IFEval by 7.7 points from the base model, HAT avoids this regression and reaches 83.5. On one NVIDIA H20 GPU, the optimized system delivers P50 and P95 latencies of 3.4 s and 8.1 s. Deployed in Taobao Live's digital-avatar service, it also yields positive online A/B test results for GMV and item-page views.

TaoLiveAIGC TaoLive AIGC
·
Aug 21 2

Hardware Acceleration of Neural Graphics

Rendering and inverse-rendering algorithms that drive conventional computer graphics have recently been superseded by neural representations (NR). NRs have recently been used to learn the geometric and the material properties of the scenes and use the information to synthesize photorealistic imagery, thereby promising a replacement for traditional rendering algorithms with scalable quality and predictable performance. In this work we ask the question: Does neural graphics (NG) need hardware support? We studied representative NG applications showing that, if we want to render 4k res. at 60FPS there is a gap of 1.5X-55X in the desired performance on current GPUs. For AR/VR applications, there is an even larger gap of 2-4 OOM between the desired performance and the required system power. We identify that the input encoding and the MLP kernels are the performance bottlenecks, consuming 72%,60% and 59% of application time for multi res. hashgrid, multi res. densegrid and low res. densegrid encodings, respectively. We propose a NG processing cluster, a scalable and flexible hardware architecture that directly accelerates the input encoding and MLP kernels through dedicated engines and supports a wide range of NG applications. We also accelerate the rest of the kernels by fusing them together in Vulkan, which leads to 9.94X kernel-level performance improvement compared to un-fused implementation of the pre-processing and the post-processing kernels. Our results show that, NGPC gives up to 58X end-to-end application-level performance improvement, for multi res. hashgrid encoding on average across the four NG applications, the performance benefits are 12X,20X,33X and 39X for the scaling factor of 8,16,32 and 64, respectively. Our results show that with multi res. hashgrid encoding, NGPC enables the rendering of 4k res. at 30FPS for NeRF and 8k res. at 120FPS for all our other NG applications.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 10, 2023

Analyzing Modern NVIDIA GPU cores

GPUs are the most popular platform for accelerating HPC workloads, such as artificial intelligence and science simulations. However, most microarchitectural research in academia relies on GPU core pipeline designs based on architectures that are more than 15 years old. This paper reverse engineers modern NVIDIA GPU cores, unveiling many key aspects of its design and explaining how GPUs leverage hardware-compiler techniques where the compiler guides hardware during execution. In particular, it reveals how the issue logic works including the policy of the issue scheduler, the structure of the register file and its associated cache, and multiple features of the memory pipeline. Moreover, it analyses how a simple instruction prefetcher based on a stream buffer fits well with modern NVIDIA GPUs and is likely to be used. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of the register file cache and the number of register file read ports on both simulation accuracy and performance. By modeling all these new discovered microarchitectural details, we achieve 18.24% lower mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) in execution cycles than previous state-of-the-art simulators, resulting in an average of 13.98% MAPE with respect to real hardware (NVIDIA RTX A6000). Also, we demonstrate that this new model stands for other NVIDIA architectures, such as Turing. Finally, we show that the software-based dependence management mechanism included in modern NVIDIA GPUs outperforms a hardware mechanism based on scoreboards in terms of performance and area.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 26, 2025

Memory-Bound but Not Bandwidth-Limited: The Physical AI Inference Gap in Batch-1 LLM Decode

Physical AI systems, including robots, autonomous vehicles, embodied agents and edge copilots, often run a different inference workload from cloud LLM serving: single-stream, batch-1 autoregressive decode, where one robot, camera feed or user session waits on the next token. This workload is usually described as memory-bandwidth-bound. Each decode step streams model weights and the active KV cache, so latency should scale with peak HBM bandwidth. We show that this account is true but incomplete. We measure batch-1 decode for three 7 to 8B-class GQA transformers across four NVIDIA GPUs: H100 SXM5, A100-80GB SXM4, L40S and L4. We evaluate context lengths from 2048 to 16384, producing 44 valid cells under a controlled bf16 SDPA setup. The achieved fraction of peak HBM bandwidth falls as peak bandwidth rises. On the headline Qwen-2.5-7B ctx=2048 cell, an L4 reaches roughly 81 percent of its analytic memory floor, while an H100 reaches only 27 percent. Physical-AI decode is memory-dominated, but faster memory does not translate into proportional latency gains. We test the missing term with a CUDA Graphs A/B experiment. On H100 at ctx=2048, CUDA Graphs improves decode latency by 1.259x across N=10 fresh sessions, with a 95 percent bootstrap confidence interval of 1.253 to 1.267. On L4, the same intervention gives only 1.028x. This isolates a launch-side overhead that becomes visible on fast GPUs but remains mostly hidden on slower, bandwidth-bound GPUs. The deployment implication is that memory savings matter only when the runtime realises them. On L4, bf16 decode sits close to the memory floor, but common quantised paths do not recover the expected 4x weight-traffic reduction: bnb-nf4 reaches 59.36 ms/step and AutoAWQ+Marlin reaches 45.24 ms/step from a 62.32 ms bf16 baseline. GPTQ+ExLlamaV2, with Ada-tuned int4 kernels, reaches 17.36 ms/step.

  • 1 authors
·
May 27 2

RayOrch: Programming and Executing Lineage-Controlled Multi-Grain Dataflows for Foundation-Model Data Preparation

Preparing high quality training data for foundation models requires scalable pipelines that transform heterogeneous documents and videos into structured records. Such pipelines expand each parent item into an ordered and input dependent sequence of children, whose counts may be long tailed. GPUs should batch children across parents while preserving parent relationships, child order, completion status, and result routing. Existing systems either hide parallelism behind coarse grained jobs or expose flat records that force applications to manage lineage and regrouping. We present RayOrch, a programming model and distributed execution engine that preserves parent child relations throughout execution. Programs declare ordered variable cardinality expansions and matching gathers. The compiler validates each pair, while the runtime records child membership, immediate parents, immutable ordinals, and terminal states. Per Call FIFO Ready Queues batch ready children across parents. Gathers reconstruct results from declared membership and ordinals rather than batch boundaries or completion order. Parents can advance as soon as all required children become terminal. Typed parent scoped failures suppress undispatched siblings of the failed parent while allowing unrelated parents to continue. On NVIDIA H20 GPUs, RayOrch achieves 15.14 times speedup when scaling MinerU from 4 to 64 GPUs and 7.82 times speedup when scaling a video pipeline from 8 to 64 GPUs. It reduces end to end time by 13.1 percent versus Ray Data and 29.0 percent versus Daft on MinerU, and by 16.0 percent versus Ray Data on Docling. Code available at https://github.com/OpenDCAI/RayOrch .

CUDA-L2: Surpassing cuBLAS Performance for Matrix Multiplication through Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we propose CUDA-L2, a system that combines large language models (LLMs) and reinforcement learning (RL) to automatically optimize Half-precision General Matrix Multiply (HGEMM) CUDA kernels. Using CUDA execution speed as the RL reward, CUDA-L2 automatically optimizes HGEMM kernels across 1,000 configurations. CUDA-L2 systematically outperforms major matmul baselines to date, from the widely-used {\it torch.matmul} to state-of-the-art Nvidia's closed-source libraries, i.e., {\it cuBLAS}, {\it cuBLASLt}. In offline mode, where kernels are executed consecutively without time intervals, CUDA-L2 yields +22.0\% over {\it torch.matmul} on average; +19.2\% over {\it cuBLAS} using the optimal layout configuration (normal-normal NN and transposed-normal TN); +16.8\% over {\it cuBLASLt-heuristic}, which queries {\it cuBLASLt} library and selects the algorithm based on the heuristic's suggestion; and +11.4\% over the most competitive {\it cuBLASLt-AutoTuning} model, which selects the fastest algorithm from up to 100 candidates from {\it cuBLASLt}'s suggestions. In server mode, where kernels are executed at random intervals simulating real-time inference, the speedups further increase to +28.7\%, +26.0\%, +22.4\%, and +15.9\% for {\it torch.matmul}, {\it cuBLAS}, {\it cuBLASLt-heuristic}, and {\it cuBLASLt-AutoTuning} respectively. CUDA-L2 shows that even the most performance-critical, heavily-optimized kernels like HGEMM can be improved through LLM-guided RL automation by systematically exploring configuration spaces at scales impractical for humans. Project and code can be found at github.com/deepreinforce-ai/CUDA-L2

ornith-ai Ornith
·
Dec 2, 2025 2

Helios: Real Real-Time Long Video Generation Model

We introduce Helios, the first 14B video generation model that runs at 19.5 FPS on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU and supports minute-scale generation while matching the quality of a strong baseline. We make breakthroughs along three key dimensions: (1) robustness to long-video drifting without commonly used anti-drifting heuristics such as self-forcing, error-banks, or keyframe sampling; (2) real-time generation without standard acceleration techniques such as KV-cache, sparse/linear attention, or quantization; and (3) training without parallelism or sharding frameworks, enabling image-diffusion-scale batch sizes while fitting up to four 14B models within 80 GB of GPU memory. Specifically, Helios is a 14B autoregressive diffusion model with a unified input representation that natively supports T2V, I2V, and V2V tasks. To mitigate drifting in long-video generation, we characterize typical failure modes and propose simple yet effective training strategies that explicitly simulate drifting during training, while eliminating repetitive motion at its source. For efficiency, we heavily compress the historical and noisy context and reduce the number of sampling steps, yielding computational costs comparable to -- or lower than -- those of 1.3B video generative models. Moreover, we introduce infrastructure-level optimizations that accelerate both inference and training while reducing memory consumption. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Helios consistently outperforms prior methods on both short- and long-video generation. We plan to release the code, base model, and distilled model to support further development by the community.

ByteDance ByteDance
·
Mar 4 6

CUDA-L1: Improving CUDA Optimization via Contrastive Reinforcement Learning

The exponential growth in demand for GPU computing resources, driven by the rapid advancement of Large Language Models, has created an urgent need for automated CUDA optimization strategies. While recent advances in LLMs show promise for code generation, current SOTA models (e.g. R1, o1) achieve low success rates in improving CUDA speed. In this paper, we introduce CUDA-L1, an automated reinforcement learning framework for CUDA optimization. CUDA-L1 achieves performance improvements on the CUDA optimization task: trained on NVIDIA A100, it delivers an average speedup of x17.7 across all 250 CUDA kernels of KernelBench, with peak speedups reaching x449. Furthermore, the model also demonstrates excellent portability across GPU architectures, achieving average speedups of x17.8 on H100, x19.0 on RTX 3090, x16.5 on L40, x14.7 on H800, and x13.9 on H20 despite being optimized specifically for A100. Beyond these benchmark results, CUDA-L1 demonstrates several remarkable properties: 1) Discovers a variety of CUDA optimization techniques and learns to combine them strategically to achieve optimal performance; 2) Uncovers fundamental principles of CUDA optimization; 3) Identifies non-obvious performance bottlenecks and rejects seemingly beneficial optimizations that harm performance. The capabilities of CUDA-L1 demonstrate that reinforcement learning can transform an initially poor-performing LLM into an effective CUDA optimizer through speedup-based reward signals alone, without human expertise or domain knowledge. More importantly, the trained RL model extend the acquired reasoning abilities to new kernels. This paradigm opens possibilities for automated optimization of CUDA operations, and holds promise to substantially promote GPU efficiency and alleviate the rising pressure on GPU computing resources.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 18, 2025 6

Tawa: Automatic Warp Specialization for Modern GPUs with Asynchronous References

Modern GPUs feature specialized hardware units that enable high-performance, asynchronous dataflow execution. However, the conventional SIMT programming model is fundamentally misaligned with this task-parallel hardware, creating a significant programmability gap. While hardware-level warp specialization is the key to unlocking peak performance, it forces developers to manually orchestrate complex, low-level communication and software pipelines--a process that is labor-intensive, error-prone, and unsustainable. To address this challenge, we present Tawa, an automated compiler that systematically generates high-performance, warp-specialized code from a high-level, tile-based program. Central to our approach is a novel IR abstraction, asynchronous references (aref), which expresses warp-level communication without exposing low-level hardware details. Using this abstraction, Tawa automatically partitions programs into producer-consumer roles and manages the intricate dataflow pipeline, relieving developers of invasive kernel rewriting. Evaluation on NVIDIA H100 GPUs across representative LLM kernels shows that Tawa delivers high hardware utilization, achieving up to 1.1times speedup over highly optimized cuBLAS GEMM kernels. For attention workloads, Tawa attains 1.2times speedup over Triton and matches the performance of the hand-optimized CUTLASS C++ FlashAttention-3 kernel with far less programming effort.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 9, 2025

Arctic Long Sequence Training: Scalable And Efficient Training For Multi-Million Token Sequences

Long sequences are critical for applications like RAG, long document summarization, multi-modality, etc., and modern LLMs, like Llama 4 Scout, support max sequence length of up to 10 million tokens. However, outside of enterprise labs, long sequence training is challenging for the AI community with limited system support in the open-source space. Out-of-box, even on a modern NVIDIA H100 80GB GPU cluster, training Llama 8B model with sequence over 32K runs out of memory on a basic Hugging Face (HF) model due to two reasons: i) LLM training workloads are not optimized to fully leverage a single GPU memory, ii) existing solutions for leveraging multiple GPU memory are not easily available to HF models, making long sequence training inaccessible. We address this with Arctic Long Sequence Training (ALST). It offers a combination of attention-agnostic single GPU and multi-GPU memory optimizations, that enables it to support out-of-box training of multi-million sequence length for a wide variety of HF models. ALST supports training Meta's Llama 8B model with 500K sequence length on a single H100 GPU, 3.7M on a single 8xH100 GPU node, and over 15M on a 4 node cluster, an increase of over 400x compared to the 32K baseline for the latter. ALST is fully compatible with HF models and open-sourced via Deepspeed https://www.deepspeed.ai/tutorials/ulysses-alst-sequence-pallellism/ and Arctic Training https://github.com/snowflakedb/ArcticTraining/blob/main/projects/sequence-parallelism/README.md.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 16, 2025

The Fused Kernel Library: A C++ API to Develop Highly-Efficient GPU Libraries

Existing GPU libraries often struggle to fully exploit the parallel resources and on-chip memory (SRAM) of GPUs when chaining multiple GPU functions as individual kernels. While Kernel Fusion (KF) techniques like Horizontal Fusion (HF) and Vertical Fusion (VF) can mitigate this, current library implementations often require library developers to manually create fused kernels. Hence, library users rely on limited sets of pre-compiled or template-based fused kernels. This limits the use cases that can benefit from HF and VF and increases development costs. In order to solve these issues, we present a novel methodology for building GPU libraries that enables automatic on-demand HF and VF for arbitrary combinations of GPU library functions. Our methodology defines reusable, fusionable components that users combine via high-level programming interfaces. Leveraging C++17 metaprogramming features available in compilers like nvcc, our methodology generates a single and optimized fused kernel tailored to the user's specific sequence of operations at compile time, without needing a custom compiler or manual development and pre-compilation of kernel combinations. This approach abstracts low-level GPU complexities while maximizing GPU resource utilization and keeping intermediate data in SRAM. We provide an open-source implementation demonstrating significant speedups compared to traditional libraries in various benchmarks, validating the effectiveness of this methodology for improving GPU performance in the range of 2x to more than 1000x, while preserving high-level programmability.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 9, 2025

SwiftI2V: Efficient High-Resolution Image-to-Video Generation via Conditional Segment-wise Generation

High-resolution image-to-video (I2V) generation aims to synthesize realistic temporal dynamics while preserving fine-grained appearance details of the input image. At 2K resolution, it becomes extremely challenging, and existing solutions suffer from various weaknesses: 1) end-to-end models are often prohibitively expensive in memory and latency; 2) cascading low-resolution generation with a generic video super-resolution tends to hallucinate details and drift from input-specific local structures, since the super-resolution stage is not explicitly conditioned on the input image. To this end, we propose SwiftI2V, an efficient framework tailored for high-resolution I2V. Following the widely used two-stage design, it addresses the efficiency--fidelity dilemma by first generating a low-resolution motion reference to reduce token costs and ease the modeling burden, then performing a strongly image-conditioned 2K synthesis guided by the motion to recover input-faithful details with controlled overhead. Specifically, to make generation more scalable, SwiftI2V introduces Conditional Segment-wise Generation (CSG) to synthesize videos segment-by-segment with a bounded per-step token budget, and adopts bidirectional contextual interaction within each segment to improve cross-segment coherence and input fidelity. On VBench-I2V at 2K resolution, SwiftI2V achieves performance comparable to end-to-end baselines while reducing total GPU-time by 202x. Particularly, it enables practical 2K I2V generation on a single datacenter GPU (e.g., H800) or consumer GPU (e.g., RTX 4090).

  • 6 authors
·
May 6 4

VIBE: Visual Instruction Based Editor

Instruction-based image editing is among the fastest developing areas in generative AI. Over the past year, the field has reached a new level, with dozens of open-source models released alongside highly capable commercial systems. However, only a limited number of open-source approaches currently achieve real-world quality. In addition, diffusion backbones, the dominant choice for these pipelines, are often large and computationally expensive for many deployments and research settings, with widely used variants typically containing 6B to 20B parameters. This paper presents a compact, high-throughput instruction-based image editing pipeline that uses a modern 2B-parameter Qwen3-VL model to guide the editing process and the 1.6B-parameter diffusion model Sana1.5 for image generation. Our design decisions across architecture, data processing, training configuration, and evaluation target low-cost inference and strict source consistency while maintaining high quality across the major edit categories feasible at this scale. Evaluated on the ImgEdit and GEdit benchmarks, the proposed method matches or exceeds the performance of substantially heavier baselines, including models with several times as many parameters and higher inference cost, and is particularly strong on edits that require preserving the input image, such as an attribute adjustment, object removal, background edits, and targeted replacement. The model fits within 24 GB of GPU memory and generates edited images at up to 2K resolution in approximately 4 seconds on an NVIDIA H100 in BF16, without additional inference optimizations or distillation.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 5 3

VibeTensor: System Software for Deep Learning, Fully Generated by AI Agents

VIBETENSOR is an open-source research system software stack for deep learning, generated by LLM-powered coding agents under high-level human guidance. In this paper, "fully generated" refers to code provenance: implementation changes were produced and applied as agent-proposed diffs; validation relied on agent-run builds, tests, and differential checks, without per-change manual diff review. It implements a PyTorch-style eager tensor library with a C++20 core (CPU+CUDA), a torch-like Python overlay via nanobind, and an experimental Node.js/TypeScript interface. Unlike thin bindings, VIBETENSOR includes its own tensor/storage system, schema-lite dispatcher, reverse-mode autograd, CUDA runtime (streams/events/graphs), a stream-ordered caching allocator with diagnostics, and a stable C ABI for dynamically loaded operator plugins. We view this release as a milestone for AI-assisted software engineering: it shows coding agents can generate a coherent deep learning runtime spanning language bindings down to CUDA memory management, validated primarily by builds and tests. We describe the architecture, summarize the workflow used to produce and validate the system, and evaluate the artifact. We report repository scale and test-suite composition, and summarize reproducible microbenchmarks from an accompanying AI-generated kernel suite, including fused attention versus PyTorch SDPA/FlashAttention. We also report end-to-end training sanity checks on 3 small workloads (sequence reversal, ViT, miniGPT) on NVIDIA H100 (Hopper, SM90) and Blackwell-class GPUs; multi-GPU results are Blackwell-only and use an optional CUTLASS-based ring-allreduce plugin gated on CUDA 13+ and sm103a toolchain support. Finally, we discuss failure modes in generated system software, including a "Frankenstein" composition effect where locally correct subsystems interact to yield globally suboptimal performance.

  • 15 authors
·
Jan 20

EraserDiT: Fast Video Inpainting with Diffusion Transformer Model

Video object removal and inpainting are critical tasks in the fields of computer vision and multimedia processing, aimed at restoring missing or corrupted regions in video sequences. Traditional methods predominantly rely on flow-based propagation and spatio-temporal Transformers, but these approaches face limitations in effectively leveraging long-term temporal features and ensuring temporal consistency in the completion results, particularly when dealing with large masks. Consequently, performance on extensive masked areas remains suboptimal. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a novel video inpainting approach leveraging the Diffusion Transformer (DiT). DiT synergistically combines the advantages of diffusion models and transformer architectures to maintain long-term temporal consistency while ensuring high-quality inpainting results. We propose a Circular Position-Shift strategy to further enhance long-term temporal consistency during the inference stage. Additionally, the proposed method interactively removes specified objects, and generates corresponding prompts. In terms of processing speed, it takes only 65 seconds (testing on one NVIDIA H800 GPU) to complete a video with a resolution of 2160 times 2100 with 97 frames without any acceleration method. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method demonstrates superior performance in content fidelity, texture restoration, and temporal consistency. Project page:https://jieliu95.github.io/EraserDiT_demo/

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 15, 2025

LLIA -- Enabling Low-Latency Interactive Avatars: Real-Time Audio-Driven Portrait Video Generation with Diffusion Models

Diffusion-based models have gained wide adoption in the virtual human generation due to their outstanding expressiveness. However, their substantial computational requirements have constrained their deployment in real-time interactive avatar applications, where stringent speed, latency, and duration requirements are paramount. We present a novel audio-driven portrait video generation framework based on the diffusion model to address these challenges. Firstly, we propose robust variable-length video generation to reduce the minimum time required to generate the initial video clip or state transitions, which significantly enhances the user experience. Secondly, we propose a consistency model training strategy for Audio-Image-to-Video to ensure real-time performance, enabling a fast few-step generation. Model quantization and pipeline parallelism are further employed to accelerate the inference speed. To mitigate the stability loss incurred by the diffusion process and model quantization, we introduce a new inference strategy tailored for long-duration video generation. These methods ensure real-time performance and low latency while maintaining high-fidelity output. Thirdly, we incorporate class labels as a conditional input to seamlessly switch between speaking, listening, and idle states. Lastly, we design a novel mechanism for fine-grained facial expression control to exploit our model's inherent capacity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves low-latency, fluid, and authentic two-way communication. On an NVIDIA RTX 4090D, our model achieves a maximum of 78 FPS at a resolution of 384x384 and 45 FPS at a resolution of 512x512, with an initial video generation latency of 140 ms and 215 ms, respectively.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 6, 2025

SANA-Video: Efficient Video Generation with Block Linear Diffusion Transformer

We introduce SANA-Video, a small diffusion model that can efficiently generate videos up to 720x1280 resolution and minute-length duration. SANA-Video synthesizes high-resolution, high-quality and long videos with strong text-video alignment at a remarkably fast speed, deployable on RTX 5090 GPU. Two core designs ensure our efficient, effective and long video generation: (1) Linear DiT: We leverage linear attention as the core operation, which is more efficient than vanilla attention given the large number of tokens processed in video generation. (2) Constant-Memory KV cache for Block Linear Attention: we design block-wise autoregressive approach for long video generation by employing a constant-memory state, derived from the cumulative properties of linear attention. This KV cache provides the Linear DiT with global context at a fixed memory cost, eliminating the need for a traditional KV cache and enabling efficient, minute-long video generation. In addition, we explore effective data filters and model training strategies, narrowing the training cost to 12 days on 64 H100 GPUs, which is only 1% of the cost of MovieGen. Given its low cost, SANA-Video achieves competitive performance compared to modern state-of-the-art small diffusion models (e.g., Wan 2.1-1.3B and SkyReel-V2-1.3B) while being 16x faster in measured latency. Moreover, SANA-Video can be deployed on RTX 5090 GPUs with NVFP4 precision, accelerating the inference speed of generating a 5-second 720p video from 71s to 29s (2.4x speedup). In summary, SANA-Video enables low-cost, high-quality video generation.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Sep 29, 2025 2

SANA-Streaming: Real-time Streaming Video Editing with Hybrid Diffusion Transformer

Real-time streaming video-to-video editing (V2V) is critical for interactive applications such as live broadcasting and gaming, yet it remains a formidable challenge due to the stringent requirements for temporal consistency and inference throughput. In this paper, we present SANA-Streaming, a system-algorithm co-designed framework for high-resolution, real-time streaming video editing on consumer GPUs, with the following three core designs: (1) Hybrid Diffusion Transformer architecture introduces softmax attention in part of the blocks to improve local modeling capabilities while preserving the efficiency of linear layers. (2) Cycle-Reverse Regularization is a novel training strategy that enforces semantic consistency by predicting source frames from generated content via flow matching, improving temporal consistency without requiring paired long edited videos. (3) Efficient System Co-design combines fused GDN kernels and Mixed-Precision Quantization (MPQ) optimized for the NVIDIA Blackwell (RTX 5090) architecture. By profiling real-world throughput, our MPQ maximizes Tensor Core utilization while maintaining generation quality. The resulting system achieves real-time 1280 x 704 resolution editing at 24 end-to-end FPS on a single RTX 5090 GPU, with the DiT core running at 58 FPS. Experimental results demonstrate that our co-design approach significantly outperforms existing SOTA methods in both temporal coherence and system throughput.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
May 27 2

LTX-Video: Realtime Video Latent Diffusion

We introduce LTX-Video, a transformer-based latent diffusion model that adopts a holistic approach to video generation by seamlessly integrating the responsibilities of the Video-VAE and the denoising transformer. Unlike existing methods, which treat these components as independent, LTX-Video aims to optimize their interaction for improved efficiency and quality. At its core is a carefully designed Video-VAE that achieves a high compression ratio of 1:192, with spatiotemporal downscaling of 32 x 32 x 8 pixels per token, enabled by relocating the patchifying operation from the transformer's input to the VAE's input. Operating in this highly compressed latent space enables the transformer to efficiently perform full spatiotemporal self-attention, which is essential for generating high-resolution videos with temporal consistency. However, the high compression inherently limits the representation of fine details. To address this, our VAE decoder is tasked with both latent-to-pixel conversion and the final denoising step, producing the clean result directly in pixel space. This approach preserves the ability to generate fine details without incurring the runtime cost of a separate upsampling module. Our model supports diverse use cases, including text-to-video and image-to-video generation, with both capabilities trained simultaneously. It achieves faster-than-real-time generation, producing 5 seconds of 24 fps video at 768x512 resolution in just 2 seconds on an Nvidia H100 GPU, outperforming all existing models of similar scale. The source code and pre-trained models are publicly available, setting a new benchmark for accessible and scalable video generation.

  • 16 authors
·
Dec 30, 2024 4

Characterizing and Optimizing LLM Inference Workloads on CPU-GPU Coupled Architectures

Large language model (LLM)-based inference workloads increasingly dominate data center costs and resource utilization. Therefore, understanding the inference workload characteristics on evolving CPU-GPU coupled architectures is crucial for optimization. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of LLM inference behavior on loosely-coupled (PCIe A100/H100) and closely-coupled (GH200) systems. We analyze performance dynamics using fine-grained operator-to-kernel trace analysis, facilitated by our novel profiler SKIP and metrics like Total Kernel Launch and Queuing Time (TKLQT). Results show that closely-coupled (CC) GH200 significantly outperforms loosely-coupled (LC) systems at large batch sizes, achieving 1.9x-2.7x faster prefill latency for Llama 3.2-1B. However, our analysis also reveals that GH200 remains CPU-bound up to 4x larger batch sizes than LC systems. In this extended CPU-bound region, we identify the performance characteristics of the Grace CPU as a key factor contributing to higher inference latency at low batch sizes on GH200. We demonstrate that TKLQT accurately identifies this CPU/GPU-bound transition point. Based on this analysis, we further show that kernel fusion offers significant potential to mitigate GH200's low-batch latency bottleneck by reducing kernel launch overhead. This detailed kernel-level characterization provides critical insights for optimizing diverse CPU-GPU coupling strategies. This work is an initial effort, and we plan to explore other major AI/DL workloads that demand different degrees of CPU-GPU heterogeneous architectures.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 16, 2025

ZeRO-Infinity: Breaking the GPU Memory Wall for Extreme Scale Deep Learning

In the last three years, the largest dense deep learning models have grown over 1000x to reach hundreds of billions of parameters, while the GPU memory has only grown by 5x (16 GB to 80 GB). Therefore, the growth in model scale has been supported primarily though system innovations that allow large models to fit in the aggregate GPU memory of multiple GPUs. However, we are getting close to the GPU memory wall. It requires 800 NVIDIA V100 GPUs just to fit a trillion parameter model for training, and such clusters are simply out of reach for most data scientists. In addition, training models at that scale requires complex combinations of parallelism techniques that puts a big burden on the data scientists to refactor their model. In this paper we present ZeRO-Infinity, a novel heterogeneous system technology that leverages GPU, CPU, and NVMe memory to allow for unprecedented model scale on limited resources without requiring model code refactoring. At the same time it achieves excellent training throughput and scalability, unencumbered by the limited CPU or NVMe bandwidth. ZeRO-Infinity can fit models with tens and even hundreds of trillions of parameters for training on current generation GPU clusters. It can be used to fine-tune trillion parameter models on a single NVIDIA DGX-2 node, making large models more accessible. In terms of training throughput and scalability, it sustains over 25 petaflops on 512 NVIDIA V100 GPUs(40% of peak), while also demonstrating super linear scalability. An open source implementation of ZeRO-Infinity is available through DeepSpeed, a deep learning optimization library that makes distributed training easy, efficient, and effective.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 15, 2021

Hardware and Software Platform Inference

It is now a common business practice to buy access to large language model (LLM) inference rather than self-host, because of significant upfront hardware infrastructure and energy costs. However, as a buyer, there is no mechanism to verify the authenticity of the advertised service including the serving hardware platform, e.g. that it is actually being served using an NVIDIA H100. Furthermore, there are reports suggesting that model providers may deliver models that differ slightly from the advertised ones, often to make them run on less expensive hardware. That way, a client pays premium for a capable model access on more expensive hardware, yet ends up being served by a (potentially less capable) cheaper model on cheaper hardware. In this paper we introduce \textbf{hardware and software platform inference (HSPI)} -- a method for identifying the underlying architecture and software stack of a (black-box) machine learning model solely based on its input-output behavior. Our method leverages the inherent differences of various architectures and compilers to distinguish between different types and software stacks. By analyzing the numerical patterns in the model's outputs, we propose a classification framework capable of accurately identifying the used for model inference as well as the underlying software configuration. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of inferring type from black-box models. We evaluate HSPI against models served on different real hardware and find that in a white-box setting we can distinguish between different s with between 83.9% and 100% accuracy. Even in a black-box setting we are able to achieve results that are up to three times higher than random guess accuracy.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 7, 2024 2

WattGPU: Predicting Inference Power and Latency on Unseen GPUs and LLMs

Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads are a rapidly growing contributor to data center energy consumption. Optimizing these deployments requires matching specific LLMs to the most efficient GPUs, but operators currently lack the tools to do so without exhaustively profiling each combination. While some predictive models exist, they still require profiling data and struggle to generalize to hardware unseen during training. To address this, we introduce WattGPU, featuring two predictive models for mean GPU power draw and Inter-Token Latency (ITL). Our approach leverages only publicly available LLM metadata and GPU specifications, eliminating the need for hardware access or profiling while enabling generalization to unseen NVIDIA server-grade GPUs and LLMs. We evaluate our models using rigorous leave-one-GPU-out and leave-one-LLM-out cross-validation on a dataset of 42 open-source LLMs (0.1B--27B parameters) and 8 GPUs under both offline and server scenarios. The mean power draw model achieves a median absolute percentage error of leq3.4% for offline and leq13.5% for server scenarios on unseen GPUs, while the latency model achieves leq8.5% in server mode, both maintaining strong GPU ranking correlations for server scenarios (Kendall τgeq0.76). Compared to standard physically grounded baselines -- Load-Scaled Thermal Design Power (TDP) for power draw and roofline for latency -- our models reduce median absolute percentage error by approximately 4times on unseen LLM-GPU combinations for server scenarios or approximately 2times for completely unseen GPUs. WattGPU's data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/maufadel/wattgpu.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 1

FlashPrefill V2: Block-Sparse Prefill Attention for Long-Context LLM Serving

Long-context modeling is a pivotal capability for Large Language Models, yet the quadratic complexity of attention remains a critical bottleneck, particularly during the compute-intensive prefilling phase. Our previous work, FlashPrefill, mitigates this cost through instantaneous pattern discovery and max-based dynamic thresholding; however, it remains an algorithmic prototype that is still distant from production deployment. In this paper, we present FlashPrefill V2, which evolves FlashPrefill from a prototype toward practical long-context serving along three dimensions. First, we introduce a mean correction term that effectively suppresses the approximation error, keeping performance degradation manageable even at extreme sparsity levels. Second, we redesign the sparse attention operator with PackGQA memory access, warp specialization, and pingpong pipelining, fully aligning with the latest FlashAttention-3/4 implementations and supporting FP8 inference to meet practical quantization requirements. Third, FlashPrefill V2 natively supports paged KV cache and continuous batching, allowing integration as an attention backend in modern inference frameworks such as SGLang. Extensive evaluations on NVIDIA H20 GPUs---among the most widely deployed inference accelerators---demonstrate that FlashPrefill V2 delivers up to 47.26x and 27.19x speedups over FlashAttention-2 at 128K context length under FP8 and BF16 precision, respectively, and, in FP8, still achieves a 30.49x speedup against an FA3/4-aligned dense baseline.

tencent Tencent
·
Aug 20 2

Global Pass Barriers Without Per-Resource RHI Tracking: A Cross-Vendor Study with Blade

Explicit graphics APIs expose memory dependencies, per-resource accesses, and image layouts. wgpu reconstructs and validates this state; Blade keeps Vulkan images in GENERAL, tracks no per-resource state, and issues global pass-boundary barriers. We isolate barrier placement and stage/access scope within Blade, compare matched wgpu programs end-to-end, and measure six GPUs from four vendors, including exploratory Apple/Metal results. Removing fifteen redundant barriers from sixteen independent compute passes reduces GPU span by 29.3% on an RTX 5070 and 32.3% on an RX 7900 XT. It reduces independent-render span by 32.4% and 7.3% on the same discrete parts, but increases Radeon 780M span by 42.4% at 32 passes, beyond a 12.3% count-specific stability floor. No dependent-chain placement effect clears the study's cell-specific stability criterion. Deriving global barrier scope from the pass kinds around each boundary, without tracking any resource, saves 5.0% on an NVIDIA graphics chain and 6.7% on an AMD compute chain; no AMD render-involving scope cell resolves. wgpu's record-and-submit cost is higher in every measured cell, but this end-to-end difference cannot be attributed to tracking alone. RADV source shows why command counts do not predict these costs: broad global dependencies expand to several flush and invalidate requests that the driver may partly elide. It also shows that persistent GENERAL retains DCC under the measured RDNA conditions but disables FMASK. The resulting Blade direction is lightweight aggregate pass-kind state in a tracking-free RHI: an upstream render graph selects global dependency cuts, while aliasing, cross-queue use, exceptional layouts, and arbitrary per-resource DAG edges remain resource-aware engine responsibilities.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 28

SuperOffload: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale LLM Training on Superchips

The emergence of Superchips represents a significant advancement in next-generation AI hardware. These Superchips employ a tightly coupled heterogeneous architecture that integrates GPU and CPU on the same package, which offers unprecedented computational power. However, there has been scant research investigating how LLM training benefits from this new architecture. In this work, for the first time, we study LLM training solutions based on offloading for Superchips. We observe important differences between Superchips and traditional loosely-coupled GPU-CPU architecture, which necessitate revisiting prevailing assumptions about offloading. Based on that, we present SuperOffload, a Superchip-centric offloading system that simultaneously uses Hopper GPU, Grace CPU, and NVLink-C2C interconnect more efficiently. SuperOffload accomplishes this via a combination of techniques, such as adaptive weight offloading, bucketization repartitioning, Superchip-aware casting, speculative execution, and a highly optimized Adam optimizer for Grace CPUs. Our evaluation of SuperOffload on NVIDIA GH200 demonstrates up to 2.5x throughput improvement compared to state-of-the-art offloading-based systems, enabling training of up to 25B model on a single Superchip while achieving high training throughput. We also extend SuperOffload with ZeRO-style data parallelism and DeepSpeed-Ulysses sequence parallelism, enabling training of 13B model with sequence lengths up to 1 million tokens on 8 GH200 while achieving 55% MFU.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 24, 2025

Long-Context Fine-Tuning with Limited VRAM

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning reduces model and optimizer memory, but dense attention still makes long training sequences expensive. We combine Hierarchical Global Attention (HGA) with segment-wise backpropagation and tiered KV storage. Only the active segment remains differentiable in VRAM; older KV is detached into RAM or NVMe, and HGA loads a bounded set of exact historical tokens for each query block. On Qwen3-8B with 4-bit QLoRA and PG19, dense training on a 16 GB Quadro RTX 5000 fits 2,048 tokens but fails at 4,096, whereas HGA reaches 16,384 tokens with 15.28 GB peak VRAM. Under evaluation the same adapter runs through 131,072 tokens on this card; VRAM is not constant but grows gently with the resident chunk summaries, so RAM and NVMe capacity set the practical limit beyond these lengths. At the shared 2K training length, HGA-trained and dense-trained adapters obtain 2.7405 and 2.7383 nat under the same dense-attention readout, while the stock model obtains 2.9541. At this boundary HGA training is already marginally faster (217.75 vs. 207.02 tokens/s), and the HGA-to-dense throughput ratio improves from 1K to 2K; because HGA keeps the attended historical set per token approximately constant while dense work per token grows, we expect this lead to widen as context grows. Dense attention is used for the main quality and retrieval comparisons so that they measure the learned weights and remain compatible with standard generation frameworks. HGA can also be used for retrieval and generation; an optimized production-grade serving implementation is under development.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 15

CubicQuant: Parametric Non-Uniform Codebooks for High-Throughput LLM Inference with 1-8-Bit Weights

Weight quantization for large-language-model inference must balance adaptive reconstruction levels with representations regular enough for efficient GPU execution. Uniform integers constrain each group to a linear grid. Low-bit floating-point formats use a fixed exponent-mantissa structure, while learned codebooks gain flexibility at the cost of irregular decoding and additional metadata. We introduce CubicQuant, a parametric non-uniform scalar format that preserves a dense integer code stream while adapting reconstruction levels within each weight group. A monotonic cubic curve, specified by two shape parameters and one scale, maps uniformly spaced magnitude codes to non-uniform levels. The family spans 1-8-bit weight payloads, contains symmetric uniform integer quantization as an exact special case, and has effective width B + 64/G bits per weight for payload width B and group size G. We derive population distortion under Uniform, Gaussian, and Laplace distributions, formulate continuous and Dynamic-A8-carrier-aware fitting objectives, and describe direct packed-weight GPU execution. For finite groups of G=128 with 15,360 samples per distribution, W4 CubicQuant reduced reconstruction RMSE relative to optimally clipped four-bit uniform integer quantization by 3.90% on Uniform, 13.49% on Gaussian, and 28.14% on Laplace samples. Relative to the best enumerated four-bit finite floating-point format, the reductions were 3.90%, 9.44%, and 6.27%. Preliminary H200 kernel measurements show a workload-dependent crossover: model-dtype execution is faster for narrow GEMV, while Dynamic A8 becomes favorable as row count grows. The results establish the format's representational promise and direct executability; downstream model quality and cross-device end-to-end performance remain open evaluation questions.

  • 1 authors
·
Aug 6

Horizon-LM: A RAM-Centric Architecture for LLM Training

The rapid growth of large language models (LLMs) has outpaced the evolution of single-GPU hardware, making model scale increasingly constrained by memory capacity rather than computation. While modern training systems extend GPU memory through distributed parallelism and offloading across CPU and storage tiers, they fundamentally retain a GPU-centric execution paradigm in which GPUs host persistent model replicas and full autograd graphs. As a result, scaling large models remains tightly coupled to multi-GPU clusters, complex distributed runtimes, and unpredictable host memory consumption, creating substantial barriers for node-scale post-training workloads such as instruction tuning, alignment, and domain adaptation. We present Horizon-LM, a memory-centric training system that redefines the roles of CPU and GPU for large-model optimization. Horizon-LM treats host memory as the authoritative parameter store and uses GPUs solely as transient compute engines through a CPU-master, GPU-template execution model. By eliminating persistent GPU-resident modules and autograd graphs, employing explicit recomputation with manual gradient propagation, and introducing a pipelined double-buffered execution engine, Horizon-LM decouples model scale from GPU count and bounds memory usage to the theoretical parameter footprint. On a single H200 GPU with 1.5\,TB host RAM, Horizon-LM reliably trains models up to 120B parameters. On a standard single A100 machine, Horizon-LM achieves up to 12.2times higher training throughput than DeepSpeed ZeRO-3 with CPU offloading while preserving numerical correctness. Across platforms and scales, Horizon-LM sustains high device utilization and predictable memory growth, demonstrating that host memory, not GPU memory, defines the true feasibility boundary for node-scale large-model training.

NanoFlow: Towards Optimal Large Language Model Serving Throughput

The increasing usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) has resulted in a surging demand for planet-scale serving systems, where tens of thousands of GPUs continuously serve hundreds of millions of users. Consequently, throughput (under reasonable latency constraints) has emerged as a key metric that determines serving systems' performance. To boost throughput, various methods of inter-device parallelism (e.g., data, tensor, pipeline) have been explored. However, existing methods do not consider overlapping the utilization of different resources within a single device, leading to underutilization and sub-optimal performance. We propose NanoFlow, a novel serving framework that exploits intra-device parallelism, which overlaps the usage of resources including compute, memory, and network within a single device through operation co-scheduling. To exploit intra-device parallelism, NanoFlow introduces two key innovations: First, NanoFlow splits requests into nano-batches at the granularity of operations, which breaks the dependency of sequential operations in LLM inference and enables overlapping; then, to get benefit from overlapping, NanoFlow uses an operation-level pipeline with execution unit scheduling, which partitions the device's functional units and simultaneously executes different operations in each unit. NanoFlow automates the pipeline setup using a parameter search algorithm, which enables easily porting NanoFlow to different models. We implement NanoFlow on NVIDIA GPUs and evaluate end-to-end serving throughput on several popular models such as LLaMA-2-70B, Mixtral 8x7B, LLaMA-3-8B, etc.. With practical workloads, NanoFlow provides 1.91x throughput boost compared to state-of-the-art serving systems achieving 59% to 72% of optimal throughput across ported models.

  • 15 authors
·
Aug 22, 2024 2

Long-Horizon Streaming Video Generation via Hybrid Attention with Decoupled Distillation

Streaming video generation (SVG) distills a pretrained bidirectional video diffusion model into an autoregressive model equipped with sliding window attention (SWA). However, SWA inevitably loses distant history during long video generation, and its computational overhead remains a critical challenge to real-time deployment. In this work, we propose Hybrid Forcing, which jointly optimizes temporal information retention and computational efficiency through a hybrid attention design. First, we introduce lightweight linear temporal attention to preserve long-range dependencies beyond the sliding window. In particular, we maintain a compact key-value state to incrementally absorb evicted tokens, retaining temporal context with negligible memory and computational overhead. Second, we incorporate block-sparse attention into the local sliding window to reduce redundant computation within short-range modeling, reallocating computational capacity toward more critical dependencies. Finally, we introduce a decoupled distillation strategy tailored to the hybrid attention design. A few-step initial distillation is performed under dense attention, then the distillation of our proposed linear temporal and block-sparse attention is activated for streaming modeling, ensuring stable optimization. Extensive experiments on both short- and long-form video generation benchmarks demonstrate that Hybrid Forcing consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, our model achieves real-time, unbounded 832x480 video generation at 29.5 FPS on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU without quantization or model compression. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/leeruibin/hybrid-forcing.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 27

From Detection to Recovery: Operational Analysis on LLM Pre-training with 504 GPUs

Large-scale AI training is now fundamentally a distributed systems problem, and hardware failures have become routine operating conditions rather than rare exceptions. Public operational evidence from production training clusters, however, remains scarce. This technical report presents an empirical analysis of a 63-node NVIDIA B200 production cluster (504 GPUs), using 55 days of Prometheus time-series data and 73 days of operational logs covering 224 multi-node training sessions. The cluster operates within a cross-organizational environment in which five parties (SKT, Upstage, Lablup, NVIDIA Korea, and VAST Data) share a unified monitoring pipeline. This arrangement enabled joint diagnosis of a 60-node-scale storage I/O bottleneck that did not appear at 2-4-node scale, a production-scale phenomenon no single team could isolate alone. Drawing on a months-long pre-training campaign, we perform three quantitative analyses yielding four findings. First, statistical analysis over 751 Prometheus metrics and 10 XID-identified GPU failures achieves a 10/10 detection rate (2/10 pre-XID) at ~0.84 false positives per day. No single metric is consistently dominant across failure types, motivating a multi-signal detection strategy. Second, profiling 523 checkpoint events along the GPU VRAM to NFS path attributes the "bandwidth paradox" (1.4-10.4% utilization of 200 Gbps RoCE) to saturation of the 128-slot NFS RPC layer. Third, multi-node failure response shows concentrated exclusions (top 3 of 63 nodes account for >50% of all exclusions) and an auto-retry chain success rate of 33.3% over 12 chains (73 attempts), 2.7x the 12.5% manual recovery rate; the median retry interval is 11 min (IQR 10-11). All analyses are grounded in production infrastructure providing session-level workload management, GPU-centric scheduling, and unified observability.

  • 13 authors
·
May 25

AutoKernel: Autonomous GPU Kernel Optimization via Iterative Agent-Driven Search

Writing high-performance GPU kernels is among the most labor-intensive tasks in machine learning systems engineering. We present AutoKernel, an open-source framework that applies an autonomous agent loop to GPU kernel optimization for arbitrary PyTorch models. Given a model, AutoKernel profiles it to identify computational bottlenecks, ranks them by Amdahl's law impact, and iteratively refines Triton or CUDA C++ kernel implementations through hundreds of experiments without human intervention. A five-stage correctness harness covering smoke tests, shape sweeps, numerical stability, determinism verification, and edge-case coverage ensures every candidate kernel is validated before any speedup is recorded. The system comprises over 9,000 lines of Python, 18 starter kernel implementations across two backends, a six-tier optimization playbook, and integration with the KernelBench benchmark suite. AutoKernel covers nine kernel types spanning the dominant operations in modern transformer architectures. On an NVIDIA H100, our Triton kernels outperform both PyTorch eager and torch.compile (max-autotune) on the majority of tested configurations: 5.29x over eager on RMSNorm, 2.82x on softmax, and 2.21x on cross-entropy, while beating torch.compile by 2.83x, 3.44x, and 2.94x respectively. In community deployment, an AutoKernel-optimized kernel achieved first place on the vectorsum_v2 B200 leaderboard. The full system is available at https://github.com/RightNow-AI/autokernel.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 22

Bridging the Gap Between Promise and Performance for Microscaling FP4 Quantization

The recent hardware-accelerated microscaling 4-bit floating-point formats such as MXFP4 and NVFP4, supported on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, promise to revolutionize large language model (LLM) inference. Yet, their practical benefits remain unproven. We present the first comprehensive study of MXFP4 and NVFP4 for post-training quantization, revealing gaps between their promise and real-world performance. Our analysis shows that state-of-the-art methods struggle with FP4, due to two key issues: (1) NVFP4's small group size provably neutralizes traditional outlier mitigation techniques; (2) MXFP4's power-of-two scale quantization severely degrades accuracy due to high induced error. To bridge this gap, we introduce Micro-Rotated-GPTQ (MR-GPTQ), a variant of the classic GPTQ quantization algorithm that tailors the quantization process to FP4's unique properties, by using block-wise Hadamard transforms and format-specific optimizations. We support our proposal with a set of high-performance GPU kernels that enable the MR-GPTQ format with negligible overhead, by rotation fusion into the weights, and fast online computation of the activations. This leads to speedups vs. FP16 of up to 3.6x layer-wise, and 2.2x end-to-end on NVIDIA B200, and of 6x layer-wise and 4x end-to-end on RTX5090. Our extensive empirical evaluation demonstrates that MR-GPTQ matches or outperforms state-of-the-art accuracy, significantly boosting MXFP4, to the point where it nears that of NVFP4. We conclude that, while FP4 is not an automatic upgrade over INT4, format-specialized methods like MR-GPTQ can unlock a new frontier of accuracy-performance trade-offs.

Generative AI for Video Translation: A Scalable Architecture for Multilingual Video Conferencing

The real-time deployment of cascaded generative AI pipelines for applications like video translation is constrained by significant system-level challenges. These include the cumulative latency of sequential model inference and the quadratic (O(N^2)) computational complexity that renders multi-user video conferencing applications unscalable. This paper proposes and evaluates a practical system-level framework designed to mitigate these critical bottlenecks. The proposed architecture incorporates a turn-taking mechanism to reduce computational complexity from quadratic to linear in multi-user scenarios, and a segmented processing protocol to manage inference latency for a perceptually real-time experience. We implement a proof-of-concept pipeline and conduct a rigorous performance analysis across a multi-tiered hardware setup, including commodity (NVIDIA RTX 4060), cloud (NVIDIA T4), and enterprise (NVIDIA A100) GPUs. Our objective evaluation demonstrates that the system achieves real-time throughput (τ< 1.0) on modern hardware. A subjective user study further validates the approach, showing that a predictable, initial processing delay is highly acceptable to users in exchange for a smooth, uninterrupted playback experience. The work presents a validated, end-to-end system design that offers a practical roadmap for deploying scalable, real-time generative AI applications in multilingual communication platforms.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 15, 2025

HPCTransCompile: An AI Compiler Generated Dataset for High-Performance CUDA Transpilation and LLM Preliminary Exploration

The rapid growth of deep learning has driven exponential increases in model parameters and computational demands. NVIDIA GPUs and their CUDA-based software ecosystem provide robust support for parallel computing, significantly alleviating computational bottlenecks. Meanwhile, due to the cultivation of user programming habits and the high performance of GPUs, the CUDA ecosystem has established a dominant position in the field of parallel software. This dominance requires other hardware platforms to support CUDA-based software with performance portability. However, translating CUDA code to other platforms poses significant challenges due to differences in parallel programming paradigms and hardware architectures. Existing approaches rely on language extensions, domain-specific languages (DSLs), or compilers but face limitations in workload coverage and generalizability. Moreover, these methods often incur substantial development costs. Recently, LLMs have demonstrated extraordinary potential in various vertical domains, especially in code-related tasks. However, the performance of existing LLMs in CUDA transpilation, particularly for high-performance code, remains suboptimal. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework for generating high-performance CUDA and corresponding platform code pairs, leveraging AI compiler and automatic optimization technology. We further enhance the framework with a graph-based data augmentation method and introduce HPCTransEval, a benchmark for evaluating LLM performance on CUDA transpilation. We conduct experiments using CUDA-to-CPU transpilation as a case study on leading LLMs. The speedup ratio of the CPU operators has an average improvemnet of 43.8\%, highlighting the potential of LLMs to address compatibility challenges within the CUDA ecosystem. Our code is available at https://github.com/PJLAB-CHIP/HPCTransCompile.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 12, 2025

Cuckoo-GPU: Accelerating Cuckoo Filters on Modern GPUs

Approximate Membership Query (AMQ) structures are essential for high-throughput systems in databases, networking, and bioinformatics. While Bloom filters offer speed, they lack support for deletions. Existing GPU-based dynamic alternatives, such as the Two-Choice Filter (TCF) and GPU Quotient Filter (GQF), enable deletions but incur severe performance penalties. We present Cuckoo-GPU, an open-source, high-performance Cuckoo filter library for GPUs. Instead of prioritizing cache locality, Cuckoo-GPU embraces the inherently random access pattern of Cuckoo hashing to fully saturate global memory bandwidth. Our design features a lock-free architecture built on atomic compare-and-swap operations, paired with a novel breadth-first search-based eviction heuristic that minimizes thread divergence and bounds sequential memory accesses during high-load insertions. Evaluated on NVIDIA GH200 (HBM3) and RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell (GDDR7) systems, Cuckoo-GPU closes the performance gap between append-only and dynamic AMQ structures. It achieves insertion, query, and deletion throughputs up to 378x (4.1x), 6x (34.7x), and 258x (107x) higher than GQF (TCF) on the same hardware, respectively, and delivers up to a 350x speedup over the fastest available multi-threaded CPU-based Cuckoo filter implementation. Moreover, its query throughput rivals that of the append-only GPU-based Blocked Bloom filter - demonstrating that dynamic AMQ structures can be deployed on modern accelerators without sacrificing performance.

Profiling Large Language Model Inference on Apple Silicon: A Quantization Perspective

A systematic understanding of Apple Silicon is lacking in the current landscape of hardware efficiency; research focus is largely centered on accelerating GPUs for large-scale training or inference on CUDA devices. This paper investigates Apple Silicon's unique memory architecture that offers a unified memory integrating CPU and GPU memory and its implications for on-device LLM inference. We decipher myths about whether Apple Silicon is efficient for on-device inference compared to competitors such as NVIDIA GPUs by directly conducting latency and throughput comparison benchmarks. We explain the performance gap between them through profiling low level hardware metrics - ALU utilization, memory bandwidth, buffer usage, cache residency etc. at runtime. We draw several insights regarding performance bottlenecks such as dequantization overhead, compute throughput and memory bandwidth. We debunk existing false claims regarding large language model inference such as compressing models to lower bit precision is a defacto promise for faster inference across all hardware platforms. We find that the large unified memory enables Apple Silicon to be both cost effective and efficient against NVIDIA GPUs for ultra large language models. Our large scale evaluation on 5 hardware testbeds incorporating three Apple M-series devices: M2 Ultra, M2 Max and M4 Pro and two NVIDIA GPUs: NVIDIA RTX A6000, a multi GPU setup with 2xNVIDIA RTX A6000, 5 model scales ranging from 8B to 405B parameters and 14 quantization schemes gives an understanding of how Apple Silicon fits within the paradigm of on-device LLM inference. Our analysis reveals multiple resource interdependencies and unexpected findings, while also quantifying established insights. To the best of our knowledge, this study makes the first attempt to present a thorough characterization and analysis of Apple Silicon for on-device inference.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 11, 2025

Understanding GEMM Performance and Energy on NVIDIA Ada Lovelace: A Machine Learning-Based Analytical Approach

Analytical framework for predicting General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) performance on modern GPUs, focusing on runtime, power consumption, and energy efficiency. Our study employs two approaches: a custom-implemented tiled matrix multiplication kernel for fundamental analysis, and NVIDIA's CUTLASS library for comprehensive performance data collection across advanced configurations. Using the NVIDIA RTX 4070 as our experimental platform, we developed a Random Forest-based prediction model with multi-output regression capability. Through analysis of both naive tiled matrix multiplication with varying tile sizes (1 to 32) and 16,128 CUTLASS GEMM operations across diverse configurations, we identified critical performance patterns related to matrix dimensions, thread block configurations, and memory access patterns. Our framework achieved exceptional accuracy with an R^2 score of 0.98 for runtime prediction (mean error 15.57%) and 0.78 for power prediction (median error 5.42%). The system successfully predicts performance across matrix sizes, demonstrating robust scaling behavior. Our results show that optimal tile size selection can improve performance by up to 3.2x while reducing power consumption by 22% compared to baseline configurations. Analysis of shared memory utilization and SM occupancy reveals that tile sizes of 16x16 achieve the best balance between parallelism and resource usage. The implementation of our framework, including prediction models and analysis tools, is available as an open-source project at GPPerf [https://github.com/pavlyhalim/GPPerf].

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 25, 2024

Benchmarking and Dissecting the Nvidia Hopper GPU Architecture

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are continually evolving to cater to the computational demands of contemporary general-purpose workloads, particularly those driven by artificial intelligence (AI) utilizing deep learning techniques. A substantial body of studies have been dedicated to dissecting the microarchitectural metrics characterizing diverse GPU generations, which helps researchers understand the hardware details and leverage them to optimize the GPU programs. However, the latest Hopper GPUs present a set of novel attributes, including new tensor cores supporting FP8, DPX, and distributed shared memory. Their details still remain mysterious in terms of performance and operational characteristics. In this research, we propose an extensive benchmarking study focused on the Hopper GPU. The objective is to unveil its microarchitectural intricacies through an examination of the new instruction-set architecture (ISA) of Nvidia GPUs and the utilization of new CUDA APIs. Our approach involves two main aspects. Firstly, we conduct conventional latency and throughput comparison benchmarks across the three most recent GPU architectures, namely Hopper, Ada, and Ampere. Secondly, we delve into a comprehensive discussion and benchmarking of the latest Hopper features, encompassing the Hopper DPX dynamic programming (DP) instruction set, distributed shared memory, and the availability of FP8 tensor cores. The microbenchmarking results we present offer a deeper understanding of the novel GPU AI function units and programming features introduced by the Hopper architecture. This newfound understanding is expected to greatly facilitate software optimization and modeling efforts for GPU architectures. To the best of our knowledge, this study makes the first attempt to demystify the tensor core performance and programming instruction sets unique to Hopper GPUs.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 20, 2024

VC-Attention: Value Smoothing and Softmax Casting for Low-bit Attention

Diffusion Transformers deliver state-of-the-art video generation, but their long spatiotemporal sequences make attention the dominant deployment cost, and a deployable low-bit kernel must be accurate and fast. Accuracy is limited by outliers: a block's quantization scale is set by its largest entries, leaving typical entries confined to a narrow range of representable values. Prior work smooths queries and keys, but value outliers follow no fixed channel or spatiotemporal structure and remain the dominant source of output error. Speed is limited by softmax: low-bit Tensor Cores accelerate only the two matrix multiplications, so the high-precision exponential between them becomes the longest pipeline stage on datacenter GPUs. We propose VC-Attention, a training-free low-bit attention framework that addresses both by pairing Value smoothing with a fused probability Cast. V-Smooth reorders value tokens by lightweight online clustering, so the tokens in a hardware block quantize well together. It quantizes only the residual after subtracting the block mean, and restores that mean from the row sum the online softmax already maintains. ExpCast-FP8 maps log-domain scores directly to E4M3 probability codes with one fused multiply-add, eliminating the FP32 exponential and the format conversion. We implement VC-Attention for B200, B300, H200, RTX PRO 6000, and RTX 5090. Across Wan2.2, LongCat-Video, HunyuanVideo-1.5, and MiniMax-H3, VC-Attention improves fidelity over low-bit baselines, speeds up the attention kernel over BF16 FlashAttention-4 by 1.46-1.59x on datacenter Blackwell and Hopper and by 2.3-3.6x on workstation cards, and generates a clip 1.13-1.19x and 1.36-1.70x faster end to end.

nunchux-inc Nunchux AI
·
Sep 13 2

LiveAnimate: Stable Long-Form Streaming Human Animation in Real-Time

Pose-driven human animation synthesizes a video of a target person from a single reference image and a driving pose stream. Real-time generation is essential for interactive applications such as live streaming, telepresence, and virtual avatars, yet diffusion-based systems require minutes to hours per clip, precluding responsive interaction. We present LiveAnimate, to our knowledge the first animation system to combine real-time streaming with stable long-form generation at billion scale, built on a 14B-parameter video Diffusion Transformer (DiT). A two-stage training pipeline first adapts a pretrained bidirectional DiT into a block-causal autoregressive generator through Reference-Anchored Teacher-Forcing Adaptation, and then reduces the sampling budget to three steps through Block-wise Self-Forcing Distillation. To preserve appearance over extended streams, we introduce Pose-Retrieval Sink Attention (PR-Sink), a bounded KV-cache mechanism combining a Static Sink that permanently anchors the first generated block, a Dynamic Sink that holds a pose-retrieved historical block, and a three-slot Rolling Window. When a pose recurs, PR-Sink restores the relevant appearance context without retaining the entire sequence, so memory and per-block latency remain constant regardless of stream duration. Together with Ulysses sequence parallelism and operator fusion, these designs enable 19.63\,FPS streaming inference on two NVIDIA H100 GPUs. On a three-minute benchmark, LiveAnimate maintains nearly constant perceptual quality and identity from the first 30 seconds to the final minute, while prior systems degrade substantially or require hours of offline computation for the same rollout. These results establish a new operating point in quality, latency, and duration for interactive full-body animation.

OPTIMA: Optimal One-shot Pruning for LLMs via Quadratic Programming Reconstruction

Post-training model pruning is a promising solution, yet it faces a trade-off: simple heuristics that zero weights are fast but degrade accuracy, while principled joint optimization methods recover accuracy but are computationally infeasible at modern scale. One-shot methods such as SparseGPT offer a practical trade-off in optimality by applying efficient, approximate heuristic weight updates. To close this gap, we introduce OPTIMA, a practical one-shot post-training pruning method that balances accuracy and scalability. OPTIMA casts layer-wise weight reconstruction after mask selection as independent, row-wise Quadratic Programs (QPs) that share a common layer Hessian. Solving these QPs yields the per-row globally optimal update with respect to the reconstruction objective given the estimated Hessian. The shared-Hessian structure makes the problem highly amenable to batching on accelerators. We implement an accelerator-friendly QP solver that accumulates one Hessian per layer and solves many small QPs in parallel, enabling one-shot post-training pruning at scale on a single accelerator without fine-tuning. OPTIMA integrates with existing mask selectors and consistently improves zero-shot performance across multiple LLM families and sparsity regimes, yielding up to 3.97% absolute accuracy improvement. On an NVIDIA H100, OPTIMA prunes a 8B-parameter transformer end-to-end in 40 hours with 60GB peak memory. Together, these results set a new state-of-the-art accuracy-efficiency trade-offs for one-shot post-training pruning.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 30, 2025

RAIN: Real-time Animation of Infinite Video Stream

Live animation has gained immense popularity for enhancing online engagement, yet achieving high-quality, real-time, and stable animation with diffusion models remains challenging, especially on consumer-grade GPUs. Existing methods struggle with generating long, consistent video streams efficiently, often being limited by latency issues and degraded visual quality over extended periods. In this paper, we introduce RAIN, a pipeline solution capable of animating infinite video streams in real-time with low latency using a single RTX 4090 GPU. The core idea of RAIN is to efficiently compute frame-token attention across different noise levels and long time-intervals while simultaneously denoising a significantly larger number of frame-tokens than previous stream-based methods. This design allows RAIN to generate video frames with much shorter latency and faster speed, while maintaining long-range attention over extended video streams, resulting in enhanced continuity and consistency. Consequently, a Stable Diffusion model fine-tuned with RAIN in just a few epochs can produce video streams in real-time and low latency without much compromise in quality or consistency, up to infinite long. Despite its advanced capabilities, the RAIN only introduces a few additional 1D attention blocks, imposing minimal additional burden. Experiments in benchmark datasets and generating super-long videos demonstrating that RAIN can animate characters in real-time with much better quality, accuracy, and consistency than competitors while costing less latency. All code and models will be made publicly available.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 27, 2024

Parallel Paradigms in Modern HPC: A Comparative Analysis of MPI, OpenMP, and CUDA

This paper presents a comprehensive comparison of three dominant parallel programming models in High Performance Computing (HPC): Message Passing Interface (MPI), Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP), and Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). Selecting optimal programming approaches for modern heterogeneous HPC architectures has become increasingly critical. We systematically analyze these models across multiple dimensions: architectural foundations, performance characteristics, domain-specific suitability, programming complexity, and recent advancements. We examine each model's strengths, weaknesses, and optimization techniques. Our investigation demonstrates that MPI excels in distributed memory environments with near-linear scalability for communication-intensive applications, but faces communication overhead challenges. OpenMP provides strong performance and usability in shared-memory systems and loop-centric tasks, though it is limited by shared memory contention. CUDA offers substantial performance gains for data-parallel GPU workloads, but is restricted to NVIDIA GPUs and requires specialized expertise. Performance evaluations across scientific simulations, machine learning, and data analytics reveal that hybrid approaches combining two or more models often yield optimal results in heterogeneous environments. The paper also discusses implementation challenges, optimization best practices, and emerging trends such as performance portability frameworks, task-based programming, and the convergence of HPC and Big Data. This research helps developers and researchers make informed decisions when selecting programming models for modern HPC applications, emphasizing that the best choice depends on application requirements, hardware, and development constraints.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 17, 2025

GameIR: A Large-Scale Synthesized Ground-Truth Dataset for Image Restoration over Gaming Content

Image restoration methods like super-resolution and image synthesis have been successfully used in commercial cloud gaming products like NVIDIA's DLSS. However, restoration over gaming content is not well studied by the general public. The discrepancy is mainly caused by the lack of ground-truth gaming training data that match the test cases. Due to the unique characteristics of gaming content, the common approach of generating pseudo training data by degrading the original HR images results in inferior restoration performance. In this work, we develop GameIR, a large-scale high-quality computer-synthesized ground-truth dataset to fill in the blanks, targeting at two different applications. The first is super-resolution with deferred rendering, to support the gaming solution of rendering and transferring LR images only and restoring HR images on the client side. We provide 19200 LR-HR paired ground-truth frames coming from 640 videos rendered at 720p and 1440p for this task. The second is novel view synthesis (NVS), to support the multiview gaming solution of rendering and transferring part of the multiview frames and generating the remaining frames on the client side. This task has 57,600 HR frames from 960 videos of 160 scenes with 6 camera views. In addition to the RGB frames, the GBuffers during the deferred rendering stage are also provided, which can be used to help restoration. Furthermore, we evaluate several SOTA super-resolution algorithms and NeRF-based NVS algorithms over our dataset, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our ground-truth GameIR data in improving restoration performance for gaming content. Also, we test the method of incorporating the GBuffers as additional input information for helping super-resolution and NVS. We release our dataset and models to the general public to facilitate research on restoration methods over gaming content.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 29, 2024

StreamDiffusionV2: A Streaming System for Dynamic and Interactive Video Generation

Generative models are reshaping the live-streaming industry by redefining how content is created, styled, and delivered. Previous image-based streaming diffusion models have powered efficient and creative live streaming products but have hit limits on temporal consistency due to the foundation of image-based designs. Recent advances in video diffusion have markedly improved temporal consistency and sampling efficiency for offline generation. However, offline generation systems primarily optimize throughput by batching large workloads. In contrast, live online streaming operates under strict service-level objectives (SLOs): time-to-first-frame must be minimal, and every frame must meet a per-frame deadline with low jitter. Besides, scalable multi-GPU serving for real-time streams remains largely unresolved so far. To address this, we present StreamDiffusionV2, a training-free pipeline for interactive live streaming with video diffusion models. StreamDiffusionV2 integrates an SLO-aware batching scheduler and a block scheduler, together with a sink-token--guided rolling KV cache, a motion-aware noise controller, and other system-level optimizations. Moreover, we introduce a scalable pipeline orchestration that parallelizes the diffusion process across denoising steps and network layers, achieving near-linear FPS scaling without violating latency guarantees. The system scales seamlessly across heterogeneous GPU environments and supports flexible denoising steps (e.g., 1--4), enabling both ultra-low-latency and higher-quality modes. Without TensorRT or quantization, StreamDiffusionV2 renders the first frame within 0.5s and attains 58.28 FPS with a 14B-parameter model and 64.52 FPS with a 1.3B-parameter model on four H100 GPUs, making state-of-the-art generative live streaming practical and accessible--from individual creators to enterprise-scale platforms.

  • 14 authors
·
Nov 10, 2025 1

Adding NVMe SSDs to Enable and Accelerate 100B Model Fine-tuning on a Single GPU

Recent advances in large language models have brought immense value to the world, with their superior capabilities stemming from the massive number of parameters they utilize. However, even the GPUs with the highest memory capacities, currently peaking at 80GB, are far from sufficient to accommodate these vast parameters and their associated optimizer states when conducting stochastic gradient descent-based optimization. One approach to hosting such huge models is to aggregate device memory from many GPUs. However, this approach introduces prohibitive costs for most academic researchers, who always have a limited budget for many high-end GPU servers. In this paper, we focus on huge model fine-tuning on a single, even low-end, GPU in a commodity server, which is accessible to most AI researchers. In such a scenario, the state-of-the-art work ZeRO-Infinity suffers from two severe issues when running in a commodity server: 1) low GPU utilization due to inefficient swapping, and 2) limited trainable model size due to CPU memory capacity. The underlying reason is that ZeRO-Infinity is optimized for running on high-end GPU servers. To this end, we present Fuyou, a low-cost training framework that enables efficient 100B huge model fine-tuning on a low-end server with a low-end GPU and limited CPU memory capacity. The key idea is to add the SSD-CPU communication as an optimization dimension and thus carefully co-optimize computation and data swapping from a systematic approach to maximize GPU utilization. The experimental results show that 1) Fuyou is able to fine-tune 175B GPT-3 on a consumer GPU RTX 4090 with high GPU utilization, while ZeRO-Infinity fails to fine-tune; and 2) when training a small GPT-3 13B model, Fuyou achieves 156 TFLOPS on an RTX 4090 GPU while ZeRO-Infinity only achieves 45 TFLOPS.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 11, 2024 4

WarpCore: A Library for fast Hash Tables on GPUs

Hash tables are ubiquitous. Properties such as an amortized constant time complexity for insertion and querying as well as a compact memory layout make them versatile associative data structures with manifold applications. The rapidly growing amount of data emerging in many fields motivated the need for accelerated hash tables designed for modern parallel architectures. In this work, we exploit the fast memory interface of modern GPUs together with a parallel hashing scheme tailored to improve global memory access patterns, to design WarpCore -- a versatile library of hash table data structures. Unique device-sided operations allow for building high performance data processing pipelines entirely on the GPU. Our implementation achieves up to 1.6 billion inserts and up to 4.3 billion retrievals per second on a single GV100 GPU thereby outperforming the state-of-the-art solutions cuDPP, SlabHash, and NVIDIA RAPIDS cuDF. This performance advantage becomes even more pronounced for high load factors of over 90%. To overcome the memory limitation of a single GPU, we scale our approach over a dense NVLink topology which gives us close-to-optimal weak scaling on DGX servers. We further show how WarpCore can be used for accelerating a real world bioinformatics application (metagenomic classification) with speedups of over two orders-of-magnitude against state-of-the-art CPU-based solutions. WC is written in C++/CUDA-C and is openly available at https://github.com/sleeepyjack/warpcore.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 10, 2020

LongLive: Real-time Interactive Long Video Generation

We present LongLive, a frame-level autoregressive (AR) framework for real-time and interactive long video generation. Long video generation presents challenges in both efficiency and quality. Diffusion and Diffusion-Forcing models can produce high-quality videos but suffer from low efficiency due to bidirectional attention. Causal attention AR models support KV caching for faster inference, but often degrade in quality on long videos due to memory challenges during long-video training. In addition, beyond static prompt-based generation, interactive capabilities, such as streaming prompt inputs, are critical for dynamic content creation, enabling users to guide narratives in real time. This interactive requirement significantly increases complexity, especially in ensuring visual consistency and semantic coherence during prompt transitions. To address these challenges, LongLive adopts a causal, frame-level AR design that integrates a KV-recache mechanism that refreshes cached states with new prompts for smooth, adherent switches; streaming long tuning to enable long video training and to align training and inference (train-long-test-long); and short window attention paired with a frame-level attention sink, shorten as frame sink, preserving long-range consistency while enabling faster generation. With these key designs, LongLive fine-tunes a 1.3B-parameter short-clip model to minute-long generation in just 32 GPU-days. At inference, LongLive sustains 20.7 FPS on a single NVIDIA H100, achieves strong performance on VBench in both short and long videos. LongLive supports up to 240-second videos on a single H100 GPU. LongLive further supports INT8-quantized inference with only marginal quality loss.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Sep 26, 2025 2

Sol-H3: Recursive Self-Improvement for MiniMax-H3 Inference Acceleration on Sol-Engine across Cloud and Edge

Video diffusion models are rapidly scaling and exhibiting enhanced generation capabilities. Among these recent advancements, MiniMax-H3 stands out as a highly capable, production-level open-source model. However, its 33-billion parameters and multi-step iterative denoising process introduce substantial computational overhead. Consequently, their practical production is hindered by generation latency in the cloud deployment like NVIDIA-GB200, alongside strict memory limits that pose further challenges at the edge device like DGX-Spark. To address these diverse hardware bottlenecks from cloud to edge device, we present a full-stack inference pipeline that integrates efficient algorithmic design with optimized operator implementations. Algorithmically, we introduce a cross-resolution two-stage generation scheduler that exploits the step-wise nature of diffusion: early low-resolution steps rapidly establish the global layout, while later high-resolution steps focus refinements of local and perceptual details. These stages are connected by a learned latent-to-latent mapping module, completely eliminating the computationally expensive VAE decode-reencode cycle for resolution transferring cross different resolutions. For operator implementation, we deploy a Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) loop that searches kernel fusions and memory layouts, evaluating latency together with numerical agreement. Together, these optimizations deliver up to 30x end-to-end speedup and 20% lower memory: a 5-second 1344x768 video with audio is generated 3.5x faster than real time on an 8xGB200 node, and in under a minute fully memory-resident on a single DGX Spark.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 27

Improve Machine Learning carbon footprint using Nvidia GPU and Mixed Precision training for classification models -- Part I

This is the 1st part of the dissertation for my master degree and compares the power consumption using the default floating point (32bit) and Nvidia mixed precision (16bit and 32bit) while training a classification ML model. A custom PC with specific hardware was built to perform the experiments, and different ML hyper-parameters, such as batch size, neurons, and epochs, were chosen to build Deep Neural Networks (DNN). Additionally, various software was used during the experiments to collect the power consumption data in Watts from the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), Central Processing Unit (CPU), Random Access Memory (RAM) and manually from a wattmeter connected to the wall. A benchmarking test with default hyper parameter values for the DNN was used as a reference, while the experiments used a combination of different settings. The results were recorded in Excel, and descriptive statistics were chosen to calculate the mean between the groups and compare them using graphs and tables. The outcome was positive when using mixed precision combined with specific hyper-parameters. Compared to the benchmarking, the optimisation for the classification reduced the power consumption between 7 and 11 Watts. Similarly, the carbon footprint is reduced because the calculation uses the same power consumption data. Still, a consideration is required when configuring hyper-parameters because it can negatively affect hardware performance. However, this research required inferential statistics, specifically ANOVA and T-test, to compare the relationship between the means. Furthermore, tests indicated no statistical significance of the relationship between the benchmarking and experiments. However, a more extensive implementation with a cluster of GPUs can increase the sample size significantly, as it is an essential factor and can change the outcome of the statistical analysis.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 12, 2024

FlashBoot: Sub-Second Weight Loading for Large Models at Rack Scale

Flagship Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are growing fast along two axes at once: total parameter count and the number of experts. In elastic deployment scenarios, many GPUs across many nodes must become serving-ready quickly, and this growth makes weight loading a noticeable part of the latency budget. Even on NVIDIA's GB300 NVL72, today's state-of-the-art loaders leave most of that bandwidth unused. The losses are structural: (C1) weight memory is fragmented into tens of thousands of per-tensor objects, so transfers run far below link bandwidth; (C2) cross-node replication is gated by NCCL communicator setup, which costs 10-110 s before a single weight byte moves; and (C3) the existing cross-node GPU->GPU clone path is serial and scales poorly to concurrent multi-node bring-up. We present FlashBoot, a hardware-friendly, framework-workflow co-designed weight-loading subsystem built on SGLang. At its core is FabricArena, a contiguous, exportable and inter-node addressable tensor memory layout. On top of it, FlashLoad loads from CPU as a single bulk, zero-copy transfer, and FlashClone replicates a resident model from a remote GPU via a remote-mapping mechanism that removes NCCL setup. In experiments on NVL72 with DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash, FlashClone maps remote weight memory in ~10 ms (versus 10-110 s for NCCL) and sustains >=700 GB/s per clone. Against the state of the art, FlashBoot accelerates single-node weight loading by up to 50x (from 20.1 s to 0.4 s) and concurrent rack-level weight loading by >270x (from 87 s to 0.32 s). Our code will be made publicly available.

  • 6 authors
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Aug 8

Z-Image: An Efficient Image Generation Foundation Model with Single-Stream Diffusion Transformer

The landscape of high-performance image generation models is currently dominated by proprietary systems, such as Nano Banana Pro and Seedream 4.0. Leading open-source alternatives, including Qwen-Image, Hunyuan-Image-3.0 and FLUX.2, are characterized by massive parameter counts (20B to 80B), making them impractical for inference, and fine-tuning on consumer-grade hardware. To address this gap, we propose Z-Image, an efficient 6B-parameter foundation generative model built upon a Scalable Single-Stream Diffusion Transformer (S3-DiT) architecture that challenges the "scale-at-all-costs" paradigm. By systematically optimizing the entire model lifecycle -- from a curated data infrastructure to a streamlined training curriculum -- we complete the full training workflow in just 314K H800 GPU hours (approx. $630K). Our few-step distillation scheme with reward post-training further yields Z-Image-Turbo, offering both sub-second inference latency on an enterprise-grade H800 GPU and compatibility with consumer-grade hardware (<16GB VRAM). Additionally, our omni-pre-training paradigm also enables efficient training of Z-Image-Edit, an editing model with impressive instruction-following capabilities. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our model achieves performance comparable to or surpassing that of leading competitors across various dimensions. Most notably, Z-Image exhibits exceptional capabilities in photorealistic image generation and bilingual text rendering, delivering results that rival top-tier commercial models, thereby demonstrating that state-of-the-art results are achievable with significantly reduced computational overhead. We publicly release our code, weights, and online demo to foster the development of accessible, budget-friendly, yet state-of-the-art generative models.

Tongyi-MAI Tongyi-MAI
·
Nov 27, 2025 9

EfficientViT: Memory Efficient Vision Transformer with Cascaded Group Attention

Vision transformers have shown great success due to their high model capabilities. However, their remarkable performance is accompanied by heavy computation costs, which makes them unsuitable for real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a family of high-speed vision transformers named EfficientViT. We find that the speed of existing transformer models is commonly bounded by memory inefficient operations, especially the tensor reshaping and element-wise functions in MHSA. Therefore, we design a new building block with a sandwich layout, i.e., using a single memory-bound MHSA between efficient FFN layers, which improves memory efficiency while enhancing channel communication. Moreover, we discover that the attention maps share high similarities across heads, leading to computational redundancy. To address this, we present a cascaded group attention module feeding attention heads with different splits of the full feature, which not only saves computation cost but also improves attention diversity. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate EfficientViT outperforms existing efficient models, striking a good trade-off between speed and accuracy. For instance, our EfficientViT-M5 surpasses MobileNetV3-Large by 1.9% in accuracy, while getting 40.4% and 45.2% higher throughput on Nvidia V100 GPU and Intel Xeon CPU, respectively. Compared to the recent efficient model MobileViT-XXS, EfficientViT-M2 achieves 1.8% superior accuracy, while running 5.8x/3.7x faster on the GPU/CPU, and 7.4x faster when converted to ONNX format. Code and models are available at https://github.com/microsoft/Cream/tree/main/EfficientViT.

  • 6 authors
·
May 11, 2023 1

H_2O: Heavy-Hitter Oracle for Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their recent impressive accomplishments, are notably cost-prohibitive to deploy, particularly for applications involving long-content generation, such as dialogue systems and story writing. Often, a large amount of transient state information, referred to as the KV cache, is stored in GPU memory in addition to model parameters, scaling linearly with the sequence length and batch size. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for implementing the KV cache which significantly reduces its memory footprint. Our approach is based on the noteworthy observation that a small portion of tokens contributes most of the value when computing attention scores. We call these tokens Heavy Hitters (H_2). Through a comprehensive investigation, we find that (i) the emergence of H_2 is natural and strongly correlates with the frequent co-occurrence of tokens in the text, and (ii) removing them results in significant performance degradation. Based on these insights, we propose Heavy Hitter Oracle (H_2O), a KV cache eviction policy that dynamically retains a balance of recent and H_2 tokens. We formulate the KV cache eviction as a dynamic submodular problem and prove (under mild assumptions) a theoretical guarantee for our novel eviction algorithm which could help guide future work. We validate the accuracy of our algorithm with OPT, LLaMA, and GPT-NeoX across a wide range of tasks. Our implementation of H_2O with 20% heavy hitters improves the throughput over three leading inference systems DeepSpeed Zero-Inference, Hugging Face Accelerate, and FlexGen by up to 29times, 29times, and 3times on OPT-6.7B and OPT-30B. With the same batch size, H2O can reduce the latency by up to 1.9times. The code is available at https://github.com/FMInference/H2O.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 24, 2023 1

HALO: Hadamard-Assisted Lossless Optimization for Efficient Low-Precision LLM Training and Fine-Tuning

Quantized training of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains an open challenge, as maintaining accuracy while performing all matrix multiplications in low precision has proven difficult. This is particularly the case when fine-tuning pre-trained models, which often already have large weight and activation outlier values that render quantized optimization difficult. We present HALO, a novel quantization-aware training approach for Transformers that enables accurate and efficient low-precision training by combining 1) strategic placement of Hadamard rotations in both forward and backward passes, to mitigate outliers during the low-precision computation, 2) FSDP integration for low-precision communication, and 3) high-performance kernel support. Our approach ensures that all large matrix multiplications during the forward and backward passes are executed in lower precision. Applied to LLAMA-family models, HALO achieves near-full-precision-equivalent results during fine-tuning on various tasks, while delivering up to 1.31x end-to-end speedup for full fine-tuning on RTX 4090 GPUs. Our method supports both standard and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, both backed by efficient kernel implementations. Our results demonstrate the first practical approach to fully quantized LLM fine-tuning that maintains accuracy in FP8 precision, while delivering performance benefits.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 5, 2025

HiSparse: Scaling Sparse-Attention Decoding with Hierarchical KV Cache Management

Top-k sparse attention makes long-context LLM decoding cheap to compute: each step reads only a few thousand selected KV entries rather than the full context. Serving systems, however, typically keep the entire KV cache in GPU HBM so that every position stays selectable, so a request's memory bill still grows with its full context length--decoding hits a capacity wall long before it runs out of compute, and a context whose KV cache exceeds HBM cannot be served at all. We present HiSparse, an exact, indexer-agnostic hierarchical KV cache for sparse-attention serving. HiSparse keeps each request's full KV history in host memory and bounds its decode footprint with a small, fixed-size GPU cache; a fused CUDA kernel resolves each layer's selections--hit detection, LRU replacement, and host-to-device fetches--inside the decode CUDA graph; and, for models that share selections across layers, exact layer-wise prefetching hides roughly half of the remaining miss overhead. Because only KV placement changes, model outputs are unchanged. HiSparse is merged into upstream SGLang and evaluated across three sparse-attention families (DSA, NSA, and Quest) on H200, B200, and GH200 platforms: it improves peak generation throughput by up to 4.7x on long-context workloads while preserving comparable per-token latency and reducing time-to-first-token at high load--and a no-IO oracle shows the resolution mechanism itself adds no measurable per-token cost, leaving host-device IO as the only price of bounded residency.

  • 6 authors
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Aug 6

The Serialized Bridge: Understanding and Recovering LLM Serving Performance under Blackwell GPU Confidential Computing

GPU Confidential Computing (GPU-CC) now preserves GPU-local performance: on NVIDIA B300, BF16 matmul runs at 0.998x of non-confidential performance. Yet LLM serving under Intel TDX plus GPU-CC still loses 13-27% of throughput, and KV-cache restore latency can more than double. This paper studies that gap on two Blackwell platforms, RTX Pro 6000 and B300 HGX, and identifies its dominant cause: the confidential VM-GPU bridge, not GPU compute. We find that GPU-CC turns host/device movement into a serialized, high-setup-cost channel. Secure copies do not gain CUDA-stream concurrency within a context, asynchronous transfers block at the runtime boundary, and small crossings pay a fixed toll. This violates the assumptions of modern inference runtimes, where DMA is expected to be cheap, concurrent, and asynchronous. In vLLM dense decode, the gap closes around 44x-slower small alloc-and-copy operations; targeted patches reject alternative explanations. A scheduling flag recovers 57% of the gap, while a worker-thread drain recovers up to 92% in qualified high-concurrency runs. The same bridge model explains a +131% KV-restore penalty and a 34x model-load slowdown. Blackwell also changes the confidential tenancy unit. We qualify confidential multi-GPU NVSwitch tenants on B300, including 510 GB/s NVLink P2P inside a CVM and concurrent isolated tenants, and identify the remaining fabric-attestation gap for production confidential AI platforms.

  • 2 authors
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Jul 8

Meganeura: Portable GPU Training and Inference through Vulkan and Metal

Training and deployed inference often cross export, conversion, and platform-specific runtime boundaries. Meganeura asks whether one compact native compiler can span both phases on consumer GPUs. Its typed static graph, automatic differentiation, optimizer, checkpoint, memory planner, and runtime lower specialized programs through Vulkan and Metal. We compare five matched workloads with PyTorch on NVIDIA and AMD discrete GPUs, an AMD APU, Apple silicon, and an Intel iGPU. The protocol separates strict f32 from validated fast paths and gates forward and backward independently. Forty-eight of 50 device-workload-mode cells pass both gates; the other two share one unresolved backward-reference disagreement on a newly supported APU. In strict f32, Meganeura wins 12 of 20 GPU-referenced minimal-latency cells and has a median valid training gap of 1.8x. On the discrete AMD GPU, four of five inference workloads are within 1.10x of compiled ROCm PyTorch and three training workloads are faster. Under accelerated contracts, the worst training gap is 4.6x. Compilation takes 0.1-2.4 seconds versus 6-96 seconds for torch.compile on supported GPU paths; the stripped binary is 13 MiB. Dispatch profiles localize the largest gaps to convolution derivatives and attention backward. A physical Android XR case study transfers a Meganeura-trained decoder into an Adreno/OpenXR application sharing the graphics queue. The results show that general consumer graphics APIs can support a compact shared train-to-deploy stack at useful, sometimes vendor-competitive performance. The measured gaps point to kernel coverage, scheduling, and arithmetic policy rather than an identified API limitation.

  • 1 authors
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Aug 2