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Nov 4

Parallelized Hierarchical Connectome: A Spatiotemporal Recurrent Framework for Spiking State-Space Models

This work presents the Parallelized Hierarchical Connectome (PHC), a general architectural framework that upgrades temporal-only State-Space Models (SSMs) into spatiotemporal recurrent networks. Conventional SSMs achieve parallel-scan training but are limited to temporal recurrence, lacking lateral or feedback interactions within a single timestep. PHC maps the diagonal SSM core to a shared Neuron Layer and inter-neuronal communication to a shared Synapse Layer of hierarchical regions, reconnected by a Multi-Transmission Loop iterating spatial recurrence within each temporal window, at parameter complexity Theta(D^2) versus Theta(D^2 L) of stacked SSMs. This spatiotemporal framework enables the seamless integration of neuro-physical priors typically intractable for standard SSMs, including adaptive LIF, synaptic delay, STP, Dale's Law with E/I-asymmetric topology, and STDP. The framework is instantiated as PHCSSM, the first spiking SSM that integrates all five biological priors and is evaluated on long-sequence data, achieving test accuracy competitive with state-of-the-art SSM baselines at 1,312 to 4,891 trainable parameters (1 to 4 orders of magnitude smaller than every baseline). PHCSSM further admits a sequential recurrent spiking neural network (RSNN) deployment mode that converges asymptotically to the parallel-scan training mode without artificial-neural-network-to-spiking-neural-network (ANN-to-SNN) conversion, with cross-backend reproducibility verified across four hardware backends (x86 CPU, H100 GPU, Cortex-A76, Cortex-M4F) including end-to-end deployment on the Cortex-M4F microcontroller (40 KB SRAM, 128 KB Flash). PHCSSM thereby bridges parallel-scan SSM and biologically grounded RSNN, two paradigms with previously incompatible training regimes, into a single architecture and trained weights.

  • 1 authors
·
May 19

Rollout-Training Co-Design for Efficient LLM-Based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Despite algorithm-level innovations for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), the underlying networked infrastructure for large-scale MARL training remains underexplored. Existing training frameworks primarily optimize for single-agent scenarios and fail to address the unique system-level challenges of MARL, including rollout-training synchronization barriers, rollout load imbalance, and training resource underutilization. To bridge this gap, we propose FlexMARL, the first end-to-end training framework that holistically optimizes rollout, training, and their orchestration for large-scale LLM-based MARL. Specifically, FlexMARL introduces the joint orchestrator to manage data flow under the rollout-training disaggregated architecture. Building upon the experience store, a novel micro-batch driven asynchronous pipeline eliminates the synchronization barriers while providing strong consistency guarantees. Rollout engine adopts a parallel sampling scheme combined with hierarchical load balancing, which adapts to skewed inter/intra-agent request patterns. Training engine achieves on-demand hardware binding through agent-centric resource allocation. The training states of different agents are swapped via unified and location-agnostic communication. Empirical results on a large-scale production cluster demonstrate that FlexMARL achieves up to 7.3x speedup and improves hardware utilization by up to 5.6x compared to existing frameworks.

  • 16 authors
·
Feb 9

Libra: Efficient Resource Management for Agentic RL Post-Training

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a standard post-training paradigm for shaping large language models (LLMs) into capable agents. In agentic RL, the rollout stage generates trajectories while invoking tools, producing long-tailed and non-stationary workloads that expose two fundamental challenges in resource management. First, due to the long-tail distribution, a small fraction of trajectories dominates rollout makespan. Second, rollout and training are subject to cross-stage imbalance, as they exhibit strong asymmetry in compute patterns, memory demands, and sensitivity to sequence length. Compounding this asymmetry, the sequence length distribution drifts continuously as the policy evolves, rendering any static resource split progressively suboptimal. We present Libra, a resource management system to address both challenges via two core mechanisms. The first is a global resource planner that jointly optimizes GPU allocation across rollout and training clusters. It leverages an elastic hybrid pool to enable lightweight, non-blocking worker reallocation between stages. The second is a causality-driven multi-level feedback queue (C-MLFQ) scheduler, which routes requests to heterogeneous rollout buckets based on causal signals derived from tool-return outcomes, rather than relying on fragile length predictions. Evaluated on 48 A800 GPUs, Libra achieves up to 3.0x higher throughput and converges up to 2.5x faster in reward compared to the baselines.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 9

Towards Seamless Hierarchical Federated Learning under Intermittent Client Participation: A Stagewise Decision-Making Methodology

Federated Learning (FL) offers a pioneering distributed learning paradigm that enables devices/clients to build a shared global model. This global model is obtained through frequent model transmissions between clients and a central server, which may cause high latency, energy consumption, and congestion over backhaul links. To overcome these drawbacks, Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) has emerged, which organizes clients into multiple clusters and utilizes edge nodes (e.g., edge servers) for intermediate model aggregations between clients and the central server. Current research on HFL mainly focus on enhancing model accuracy, latency, and energy consumption in scenarios with a stable/fixed set of clients. However, addressing the dynamic availability of clients -- a critical aspect of real-world scenarios -- remains underexplored. This study delves into optimizing client selection and client-to-edge associations in HFL under intermittent client participation so as to minimize overall system costs (i.e., delay and energy), while achieving fast model convergence. We unveil that achieving this goal involves solving a complex NP-hard problem. To tackle this, we propose a stagewise methodology that splits the solution into two stages, referred to as Plan A and Plan B. Plan A focuses on identifying long-term clients with high chance of participation in subsequent model training rounds. Plan B serves as a backup, selecting alternative clients when long-term clients are unavailable during model training rounds. This stagewise methodology offers a fresh perspective on client selection that can enhance both HFL and conventional FL via enabling low-overhead decision-making processes. Through evaluations on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, we show that our methodology outperforms existing benchmarks in terms of model accuracy and system costs.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 20, 2025

Agentic Troubleshooting Guide Automation for Incident Management

Effective incident management in large-scale IT systems relies on troubleshooting guides (TSGs), but their manual execution is slow and error-prone. While recent advances in LLMs offer promise for automating incident management tasks, existing LLM-based solutions lack specialized support for several key challenges, including managing TSG quality issues, interpreting complex control flow, handling data-intensive queries, and exploiting execution parallelism. We first conducted an empirical study on 92 real-world TSGs, and, guided by our findings, we present StepFly, a novel end-to-end agentic framework for troubleshooting guide automation. Our approach features a three-stage workflow: the first stage provides a comprehensive guide together with a tool, TSG Mentor, to assist SREs in improving TSG quality; the second stage performs offline preprocessing using LLMs to extract structured execution DAGs from unstructured TSGs and to create dedicated Query Preparation Plugins (QPPs); and the third stage executes online using a DAG-guided scheduler-executor framework with a memory system to guarantee correct workflow and support parallel execution of independent steps. Our empirical evaluation on a collection of real-world TSGs and incidents demonstrates that StepFly achieves a ~94% success rate on GPT-4.1, outperforming baselines with less time and token consumption. Furthermore, it achieves a remarkable execution time reduction of 32.9% to 70.4% for parallelizable TSGs.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 11, 2025

Speculative Forking: Turning Idle Wait into Parallel Exploration for Repository Environment Setup

Before developers can use a software project, they must first get it to run. This often requires installing the right language runtime, system packages, build tools, and test commands. Recent LLM-based agents automate environment setup by inspecting a repository, writing setup scripts, running them, and repairing the resulting errors. However, these agents still follow a sequential trial-and-error loop: they try one setup route, wait for slow commands to finish, observe the failure, and only then decide what to try next. Because environment commands often take long to run, this sequential workflow makes setup slow and limits exploration to one route at a time. We present SpecBuild, an LLM-based environment setup system designed to be both faster and more successful through speculative forking. SpecBuild explores candidate setup branches in parallel, returns the first committed environment, and discards the rest. It applies this design at two granularities: strategy-level forking explores alternative setup routes, such as different base images and dependency policies, while command-level forking predicts failures of running commands and prepares repair branches before those failures are observed. We evaluate SpecBuild on Multi-Docker-Eval, covering 334 tasks from 40 repositories and 9 programming languages. Across three backbone models, SpecBuild improves the success rate by 6.4 to 12.0 percentage points over the strongest baseline, while reducing average setup time by 22.4% to 41.6%. These results show that LLM-based environment setup need not trade speed for reliability: parallel speculative exploration can make agents both faster and more successful.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 22

SparseRL-Sync: Lossless Weight Synchronization with ~100x Less Communication

In large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) systems with decoupled Trainer-Rollout execution, the Trainer must regularly synchronize policy weights to the Rollout side to limit policy staleness. When inter-node bandwidth is abundant, such synchronization is usually only a small fraction of end-to-end cost. As model size grows, however, the communication demand rises rapidly. In bandwidth-constrained or network-variable deployments -- for example, cross-datacenter or cross-cluster settings, heterogeneous resource pools, and online RL -- weight synchronization can become a dominant bottleneck for throughput and tail latency. We observe that, in mainstream large-model RL training, the locations where parameters actually change are highly sparse at the element level (often 99%+ sparsity). Building on this observation, we propose and implement SparseRL-Sync, which replaces full-weight transfers with a lossless sparse update payload (indices and values) that can be exactly reconstructed on the inference side, thereby preserving 100% fidelity. Under a simplified cost model, sparse synchronization reduces the per-update communication volume from S to approximately S/X; with 99% sparsity (X ~ 100), this yields about a 100x reduction in transmitted data. Combined with appropriate bucketing, SparseRL-Sync also reduces launch and control-plane overhead, significantly improving scalability and end-to-end efficiency in bandwidth-limited and highly asynchronous RL settings.

  • 7 authors
·
May 7

vLLM-Omni: Fully Disaggregated Serving for Any-to-Any Multimodal Models

Any-to-any multimodal models that jointly handle text, images, video, and audio represent a significant advance in multimodal AI. However, their complex architectures (typically combining multiple autoregressive LLMs, diffusion transformers, and other specialized components) pose substantial challenges for efficient model serving. Existing serving systems are mainly tailored to a single paradigm, such as autoregressive LLMs for text generation or diffusion transformers for visual generation. They lack support for any-to-any pipelines that involve multiple interconnected model components. As a result, developers must manually handle cross-stage interactions, leading to huge performance degradation. We present vLLM-Omni, a fully disaggregated serving system for any-to-any models. vLLM-Omni features a novel stage abstraction that enables users to decompose complex any-to-any architectures into interconnected stages represented as a graph, and a disaggregated stage execution backend that optimizes resource utilization and throughput across stages. Each stage is independently served by an LLM or diffusion engine with per-stage request batching, flexible GPU allocation, and unified inter-stage connectors for data routing. Experimental results demonstrate that vLLM-Omni reduces job completion time (JCT) by up to 91.4% compared to baseline methods. The code is public available at https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm-omni.

  • 16 authors
·
Feb 1

Pre-Compiled Pipeline Shards for Distributed LLM Inference on Intel AI PC Fleets

Modern Intel AI PCs ship capable integrated GPUs and NPUs with 16+ GB of unified memory, and they spend considerable time idle. That is not enough memory to fit a large model such as a 70B-parameter LLM. We show that a handful of AIPCs, working together over an ordinary network, can serve models beyond the capability of any single one. We use pipeline parallelism: a model is split by layer into per-stage shards, each pre-compiled into an OpenVINO graph, so that every machine runs one shard and passes activations to the next. Three techniques make this fast enough to be useful. First, we recover the speed of the unsplit model: a naive per-stage export runs well below monolithic inference because it misses an OpenVINO GPU optimization, and injecting a beam_idx Gather into each shard triggers that optimization (the IndirectKVCache fusion) and brings the shards to parity. Second, we leverage speculative decoding on stateful OpenVINO models. Third, the pipeline serves several users at once by interleaving their requests across the stages, each request carrying its own cache (micro-batching). Together, a two-node Llama 3.1 8B INT4 pipeline serves two concurrent users at 1.79x the single-user throughput of the unsplit model on the same hardware, and the gap widens under simulated wide-area latency. The same design scales to a 70B model that no single fleet member can hold: a four-node deployment of Lunar Lake AI PCs on Intel Tiber Cloud serves a single user at interactive speed, with output token-for-token identical to the same four-node pipeline decoding without speculation. Code, raw benchmark logs, and reproduction scripts ship as a self-contained package at https://github.com/labscommunity/pipeline-sharded-inference-paper (in the top-level reproduction/ directory).

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 18

JoyNexus: Service-Oriented Multi-Tenant Post-Training for VLA Models

The post-training of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is essential due to the diversity of simulators, robot embodiments, and task objectives. Existing compute services, whether offered as direct accelerator rental or batch-workload submission, typically allocate an exclusive set of GPU and CPU resources to a single tenant. While this paradigm maximizes client flexibility, it burdens users with infrastructure adaptation, and the fixed card-hour accounting model renders short or bursty workloads both expensive for tenants and inefficient for the service provider. To address these challenges, we present JoyNexus, a unified service for multi-tenant VLA supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and evaluation. JoyNexus decouples the Training Model Service, Inference Model Service, and Environment Service, each accessed through APIs and backed by resident shared base models with tenant-specific slots. Tenants can directly invoke high-level semantic APIs for training, rollout, and evaluation, or compose custom algorithms using lower-level APIs and their assigned endpoints. Multiple tenants submit workloads concurrently; their action modules, optimizers, rollout records, and policy versions remain isolated, and the service is scheduled by the global Training Queue and Inference Queue. To further improve multi-tenant training efficiency, JoyNexus introduces group batching for heterogeneous VLA data schemas that share a compatible model-facing prefix, enabling a single shared backbone forward pass over grouped samples. Finally, we evaluate JoyNexus through workload simulation and a group-batching pipeline in a realistic embodied scenario. Results show that, compared with isolated single-tenant execution, JoyNexus reduces aggregate GPU time and improves service utilization via cross-tenant scheduling on shared resources.

  • 21 authors
·
Jul 16 3

Training LLMs with Fault Tolerant HSDP on 100,000 GPUs

Large-scale training systems typically use synchronous training, requiring all GPUs to be healthy simultaneously. In our experience training on O(100K) GPUs, synchronous training results in a low efficiency due to frequent failures and long recovery time. To address this problem, we propose a novel training paradigm, Fault Tolerant Hybrid-Shared Data Parallelism (FT-HSDP). FT-HSDP uses data parallel replicas as units of fault tolerance. When failures occur, only a single data-parallel replica containing the failed GPU or server is taken offline and restarted, while the other replicas continue training. To realize this idea at scale, FT-HSDP incorporates several techniques: 1) We introduce a Fault Tolerant All Reduce (FTAR) protocol for gradient exchange across data parallel replicas. FTAR relies on the CPU to drive the complex control logic for tasks like adding or removing participants dynamically, and relies on GPU to perform data transfer for best performance. 2) We introduce a non-blocking catch-up protocol, allowing a recovering replica to join training with minimal stall. Compared with fully synchronous training at O(100K) GPUs, FT-HSDP can reduce the stall time due to failure recovery from 10 minutes to 3 minutes, increasing effective training time from 44\% to 80\%. We further demonstrate that FT-HSDP's asynchronous recovery does not bring any meaning degradation to the accuracy of the result model.

  • 23 authors
·
Jan 29

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

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

  • 131 authors
·
Sep 18 1

APEX: An Extensible and Dynamism-Aware Simulator for Automated Parallel Execution in LLM Serving

Efficiently serving Large Language Models (LLMs) requires selecting an optimal parallel execution plan, balancing computation, memory, and communication overhead. However, determining the best strategy is challenging due to varying parallelism techniques (data, pipeline, tensor) and workload characteristics (e.g., compute-intensive tasks with long prompts vs. memory-intensive tasks with long generation). We propose APEX, an LLM serving system simulator that efficiently identifies optimal parallel execution plans by considering key factors of LLM serving systems, such as memory usage, batching behavior, etc. APEX performs dynamism-aware simulation to model iteration-level batching, and leverages LLMs' repetitive structure to reduce design space, scaling efficiently to trillion-scale models. APEX abstracts the key components of LLM serving systems, including the model, batching module, quantization formats, and device clusters, enabling the simulator to be general and extensible. Simulating on a CPU, APEX evaluates execution plans for various device clusters, covering diverse LLMs and workloads. APEX finds plans up to 3.37x faster than heuristics, and also plans that reduce energy consumption by up to 45% compared to latency-optimal plans. APEX performs comprehensive evaluations, reporting key system metrics like time per output token and time to first token, which can help service providers meet SLOs. APEX identifies an optimal plan within 15 minutes on a CPU, making it 71x faster and 1234x more cost-effective than cloud-based GPU deployment. APEX can be accessed at https://github.com/microsoft/apex_plus

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 26, 2024

Universal Checkpointing: Efficient and Flexible Checkpointing for Large Scale Distributed Training

Existing checkpointing approaches seem ill-suited for distributed training even though hardware limitations make model parallelism, i.e., sharding model state across multiple accelerators, a requirement for model scaling. Consolidating distributed model state into a single checkpoint unacceptably slows down training, and is impractical at extreme scales. Distributed checkpoints, in contrast, are tightly coupled to the model parallelism and hardware configurations of the training run, and thus unusable on different configurations. To address this problem, we propose Universal Checkpointing, a technique that enables efficient checkpoint creation while providing the flexibility of resuming on arbitrary parallelism strategy and hardware configurations. Universal Checkpointing unlocks unprecedented capabilities for large-scale training such as improved resilience to hardware failures through continued training on remaining healthy hardware, and reduced training time through opportunistic exploitation of elastic capacity. The key insight of Universal Checkpointing is the selection of the optimal representation in each phase of the checkpointing life cycle: distributed representation for saving, and consolidated representation for loading. This is achieved using two key mechanisms. First, the universal checkpoint format, which consists of a consolidated representation of each model parameter and metadata for mapping parameter fragments into training ranks of arbitrary model-parallelism configuration. Second, the universal checkpoint language, a simple but powerful specification language for converting distributed checkpoints into the universal checkpoint format. Our evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and generality of Universal Checkpointing on state-of-the-art model architectures and a wide range of parallelism techniques.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 26, 2024

UltraEP: Unleash MoE Training and Inference on Rack-Scale Nodes with Near-Optimal Load Balancing

Large-scale expert parallelism (EP) is becoming pivotal for training and serving frontier MoE models, but it also amplifies device-level expert load imbalance into compute stragglers, token all-to-all bottlenecks, and activation-memory spikes. Existing balancers redistribute experts periodically based on historical load, which becomes unreliable for production deployments with non-stationary load patterns. We present UltraEP, the first exact-load, real-time balancer for large-EP MoE training and serving prefill on rack-scale nodes (RSNs). Leveraging the extended scale-up connectivity among dozens of GPUs within RSNs, UltraEP rebalances every microbatch and layer on critical paths, which requires nontrivial co-design of plan solving and expert replication communication to minimize exposed overhead. To this end, UltraEP eagerly reacts to post-gating load with an efficient quota-driven planner, and executes the resulting irregular expert-state transfers with RSN-native persistent tile streaming and relay-based fan-out mitigation. We evaluate UltraEP in a multi-RSN deployment of up to 256 GPUs, using cutting-edge MoE models from 106B to 671B parameters. Averaged across training and serving, UltraEP achieves 94.3% of the force-balanced ideal throughput, delivering 1.49times improvement over no-balancing, while reducing the final inter-rank imbalance from 1.30-4.01 to 1.01-1.04.

  • 13 authors
·
Jun 17

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
·
Aug 8

All is Not Lost: LLM Recovery without Checkpoints

Training LLMs on decentralized and wimpy computation nodes, e.g., multiple on-spot instances, lowers the training cost and enables model democratization. The inevitable challenge here is the churn of nodes due to failures and the operator's scheduling policies, leading to losing a stage - a part of the model. The conventional approaches to recover from failures are to either use checkpointing, where periodically a copy of the entire model is sent to an additional storage, or redundant computation. These approaches yield significant communication and/or computation overhead even in non-failure cases and scale poorly in settings with large models. In this paper, we propose, CheckFree, an efficient recovery method where a failing stage is substituted by a weighted average of the closest neighboring stages. In contrast to the state of the art, CheckFree requires no additional computation or storage. However, because of the nature of averaging neighbouring stages, it can only recover failures of intermediate stages. We further extend our method to CheckFree+ with out-of-order pipeline execution to tolerate crashes of the first and last stages. Thanks to out-of-order pipelining, behaviour of those stages is mimicked by their neighboring ones, which allows CheckFree+ to recover them by simply copying the weights from the immediate neighbour. To be able to recover the (de)embedding layers, CheckFree+ copies those layers to the neighboring stages, which requires relatively small storage overhead. We extensively evaluate our method on LLaMa models of model sizes from 124M to 1.5B with varying failure frequencies. In the case of low and medium failure rates (5-10%), CheckFree and CheckFree+ outperform both checkpointing and redundant computation in terms of convergence in wall-clock time by over 12%. Both of our proposals can be run via our code available at: https://github.com/gensyn-ai/CheckFree.

Gensyn Gensyn
·
Jun 18, 2025 3

Zorse: Optimizing LLM Training Efficiency on Heterogeneous GPU Clusters

Large language models (LLMs) require vast amounts of GPU compute to train, but limited availability and high costs of GPUs make homogeneous clusters impractical for many organizations. Instead, assembling heterogeneous clusters by pooling together GPUs of different generations allows them to achieve higher aggregate compute and make use of all available GPUs. However, training on heterogeneous clusters presents several challenges, including load balancing across GPUs, optimizing memory usage to accommodate varying memory capacities, and ensuring communication-efficient training over diverse network interconnects potentially spanning multiple datacenters. In this paper, we make the case that efficient training on heterogeneous clusters requires (1) the integration of pipeline parallelism and data parallelism in a manner that is both communication- and memory-efficient, and (2) a more adaptable configuration of pipeline and data parallelism, which includes the capability to flexibly partition GPUs into asymmetric pipeline parallel stages and to incorporate heterogeneous GPUs within the same data parallelism group. We propose Zorse, the first system to unify all these capabilities while incorporating a planner that automatically configures training strategies for a given workload. Our evaluation shows that Zorse significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems in heterogeneous training scenarios.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 13, 2025

Claim Plane: Enforceable Change Intents and Dynamic Scope for Parallel Coding Agents

Parallel coding agents can independently produce locally valid changes while still interfering at integration time, expanding beyond planned scope, or relying on premises invalidated by concurrent work. Existing responses emphasize communication, isolated workspaces, late merge-time repair, continuous supervision, or post-hoc runtime recovery. This paper presents Claim Plane, a model-agnostic coordination architecture that treats concurrent software change as a pre-write admission problem. Before implementation, each worker declares a versioned ChangeIntent containing an exact base commit, typed resources, dependencies, and operations marked as committed or contingent. A deterministic control plane atomically admits compatible intents, constrains same-file parallelism to declared regions, serializes unresolved overlap, tracks dependency invalidation, and fails closed on ambiguous authority. During execution, a contingent mutation does not reserve write ownership initially; the first attempted mutation triggers atomic scope promotion and re-admission against the current active set. Brokered execution binds capabilities to intent versions, leases, OS-level worktree locks, monotonic fencing tokens, and Git-tree provenance, while integration verifies immutable patches and evidence. A preliminary six-pair CooperBench mechanism check is reported only as feasibility evidence: static Claim Plane achieved 6/6 pair passes with full serialization, while dynamic scope retained parallel admission on half of the pairs, performed seven successful scope promotions, and failed closed on two undeclared mutations. The sample is intentionally too small for comparative claims. We argue that separating probabilistic planning from deterministic authority provides a foundation for a future learned semantic-dependency model and frontier-model escalation only on unresolved cases.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 23

DistServe: Disaggregating Prefill and Decoding for Goodput-optimized Large Language Model Serving

DistServe improves the performance of large language models (LLMs) serving by disaggregating the prefill and decoding computation. Existing LLM serving systems colocate the two phases and batch the computation of prefill and decoding across all users and requests. We find that this strategy not only leads to strong prefill-decoding interferences but also couples the resource allocation and parallelism plans for both phases. LLM applications often emphasize individual latency for each phase: time to first token (TTFT) for the prefill phase and time per output token (TPOT) of each request for the decoding phase. In the presence of stringent latency requirements, existing systems have to prioritize one latency over the other, or over-provision compute resources to meet both. DistServe assigns prefill and decoding computation to different GPUs, hence eliminating prefill-decoding interferences. Given the application's TTFT and TPOT requirements, DistServe co-optimizes the resource allocation and parallelism strategy tailored for each phase. DistServe also places the two phases according to the serving cluster's bandwidth to minimize the communication caused by disaggregation. As a result, DistServe significantly improves LLM serving performance in terms of the maximum rate that can be served within both TTFT and TPOT constraints on each GPU. Our evaluations show that on various popular LLMs, applications, and latency requirements, DistServe can serve 4.48x more requests or 10.2x tighter SLO, compared to state-of-the-art systems, while staying within latency constraints for > 90% of requests.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 17, 2024 1

When the KV Cache Is Slower Than the GPU: Scaling Remote KV Tiers for Context-Parallel Prefill

Reusing the attention KV cache across requests is a standard way to cut prefill cost in long-context LLM serving, and production systems increasingly back the per-engine cache with a remote tier shared by every engine. We study such a tier in a disaggregated deployment of GLM-5.3, an FP8 mixture-of-experts model with multi-head latent attention (MLA), on 8xB300 nodes running prefill context parallelism (PCP8). Enabling the remote tier (LMCache with a Valkey store) left median time-to-first-token unchanged but raised the 16k-token p99 from 3.96 s to 17.3 s. Replaying a production request stream on an isolated engine, we find that a remote hit took 0.88 s against 0.31 s to recompute the prompt, and that synchronous loading turned a hit-heavy stream into an unstable queue: p99 83.32 s with the GPUs 7% busy. A two-term cost model explains both: a hit pays off only if the tier delivers more than B* = sR (2.53 GB/s for this model and GPU), and a fixed per-hit engine cost (T0 ~ 0.33 s) means that hits on prompts shorter than about 17k tokens cannot beat recompute at any bandwidth. Guided by the model, we (i) shard the MLA KV store across PCP ranks, with a proof that the existing minimum-over-ranks lookup returns the longest cached prefix and a load protocol that can never desynchronize collectives; (ii) partition the remote tier by rank, one server instance per rank with no coordination, which raises GET bandwidth 6.3x to 10.76 GB/s; (iii) add asynchronous loading to the sharded store; and (iv) fix three client bugs that caused unbounded stalls. On the hit-heavy stream, with 98.5% of prompt tokens served from the remote tier, p99 falls from 83.32 s to 0.67 s. The sharded store raises prefill throughput by 14%, and by 34% together with an upstream kernel fix. All changes are submitted upstream to LMCache.

AgentX: Towards Agent-Driven Self-Iteration of Industrial Recommender Systems

Recommendation algorithm iteration is moving from an artisanal, engineer-bound process toward an industrialized research loop, but this transition remains blocked by a structural execution bottleneck: the idea-to-launch cycle still depends on human engineers to generate hypotheses, modify production code, launch A/B experiments, and attribute online results. Innovation therefore scales linearly with headcount rather than compounding with evidence, compute, and accumulated experimental knowledge. We present AgentX, a production-deployed multi-agent system that fundamentally restructures this production function. AgentX operates as a self-evolving development engine: it autonomously generates, implements, evaluates, and learns from recommendation experiments at a scale and pace that no manual workflow can sustain. The system orchestrates four tightly coupled stages in a closed loop. A Brainstorm Agent synthesizes evidence from historical experiments, system architecture, data analysis, and external research into ranked, executable proposals. A Developing Agent translates each proposal into production-ready code through repository-grounded generation and multi-dimensional reliability verification. An Evaluation Agent conducts safe online rollout with guardrail-vetoed A/B judgment, converting both successes and failures into structured knowledge assets. A Harness Evolution layer (SGPO) then distills execution trajectories into semantic-gradient updates that continuously sharpen the agents themselves -- making the system not merely automated, but self-improving.

  • 60 authors
·
Jun 24

Heterogeneous Low-Bandwidth Pre-Training of LLMs

Pre-training large language models (LLMs) increasingly requires distributed compute, yet bandwidth constraints make it difficult to scale beyond well-provisioned datacenters-especially when model parallelism forces frequent, large inter-device communications. We study whether SparseLoCo, a low-communication data parallel method based on infrequent synchronization and sparse pseudo-gradient exchange, can be combined with low-bandwidth pipeline model parallelism via activation and activation-gradient compression. We introduce a heterogeneous distributed training framework where some participants host full replicas on high-bandwidth interconnects, while resource-limited participants are grouped to jointly instantiate a replica using pipeline parallelism with subspace-projected inter-stage communication. To make the recently introduced subspace pipeline compression compatible with SparseLoCo, we study a number of adaptations. Across large-scale language modeling experiments (178M-1B parameters) on standard pretraining corpora, we find that activation compression composes with SparseLoCo at modest cost, while selective (heterogeneous) compression consistently improves the loss-communication tradeoff relative to compressing all replicas-especially at aggressive compression ratios. These results suggest a practical path to incorporating low-bandwidth model parallelism and heterogeneous participants into LLM pre-training.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 5

MAServeBench: Benchmarking Multi-Agent LLM Serving Systems with Hierarchical Collaboration Workloads

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) coordinate specialized agents to solve complex tasks, turning each user request into interdependent model and tool operations. Unlike independent requests, these operations become ready at different times and consume evolving context as agents coordinate and exchange results. This creates changing patterns of concurrency, computation, and memory demand that can expose different bottlenecks in LLM serving hardware. Yet benchmarking these effects requires capturing the collaboration rules that generate serving workloads, beyond the requests observed during execution. We present MAServeBench, a benchmark that treats multi-agent collaboration as a configurable dimension of serving workloads for LLM serving and hardware evaluation. Its composable stages capture how agents coordinate and exchange context in documented MAS workflows, enabling native executions to generate different workloads even when task inputs and tools remain unchanged. Hierarchical Semantic Traces preserve realized operations and dependencies for reproducible comparisons of legal release constraints at fixed work. Task-linked measurements connect these workloads to serving execution and GPU/NPU hardware behavior, revealing why serving efficiency does not always translate into timely task completion. The benchmark code is available at https://github.com/ShengxuanQiu/MAServeBench.

Rollplex: Cross-Phase GPU Spatial Sharing for Vision Language Model Post-Training

Vision-language models (VLMs) enable embodied agents to reason and act from visual observations and language instructions. Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training enhances these capabilities using task feedback, but current on-policy RL runtimes execute rollout, reference scoring, and actor training in strict serial phases. While effective for text-only RL, this phase-granular execution is wasteful for VLMs, where processing dense video inputs and prompt prefixes occupies a large fraction of each phase. Because prefix processing is independent of the generated response, it can be run alongside rollout decoding, which leaves GPU compute capacity underutilized, without breaking synchronous on-policy semantics. We present Rollplex, a runtime that decomposes the reference and training phase and moves the prefix computation into the rollout decode window. Realizing this schedule requires more than concurrent kernel launches: naive colocation of Qwen2.5-VL-32\,B requires roughly 165\,GiB per GPU, while rollout and training prefer different tensor-parallel (TP) degrees and weight layouts. Rollplex addresses these constraints with two mechanisms. Phase-aware memory management controls HBM residency according to producer--consumer lifetimes. Parallelism-aware weight sharing uses the same physical storage for layout-compatible tensors across distinct TP degrees and reconstructs only incompatible tensors, avoiding a complete second actor copy. On 32 H800 GPUs, Rollplex achieves 1.23times--1.30times speedup over serial colocation and 1.57times--2.24times over disaggregation under the same GPU budget, while preserving the synchronous RL update.

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 13

Cascadia: A Control-Plane-Free Alternative to Hyperconverged AI Infrastructure

We present Cascadia, a system for serving large language models on fleets of commodity Intel AIPCs using their CPU, integrated-GPU, and NPU resources. Every node embeds ingress, scheduling, and execution; inference requests require no dedicated routing control plane. Nodes join a libp2p QUIC mesh using CA-issued ed25519 admission certificates, gossip signed capabilities, exchange live load over direct peer streams, and route OpenAI-compatible requests to eligible peers. An operator-run certificate authority handles admission and fleet management outside the inference path. Three serving modes share one interface: whole-model execution on one node, load-balanced replicas, and pipeline-sharded chains using the compilation and speculative decoding mechanism of our companion paper. Optional KV-cache mobility reuses compatible conversation prefixes after a routing move, with cold recomputation on a miss. Signed response receipts and hash-chained logs support provenance and audit. A three-node Phi-3.5-mini NPU testbed delivered 3.10x the response throughput of its one-node configuration under ten concurrent requests; a separate four-node deployment recorded 4.06x the throughput of direct single-node serving. Paired latency observations, runtime measurements, and internal functional checks characterize the tested configurations. We compare Cascadia with IBM, Nutanix, VMware, and HPE platforms on deployment footprint, hardware requirements, scheduling, scaling, licensing, and trust, using vendor documentation. The paper repository provides benchmark scripts, curated measurements, and a claim-to-evidence map.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 29

Routine: A Structural Planning Framework for LLM Agent System in Enterprise

The deployment of agent systems in an enterprise environment is often hindered by several challenges: common models lack domain-specific process knowledge, leading to disorganized plans, missing key tools, and poor execution stability. To address this, this paper introduces Routine, a multi-step agent planning framework designed with a clear structure, explicit instructions, and seamless parameter passing to guide the agent's execution module in performing multi-step tool-calling tasks with high stability. In evaluations conducted within a real-world enterprise scenario, Routine significantly increases the execution accuracy in model tool calls, increasing the performance of GPT-4o from 41.1% to 96.3%, and Qwen3-14B from 32.6% to 83.3%. We further constructed a Routine-following training dataset and fine-tuned Qwen3-14B, resulting in an accuracy increase to 88.2% on scenario-specific evaluations, indicating improved adherence to execution plans. In addition, we employed Routine-based distillation to create a scenario-specific, multi-step tool-calling dataset. Fine-tuning on this distilled dataset raised the model's accuracy to 95.5%, approaching GPT-4o's performance. These results highlight Routine's effectiveness in distilling domain-specific tool-usage patterns and enhancing model adaptability to new scenarios. Our experimental results demonstrate that Routine provides a practical and accessible approach to building stable agent workflows, accelerating the deployment and adoption of agent systems in enterprise environments, and advancing the technical vision of AI for Process.

  • 16 authors
·
Jul 18, 2025

Autonomous Data Processing using Meta-Agents

Traditional data processing pipelines are typically static and handcrafted for specific tasks, limiting their adaptability to evolving requirements. While general-purpose agents and coding assistants can generate code for well-understood data pipelines, they lack the ability to autonomously monitor, manage, and optimize an end-to-end pipeline once deployed. We present Autonomous Data Processing using Meta-agents (ADP-MA), a framework that dynamically constructs, executes, and iteratively refines data processing pipelines through hierarchical agent orchestration. At its core, meta-agents analyze input data and task specifications to design a multi-phase plan, instantiate specialized ground-level agents, and continuously evaluate pipeline performance. The architecture comprises three key components: a planning module for strategy generation, an orchestration layer for agent coordination and tool integration, and a monitoring loop for iterative evaluation and backtracking. Unlike conventional approaches, ADP-MA emphasizes context-aware optimization, adaptive workload partitioning, and progressive sampling for scalability. Additionally, the framework leverages a diverse set of external tools and can reuse previously designed agents, reducing redundancy and accelerating pipeline construction. We demonstrate ADP-MA through an interactive demo that showcases pipeline construction, execution monitoring, and adaptive refinement across representative data processing tasks.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 18

A Declarative Language for Building And Orchestrating LLM-Powered Agent Workflows

Building deployment-ready LLM agents requires complex orchestration of tools, data sources, and control flow logic, yet existing systems tightly couple agent logic to specific programming languages and deployment models. We present a declarative system that separates agent workflow specification from implementation, enabling the same pipeline definition to execute across multiple backend languages (Java, Python, Go) and deployment environments (cloud-native, on-premises). Our key insight is that most agent workflows consist of common patterns -- data serialization, filtering, RAG retrieval, API orchestration -- that can be expressed through a unified DSL rather than imperative code. This approach transforms agent development from application programming to configuration, where adding new tools or fine-tuning agent behaviors requires only pipeline specification changes, not code deployment. Our system natively supports A/B testing of agent strategies, allowing multiple pipeline variants to run on the same backend infrastructure with automatic metric collection and comparison. We evaluate our approach on real-world e-commerce workflows at PayPal, processing millions of daily interactions. Our results demonstrate 60% reduction in development time, and 3x improvement in deployment velocity compared to imperative implementations. The language's declarative approach enables non-engineers to modify agent behaviors safely, while maintaining sub-100ms orchestration overhead. We show that complex workflows involving product search, personalization, and cart management can be expressed in under 50 lines of DSL compared to 500+ lines of imperative code.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 21, 2025

Challenging the Need for Packet Spraying in Large-Scale Distributed Training

Large-scale distributed training in production datacenters constitutes a challenging workload bottlenecked by network communication. In response, both major industry players (e.g., Ultra Ethernet Consortium) and parts of academia have surprisingly, and almost unanimously, agreed that packet spraying is necessary to improve the performance of large-scale distributed training workloads. In this paper, we challenge this prevailing belief and pose the question: How close can a singlepath transport approach an optimal multipath transport? We demonstrate that singlepath transport (from a NIC's perspective) is sufficient and can perform nearly as well as an ideal multipath transport with packet spraying, particularly in the context of distributed training in leaf-spine topologies. Our assertion is based on four key observations about workloads driven by collective communication patterns: (i) flows within a collective start almost simultaneously, (ii) flow sizes are nearly equal, (iii) the completion time of a collective is more crucial than individual flow completion times, and (iv) flows can be split upon arrival. We analytically prove that singlepath transport, using minimal flow splitting (at the application layer), is equivalent to an ideal multipath transport with packet spraying in terms of maximum congestion. Our preliminary evaluations support our claims. This paper suggests an alternative agenda for developing next-generation transport protocols tailored for large-scale distributed training.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 29, 2024

Architecting for Hardware Diversity: Meta's End-to-End Co-Design for High-Performance AI Training on AMD GPUs

Meta deploys a heterogeneous fleet comprising NVIDIA GPUs, AMD GPUs, and proprietary MTIA accelerators to reduce costs and mitigate vendor lock-in. However, the extensive history of NVIDIA-specific optimizations hinders performance portability to other hardware. This paper presents our methods for optimizing alternative accelerators, using AMD Instinct MI350X versus NVIDIA B200 for recommendation model training as a case study. We propose three reusable principles. First, hardware-model co-design is essential: rather than directly porting models from NVIDIA GPUs, revising model structures and software recipes allows full exploitation of accelerator-specific strengths (e.g., MI350X's 1.6x HBM capacity relative to B200). Second, our analytical performance model enables zero-warmup optimal kernel selection across diverse datatypes and matrix shapes in production models, drastically simplifying tuning. Third, increasingly mature agentic workflows have lowered the barrier to porting from the CUDA ecosystem; we extend these workflows for microarchitecture-aware kernel optimizations and custom shim generation. Compared to the directly ported baseline, these methods deliver up to 1.5x improvement in end-to-end training throughput. To our knowledge, this is the first hyperscaler report on productionizing AMD GPUs for large-scale training. Our contributions have been upstreamed to the open-source PyTorch, Triton, and ROCm ecosystems.

  • 58 authors
·
Oct 14

Agensh: Scaling Organizational Intelligence to 1,024 Agents

A multi-agent system can reduce latency on complex tasks by executing work concurrently. Several pioneering harness frameworks support multi-agent systems. However, the scalability of current multi-agent harnesses is often constrained by a central orchestrator's capacity to allocate tasks and coordinate workers. To address this limitation, we introduce Agensh, a scalable self-organized multi-agent harness without a central orchestrator: concurrent workers execute a multi-agent cooperation loop, continuously gathering context, claiming and self-assigning sub-tasks, taking action and sharing findings, verifying results, and merging progress in an asynchronous manner. The loop is supported by the agentic organization infrastructure comprising three components: a shared workspace holds proposed, ongoing, and completed work; a message interface lets workers communicate; and shared context retains reusable findings and work intentions. To test the scalability of Agensh, we evaluate it on the five hardest ProgramBench tasks with GPT-5.6-sol (high). Scaling from 1 to 128 agents raises the mean final test-pass rate from 19.31% to 28.78%, an approximately 49% relative improvement. Larger organizations reach comparable test-pass rates earlier. On pandoc, scaling from 1 to 1,024 agents raises the final test-pass rate from 33.89% to 55.06%. Worker trajectories further show that different forms of self-organized cooperation gradually emerges and standardizes as the organization grows. These results reveal the number of agents as a new scaling dimension for multi-agent organizations to expand the frontier of general intelligence, offering a practical solution for complex tasks under hard latency constraints or time budgets.

Diagnose, Localize, Align: A Full-Stack Framework for Reliable LLM Multi-Agent Systems under Instruction Conflicts

Large Language Model (LLM)-powered multi-agent systems (MAS) have rapidly advanced collaborative reasoning, tool use, and role-specialized coordination in complex tasks. However, reliability-critical deployment remains hindered by a systemic failure mode: hierarchical compliance under instruction conflicts (system-user, peer-peer), where agents misprioritize system-level rules in the presence of competing demands. Moreover, widely used macro-level metrics (e.g., pass@k) obscure these micro-level violations and offer little actionable guidance for remedy. In this work, we present a full-stack, three-stage framework: (1) Diagnose - Contextualized Role Adherence Score (CRAS), a query-wise, context-aware scoring metric that decomposes role adherence into four measurable dimensions; (2) Localize - attention drift analysis revealing that instruction conflicts are resolved by attention heads that are largely concentrated in middle layers; (3) Align - Surgical Alignment of Instruction Layers (SAIL), which installs LoRA only on the localized focal layers and optimizes a token-weighted DPO-style preference objective that credits tokens by their focal attentional contribution. Across standard benchmarks and MAS frameworks, our surgical approach improves instruction hierarchy compliance (e.g., +5.60% with AutoGen on MedQA) without full-model finetuning.

  • 13 authors
·
Sep 27, 2025

Breaking the Bubble: Asynchronous Pipeline Parallel Training with Bounded Weight Inconsistency

Pipeline parallelism is essential for training large neural networks, but existing schedules trade off throughput, memory, and optimization consistency. Synchronous pipelines preserve forward/backward weight consistency but suffer from bubbles; asynchronous pipelines remove bubbles but introduce weight-version mismatch, typically requiring weight stashing, prediction, or correction mechanisms. We introduce PACI (Pipeline Asynchronous training with Controlled Inconsistency), a bubble-free asynchronous pipeline method that bounds forward/backward version drift without weight stashing, prediction, additional parameter copies, or global synchronization. The key idea is to use local gradient accumulation as a version-control mechanism: by slowing parameter-version evolution relative to pipeline delay, PACI limits the number of optimizer updates crossed by any micro-batch while preserving steady-state utilization. In GPT-style language-model pretraining, PACI matches the stability and final perplexity of synchronous 1F1B-flush, retains the same peak memory footprint, achieves fully utilized pipeline throughput, and improves training time-to-accuracy by up to 1.69times over the fastest flush baseline. These results show that forward/backward inconsistency need not be eliminated: when explicitly bounded, it can be safely traded for substantial efficiency gains.

DeepSpeed-FastGen: High-throughput Text Generation for LLMs via MII and DeepSpeed-Inference

The deployment and scaling of large language models (LLMs) have become critical as they permeate various applications, demanding high-throughput and low-latency serving systems. Existing frameworks struggle to balance these requirements, especially for workloads with long prompts. This paper introduces DeepSpeed-FastGen, a system that employs Dynamic SplitFuse, a novel prompt and generation composition strategy, to deliver up to 2.3x higher effective throughput, 2x lower latency on average, and up to 3.7x lower (token-level) tail latency, compared to state-of-the-art systems like vLLM. We leverage a synergistic combination of DeepSpeed-MII and DeepSpeed-Inference to provide an efficient and easy-to-use serving system for LLMs. DeepSpeed-FastGen's advanced implementation supports a range of models and offers both non-persistent and persistent deployment options, catering to diverse user scenarios from interactive sessions to long-running applications. We present a detailed benchmarking methodology, analyze the performance through latency-throughput curves, and investigate scalability via load balancing. Our evaluations demonstrate substantial improvements in throughput and latency across various models and hardware configurations. We discuss our roadmap for future enhancements, including broader model support and new hardware backends. The DeepSpeed-FastGen code is readily available for community engagement and contribution.

  • 11 authors
·
Jan 9, 2024 2

Learning to Share: Selective Memory for Efficient Parallel Agentic Systems

Agentic systems solve complex tasks by coordinating multiple agents that iteratively reason, invoke tools, and exchange intermediate results. To improve robustness and solution quality, recent approaches deploy multiple agent teams running in parallel to explore diverse reasoning trajectories. However, parallel execution comes at a significant computational cost: when different teams independently reason about similar sub-problems or execute analogous steps, they repeatedly perform substantial overlapping computation. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose Learning to Share (LTS), a learned shared-memory mechanism for parallel agentic frameworks that enables selective cross-team information reuse while controlling context growth. LTS introduces a global memory bank accessible to all teams and a lightweight controller that decides whether intermediate agent steps should be added to memory or not. The controller is trained using stepwise reinforcement learning with usage-aware credit assignment, allowing it to identify information that is globally useful across parallel executions. Experiments on the AssistantBench and GAIA benchmarks show that LTS significantly reduces overall runtime while matching or improving task performance compared to memory-free parallel baselines, demonstrating that learned memory admission is an effective strategy for improving the efficiency of parallel agentic systems. Project page: https://joefioresi718.github.io/LTS_webpage/

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 5

KAT-Coder Technical Report

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled progress in agentic coding, where models autonomously reason, plan, and act within interactive software development workflows. However, bridging the gap between static text-based training and dynamic real-world agentic execution remains a core challenge. In this technical report, we present KAT-Coder, a large-scale agentic code model trained through a multi-stage curriculum encompassing Mid-Term Training, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT), and Reinforcement-to-Deployment Adaptation. The Mid-Term stage enhances reasoning, planning, and reflection capabilities through a corpus of real software engineering data and synthetic agentic interactions. The SFT stage constructs a million-sample dataset balancing twenty programming languages, ten development contexts, and ten task archetypes. The RFT stage introduces a novel multi-ground-truth reward formulation for stable and sample-efficient policy optimization. Finally, the Reinforcement-to-Deployment phase adapts the model to production-grade IDE environments using Error-Masked SFT and Tree-Structured Trajectory Training. In summary, these stages enable KAT-Coder to achieve robust tool-use reliability, instruction alignment, and long-context reasoning, forming a deployable foundation for real-world intelligent coding agents. Our KAT series 32B model, KAT-Dev, has been open-sourced on https://huggingface.co/Kwaipilot/KAT-Dev.

  • 40 authors
·
Oct 21, 2025

FlashRT: Agent Harness for Guiding Agents to Deploy Real-Time Multimodal Applications

Real-time multimodal applications, including voice agents and interactive video generation, compose heterogeneous models into pipelines whose efficient deployment requires application-specific decisions about placement, streaming, and intra-model parallelism. Existing serving systems and auto-parallelism compilers commit to limited transformations and fixed workload assumptions, so achieving high performance on a new application requires hand-crafting an efficient implementation. We present FlashRT, an agent harness that guides coding agents to lift simple developer-written reference implementations into optimized multi-GPU deployments that flexibly weigh target metrics like latency and throughput. Using a new chain-of-program paradigm, FlashRT directs a generic coding agent through a multi-pass transformation process where an agent transforms the reference into an intermediate representation (IR) to capture data dependencies and persistent-state scopes, validates this IR via a sequential interpreter, and performs static analyses to identify candidate transformations. Then, the agent iteratively implements, verifies, and benchmarks each candidate under a measurement-gated optimization loop to produce effective deployments that span different hardware budgets. Across various applications, including video world models and multimodal LLMs, FlashRT converts reference implementations into highly efficient deployments, delivering up to ~70x latency reduction and 2.8x throughput improvement on NVIDIA B200 GPUs. On AMD MI355X GPUs, FlashRT matches the peak latency reduction while increasing peak throughput improvement to 3.6x, demonstrating that agent-driven optimization can be more scalable on platforms with less mature expert optimization. In fact, for Qwen3-Omni text-to-audio inference, FlashRT reduces response latency by 65% compared to the expert vLLM-Omni implementation on AMD MI355X.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 19 2

Online Draft Co-Training for Speculative Decoding in Large-Scale, Long-Context RL Post-Training

Speculative decoding accelerates rollout generation, which dominates the cost of reinforcement learning (RL) post-training. Online co-training keeps the draft aligned with the evolving policy, further increasing acceptance length and speedup. However, training large models on long contexts requires context parallelism (CP) and pipeline parallelism (PP), and co-training drafts under this layout poses two obstacles: (1) the draft's branch attention is unsupported by causal CP, and (2) the target features that the draft consumes are spread across PP stages. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of online draft co-training in NeMo-RL. For CP, we extend packed, load-balanced zigzag ring attention by merging rank-local branch attention with causal main-sequence attention. For PP, TapChannel transports intermediate target features across stages via a separate path, leaving the pipeline schedule unaffected. Experiments show that co-training keeps the policy's reward and accuracy close to the no-draft baseline while delivering 1.48--2.25times rollout speedups and 1.19--1.88times end-to-end training speedups across model scales up to 122B. Our CP design achieves strong scaling at 256K sequence length with significant memory savings over prior work, and our PP transport incurs modest overhead. Code can be found at https://github.com/NVIDIA-NeMo/RL/issues/3698.

nvidia NVIDIA
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Nov 2 2

Replay the Curvature: Accurate and Scalable NVFP4 Quantization for Large Language Model Inference

Large language models make weight storage and memory traffic major inference costs, motivating low-precision formats that represent each weight with only a few bits. Such formats use a scale to map floating-point values into a small codebook; NVFP4 improves local range utilization by letting every 16 E2M1 weights share an E4M3 block scale. Choosing that scale is difficult in GPTQ because quantizing one column updates those that follow, so evaluating a block independently can misestimate its final reconstruction error. Large models pose a second challenge: full-precision weights, calibration activations, and second-order state cannot all remain on one accelerator, while assigning complete layers to devices leaves each time-consuming layer solve serial. We introduce Schur Replay, a scale-selection algorithm that reproduces the GPTQ updates caused by each block scale and scores the resulting block error after accounting for compensation from unquantized columns. Separately, our execution infrastructure keeps only the active layer resident, tiers activations across device, host, and disk, retires full-precision layers after export, and distributes independent output rows across tensor-parallel ranks. Together, the algorithm and infrastructure attain 99.35% and 100.84% question-weighted recovery from BF16 across seven benchmarks on Qwen3.5-397B-A17B and Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct. On the 397B model, the infrastructure reduces measured per-layer time by 15.17times over ModelOpt and 23.14times over LLM Compressor, with lower memory used per GPU.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 28

StepX-OPD: Rethinking Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation in Diffusion Models

A deployable text-to-image diffusion model must hold several capabilities at once, such as instruction following, text rendering and human preference, and must sample in a few steps. Capabilities and few-step sampling are built in separate stages: a full-step model first consolidates capabilities through multi-teacher on-policy distillation, then serves as a fixed teacher for step distillation. Every full-step model we evaluate scores lower once compressed, and the second stage cannot begin until the first finishes. We introduce StepX-OPD, which merges the two stages: one student acquires every capability while learning to sample in a few steps, so frozen specialists supervise it on the states its own rollout visits rather than on a longer trajectory it never runs. Because a decomposition of the rollout's KL weights velocity mismatch most heavily near the clean end, we also regress the student's velocity on the low-noise part of the rollout. Separately, we find that capability integration makes models write prompt words into images on prompts that never asked for text, and we give a variant that lowers it. We evaluate on SD3.5-Medium and FLUX.1-dev across instruction following, text rendering, image quality and human preference. On both architectures, StepX-OPD attains the highest normalized average score among the four-step methods compared and exceeds the forty-step Flow-OPD model, and on SD3.5-Medium it trains with about 37% fewer GPU-hours than sequential DiffusionOPD followed by step distillation.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 2

A Survey on Inference Optimization Techniques for Mixture of Experts Models

The emergence of large-scale Mixture of Experts (MoE) models has marked a significant advancement in artificial intelligence, offering enhanced model capacity and computational efficiency through conditional computation. However, the deployment and inference of these models present substantial challenges in terms of computational resources, latency, and energy efficiency. This comprehensive survey systematically analyzes the current landscape of inference optimization techniques for MoE models across the entire system stack. We first establish a taxonomical framework that categorizes optimization approaches into model-level, system-level, and hardware-level optimizations. At the model level, we examine architectural innovations including efficient expert design, attention mechanisms, various compression techniques such as pruning, quantization, and knowledge distillation, as well as algorithm improvement including dynamic routing strategies and expert merging methods. At the system level, we investigate distributed computing approaches, load balancing mechanisms, and efficient scheduling algorithms that enable scalable deployment. Furthermore, we delve into hardware-specific optimizations and co-design strategies that maximize throughput and energy efficiency. This survey not only provides a structured overview of existing solutions but also identifies key challenges and promising research directions in MoE inference optimization. Our comprehensive analysis serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working on large-scale deployment of MoE models in resource-constrained environments. To facilitate ongoing updates and the sharing of cutting-edge advances in MoE inference optimization research, we have established a repository accessible at https://github.com/MoE-Inf/awesome-moe-inference/.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 18, 2024

On Time, Within Budget: Constraint-Driven Online Resource Allocation for Agentic Workflows

Agentic systems increasingly solve complex user requests by executing orchestrated workflows, where subtasks are assigned to specialized models or tools and coordinated according to their dependencies. While recent work improves agent efficiency by optimizing the performance--cost--latency frontier, real deployments often impose concrete requirements: a workflow must be completed within a specified budget and before a specified deadline. This shifts the goal from average efficiency optimization to maximizing the probability that the entire workflow completes successfully under explicit budget and deadline constraints. We study constraint-driven online resource allocation for agentic workflows. Given a dependency-structured workflow and estimates of success rates and generation lengths for each subtask--model pair, the executor allocates models and parallel samples across simultaneously executable subtasks while managing the remaining budget and time. We formulate this setting as a finite-horizon stochastic online allocation problem and propose Monte Carlo Portfolio Planning (MCPP), a lightweight closed-loop planner that directly estimates constrained completion probability through simulated workflow executions and replans after observed outcomes. Experiments on CodeFlow and ProofFlow demonstrate that MCPP consistently improves constrained completion probability over strong baselines across a wide range of budget--deadline constraints.

Efficient Training on Multiple Consumer GPUs with RoundPipe

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on consumer-grade GPUs is highly cost-effective, yet constrained by limited GPU memory and slow PCIe interconnects. Pipeline parallelism combined with CPU offloading mitigates these hardware bottlenecks by reducing communication overhead. However, existing PP schedules suffer from an inherent limitation termed the weight binding issue. Binding uneven model stages (e.g., the LM head is large) to GPUs limits the pipeline's throughput to that of the GPU with the heaviest load, leading to severe pipeline bubbles. In this paper, we propose RoundPipe, a novel pipeline schedule that breaks the weight binding constraint on consumer GPU servers. RoundPipe treats GPUs as a pool of stateless execution workers and dynamically dispatches computation stages across devices in a round-robin manner, achieving a near-zero-bubble pipeline. To ensure training correctness and system efficiency, RoundPipe integrates a priority-aware transfer scheduling engine, a fine-grained distributed event-based synchronization protocol, and an automated layer partitioning algorithm. Evaluations on an 8times RTX 4090 server demonstrate that RoundPipe achieves 1.48--2.16times speedups over state-of-the-art baselines when fine-tuning 1.7B to 32B models. Remarkably, RoundPipe enables LoRA fine-tuning of the Qwen3-235B model with 31K sequence length on a single server. RoundPipe is publicly available as an open-source Python library with comprehensive documentation.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 28 3

SCALE: Selective Resource Allocation for Overcoming Performance Bottlenecks in Mathematical Test-time Scaling

Test-time compute scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing mathematical reasoning in large language models (LLMs) by allocating additional computational resources during inference. However, current methods employ uniform resource distribution across all reasoning sub-problems, creating fundamental bottlenecks where challenging sub-problems receive insufficient attention while routine operations consume disproportionate resources. This uniform allocation creates performance bottlenecks where additional computational resources yield diminishing returns. Inspired by dual-process theory, we propose SCALE (Selective Resource Allocation), a framework that selectively allocates computational resources based on sub-problem difficulty. SCALE operates through four stages: (1) problem decomposition into sequential reasoning sub-problems, (2) difficulty assessment of each sub-problem to distinguish between routine operations and computationally challenging sub-problems, (3) selective processing mode assignment between System 1 for simple sub-problems and System 2 for complex ones, and (4) sequential execution with context propagation. By concentrating resources on challenging sub-problems while processing routine operations efficiently, SCALE achieves substantial performance improvements with superior resource utilization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCALE significantly outperforms uniform scaling baselines, achieving accuracy improvements of up to 13.75 percentage points (57.50% to 71.25% on AIME25) while reducing computational costs by 33%-53%, representing a major advance in test-time scaling that addresses fundamental limitations of current approaches.

ParEVO: Synthesizing Code for Irregular Data: High-Performance Parallelism through Agentic Evolution

The transition from sequential to parallel computing is essential for modern high-performance applications but is hindered by the steep learning curve of concurrent programming. This challenge is magnified for irregular data structures (such as sparse graphs, unbalanced trees, and non-uniform meshes) where static scheduling fails and data dependencies are unpredictable. Current Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail catastrophically on these tasks, generating code plagued by subtle race conditions, deadlocks, and sub-optimal scaling. We bridge this gap with ParEVO, a framework designed to synthesize high-performance parallel algorithms for irregular data. Our contributions include: (1) The Parlay-Instruct Corpus, a curated dataset of 13,820 tasks synthesized via a "Critic-Refine" pipeline that explicitly filters for empirically performant algorithms that effectively utilize Work-Span parallel primitives; (2) specialized DeepSeek, Qwen, and Gemini models fine-tuned to align probabilistic generation with the rigorous semantics of the ParlayLib library; and (3) an Evolutionary Coding Agent (ECA) that improves the "last mile" of correctness by iteratively repairing code using feedback from compilers, dynamic race detectors, and performance profilers. On the ParEval benchmark, ParEVO achieves an average 106x speedup (with a maximum of 1103x) across the suite, and a robust 13.6x speedup specifically on complex irregular graph problems, outperforming state-of-the-art commercial models. Furthermore, our evolutionary approach matches state-of-the-art expert human baselines, achieving up to a 4.1x speedup on specific highly-irregular kernels. Source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/WildAlg/ParEVO.

ElasWave: An Elastic-Native System for Scalable Hybrid-Parallel Training

Large-scale LLM pretraining now runs across 10^5--10^6 accelerators, making failures routine and elasticity mandatory. We posit that an elastic-native training system must jointly deliver (i) parameter consistency, (ii) low mean time to recovery (MTTR), (iii) high post-change throughput, and (iv) computation consistency. No prior system achieves all four simultaneously. To achieve these goals, we present ElasWave, which delivers per-step fault tolerance via multi-dimensional scheduling across graph, dataflow, DVFS, and RNG. ElasWave reshapes and reshards micro-batches while preserving the global batch size and gradient scale. It performs online pipeline resharding with asynchronous parameter migration and interleaves ZeRO partitions, reducing parameter recovery processes to disjoint rank-to-rank transfers. It further leverages DVFS to absorb pipeline bubbles and reshards RNG to keep computation consistency. Together, a dynamic communicator enables in-place communication group edits, while per-step in-memory snapshots support online verification and redistribution. We evaluate ElasWave on 96 NPUs and benchmark it against state-of-the-art baselines: throughput improves by 1.35times over ReCycle and 1.60times over TorchFT; communicator recovery completes within one second (up to 82times/3.6times faster than full/partial rebuilds); migration MTTR drops by as much as 51%; and convergence deviation is reduced by approximately 78%.

  • 19 authors
·
Oct 1, 2025

RouteBalance: Fused Model Routing and Load Balancing for Heterogeneous LLM Serving

Heterogeneous LLM serving stacks split scheduling into two layers that optimize in isolation: model routers pick a model from quality and cost signals while ignoring instance load, and serving load balancers optimize queues while ignoring quality. We present RouteBalance, a serving-aware scheduling layer that fuses both into a single online assignment over concrete model instances, jointly trading off quality, latency, and cost. A batched in-process predictor stack and dead-reckoned instance state keep the joint decision cheap on the request hot path (approx32 ms at 12 req/s). On a 13-instance, 28-GPU heterogeneous cluster serving four model sizes, a single deployed RouteBalance stack traces the upper region of the three-way quality-cost-throughput frontier. Sweeping one weight vector reaches both the highest routing-decision quality (DeepEval 0.419, +0.013 over the strongest baseline, 95% CI [{+}0.005,{+}0.022]; the ordering holds when a second judge re-scores the actually served text) and, at its cost-priority corner, per-request cost that ties the cheapest baseline. With router engineering equalized against concurrent-scoring baseline variants we build, its balanced preset serves at 2.8 s and 30 req/s, leading 2.6 to 4.1times ahead of enhanced BEST-Route at high load. (Deploying those routers as published, one serial scoring call per request, makes them collapse 23times under load, a deployment-architecture effect we isolate separately, not the routing result.) A four-arm isolation shows the benefit follows from pricing latency at model-selection time; the learned predictors contribute calibration and SLO headroom rather than the headline frontier. Code: https://github.com/AKafakA/route-balance

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 15

AdaptOrch: Task-Adaptive Multi-Agent Orchestration in the Era of LLM Performance Convergence

As large language models from diverse providers converge toward comparable benchmark performance, the traditional paradigm of selecting a single best model per task yields diminishing returns. We argue that orchestration topology -- the structural composition of how multiple agents are coordinated, parallelized, and synthesized -- now dominates system-level performance over individual model capability. We present AdaptOrch, a formal framework for task-adaptive multi-agent orchestration that dynamically selects among four canonical topologies (parallel, sequential, hierarchical, and hybrid) based on task dependency graphs and empirically derived domain characteristics. Our framework introduces three key contributions: (1) a Performance Convergence Scaling Law, formalizing conditions under which orchestration selection outweighs model selection; (2) a Topology Routing Algorithm that maps task decomposition DAGs to optimal orchestration patterns in O(|V| + |E|) time; and (3) an Adaptive Synthesis Protocol with provable termination guarantees and heuristic consistency scoring for parallel agent outputs. We validate AdaptOrch across coding (SWE-bench), reasoning (GPQA), and retrieval-augmented generation tasks, demonstrating that topology-aware orchestration achieves 12-23% improvement over static single-topology baselines, even when using identical underlying models. Our results establish orchestration design as a first-class optimization target independent of model scaling.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 18 1

Sol Video Inference Engine: Agent-Native Full-Stack Acceleration Framework for Efficient Video Generation

Modern video diffusion models achieve higher generation quality through scaling, but this also increases inference cost. Although many acceleration methods have been proposed, a central challenge is that the most effective acceleration strategy is highly instance-specific: a recipe that works well for one combination of model, hardware, and inference configuration often does not transfer to another. Different models vary in architecture, numerical sensitivity, and attention concentration patterns. Inference settings differ in spatial and temporal resolution and video duration, while hardware platforms differ in memory hierarchy, supported numerical formats, and kernel throughput. These factors create a large tuning space, making manual performance engineering costly. We present Sol Video Inference Engine, an agentic, native, training-free acceleration framework for video diffusion models. It organizes five broadly applicable techniques, cache, sparse attention, token pruning, quantization, and kernel fusion, into an agentic acceleration stack for instance-specific optimization. For a concrete deployment target defined by a model, hardware platform, and serving configuration, parallel skill agents optimize the implementation of each technique, an agent integrator composes them into a global acceleration stack, and a human validator provides feedback on generation quality. We instantiate this workflow on three video models with different sizes and architectures: 64B Cosmos3-Super, 22B LTX-2.3, and 2B SANA-Video. With little human effort, the full stack achieves more than 2x end-to-end acceleration while maintaining near-lossless VBench quality, demonstrating the effectiveness of the agent framework for video diffusion acceleration.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 23

LLMServingSim 2.0: A Unified Simulator for Heterogeneous and Disaggregated LLM Serving Infrastructure

Large language model (LLM) serving infrastructures are undergoing a shift toward heterogeneity and disaggregation. Modern deployments increasingly integrate diverse accelerators and near-memory processing technologies, introducing significant hardware heterogeneity, while system software increasingly separates computation, memory, and model components across distributed resources to improve scalability and efficiency. As a result, LLM serving performance is no longer determined by hardware or software choices in isolation, but by their runtime interaction through scheduling, data movement, and interconnect behavior. However, understanding these interactions remains challenging, as existing simulators lack the ability to jointly model heterogeneous hardware and disaggregated serving techniques within a unified, runtime-driven framework. This paper presents LLMServingSim 2.0, a unified system-level simulator designed to make runtime-driven hardware-software interactions in heterogeneous and disaggregated LLM serving infrastructures explicit and analyzable. LLMServingSim 2.0 embeds serving decisions and hardware behavior into a single runtime loop, enabling interaction-aware modeling of batching, routing, offloading, memory, and power. The simulator supports extensible integration of emerging accelerators and memory systems through profile-based modeling, while capturing dynamic serving behavior and system-level effects. We validate LLMServingSim 2.0 against real deployments, showing that it reproduces key performance, memory, and power metrics with an average error of 0.95%, while maintaining simulation times of around 10 minutes even for complex configurations. These results demonstrate that LLMServingSim 2.0 provides a practical bridge between hardware innovation and serving-system design, enabling systematic exploration and co-design for next-generation LLM serving infrastructures.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 26

AI-based Resource Allocation: Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Auto-scaling in Serverless Environments

Serverless computing has emerged as a compelling new paradigm of cloud computing models in recent years. It promises the user services at large scale and low cost while eliminating the need for infrastructure management. On cloud provider side, flexible resource management is required to meet fluctuating demand. It can be enabled through automated provisioning and deprovisioning of resources. A common approach among both commercial and open source serverless computing platforms is workload-based auto-scaling, where a designated algorithm scales instances according to the number of incoming requests. In the recently evolving serverless framework Knative a request-based policy is proposed, where the algorithm scales resources by a configured maximum number of requests that can be processed in parallel per instance, the so-called concurrency. As we show in a baseline experiment, this predefined concurrency level can strongly influence the performance of a serverless application. However, identifying the concurrency configuration that yields the highest possible quality of service is a challenging task due to various factors, e.g. varying workload and complex infrastructure characteristics, influencing throughput and latency. While there has been considerable research into intelligent techniques for optimizing auto-scaling for virtual machine provisioning, this topic has not yet been discussed in the area of serverless computing. For this reason, we investigate the applicability of a reinforcement learning approach, which has been proven on dynamic virtual machine provisioning, to request-based auto-scaling in a serverless framework. Our results show that within a limited number of iterations our proposed model learns an effective scaling policy per workload, improving the performance compared to the default auto-scaling configuration.

  • 3 authors
·
May 28, 2020

Efficient and Scalable Agentic AI with Heterogeneous Systems

AI agents are emerging as a dominant workload in a wide range of applications, promising to be the vehicle that delivers the promised benefits of AI to enterprises and consumers. Unlike conventional software or static inference, agentic workloads are dynamic and structurally complex. Often these agents are directed graphs of compute and IO operations that span multi-modal data input and conversion), data processing and context gathering (e.g vector DB lookups), multiple LLM inferences, tool calls, etc. To scale AI agent usage, we need efficient and scalable deployment and agent-serving infrastructure. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we present a system design for dynamic orchestration of AI agent workloads on heterogeneous compute infrastructure spanning CPUs and accelerators, both from different vendors and across different performance tiers within a single vendor. The system delivers several building blocks: a framework for planning and optimizing agentic AI execution graphs using cost models that account for compute, memory, and bandwidth constraints of different HW; a MLIR based representation and compilation system that can decompose AI agent execution graphs into granular operators and generate code for different HW options; and a dynamic orchestration system that can place the granular components across a heterogeneous compute infrastructure and stitch them together while meeting an end-to-end SLA. Our design performs a systems level TCO optimization and preliminary results show that leveraging a heterogeneous infrastructure can deliver significant TCO benefits. A preliminary surprising finding is that for some workloads a heterogeneous combination of older generation GPUs with newer accelerators can deliver similar TCO as the latest generation homogenous GPU infrastructure design, potentially extending the life of deployed infrastructure.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 25, 2025

ETS: Efficient Tree Search for Inference-Time Scaling

Test-time compute scaling has emerged as a new axis along which to improve model accuracy, where additional computation is used at inference time to allow the model to think longer for more challenging problems. One promising approach for test-time compute scaling is search against a process reward model, where a model generates multiple potential candidates at each step of the search, and these partial trajectories are then scored by a separate reward model in order to guide the search process. The diversity of trajectories in the tree search process affects the accuracy of the search, since increasing diversity promotes more exploration. However, this diversity comes at a cost, as divergent trajectories have less KV sharing, which means they consume more memory and slow down the search process. Previous search methods either do not perform sufficient exploration, or else explore diverse trajectories but have high latency. We address this challenge by proposing Efficient Tree Search (ETS), which promotes KV sharing by pruning redundant trajectories while maintaining necessary diverse trajectories. ETS incorporates a linear programming cost model to promote KV cache sharing by penalizing the number of nodes retained, while incorporating a semantic coverage term into the cost model to ensure that we retain trajectories which are semantically different. We demonstrate how ETS can achieve 1.8times reduction in average KV cache size during the search process, leading to 1.4times increased throughput relative to prior state-of-the-art methods, with minimal accuracy degradation and without requiring any custom kernel implementation. Code is available at: https://github.com/SqueezeAILab/ETS.

  • 10 authors
·
Feb 19, 2025

SLAI T-Rex: Full-Parameter Post-training of the DeepSeek-V4 Family on Ascend SuperPOD

Full-parameter post-training of trillion-parameter-scale MoE models introduces substantial system-level challenges for large-scale distributed training, including severe memory pressure, non-overlapped communication overhead, and inefficient kernel execution. While most large-scale LLM training systems are built around GPU-based clusters, this report presents an end-to-end optimization practice on the Ascend NPU SuperPOD. Using the DeepSeek-V4 model family as the target workload, we develop a hierarchical optimization framework spanning model-level parallelism, computation-communication orchestration, and low-level kernel execution. The resulting system achieves 34.22% Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) with a 2.93x improvement over the open-source baseline recipe while maintaining training stability. Building on this optimized infrastructure, we further establish a CPT and SFT workflow for complex Operations Research (OR) tasks. We refer to the integrated framework as SLAI T-Rex. Using DeepSeek-V4-Flash, we develop OR-oriented CPT and SFT data pipelines that combine collected domain resources with solver-verified synthetic optimization documents. The resulting dataset contains 10K high-quality SFT samples spanning four task categories and three problem representations. The specialized model achieves the highest average zero-shot Pass@1 score among the evaluated models, reaching 71.81% and outperforming GPT-5.4-Mini and the base DeepSeek-V4-Flash model by 3.98 and 11.27 percentage points, respectively. Overall, this work demonstrates a full-stack pathway from efficient trillion-parameter model post-training on Ascend infra to domain-specialized Flash models for solver-grounded mathematical modeling, advancing frontier-model systems for complex reasoning.

  • 65 authors
·
Jul 21 2

SDOF: Taming the Alignment Tax in Multi-Agent Orchestration with State-Constrained Dispatch

Multi-agent orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, and CrewAI route tasks through graph-based pipelines but do not enforce the stage constraints that govern real business processes. We present SDOF, a framework that treats multi-agent execution as a constrained state machine. SDOF operates through two primary defensive layers, implemented by three components: (1) an Online-RLHF Specialized Intent Router trained via Generative Reward Modeling (GRPO) and (2) a StateAwareDispatcher with GoalStage finite-automaton checks and precondition/postcondition SkillRegistry validation for auditable execution control. On a recruitment system backed by the Beisen iTalent platform (6000+ enterprises), 185 expert-curated scenarios trigger 1671 live API calls. Our GSPO-aligned 7B Intent Router achieves higher joint accuracy than zero-shot GPT-4o on this FSM-constrained adversarial routing benchmark (80.9% versus 48.9%). In end-to-end execution, SDOF reaches 86.5% task completion (95% confidence interval 80.8 to 90.7) and blocks all 22 operations in the injection, illegal HR subset. Under a broader message-level blocking audit, SDOF attains precision 100% and recall 88%, expert agreement kappa=0.94. A separate evaluation on 960 SGD-derived dialogues spanning 8 service domains surfaces 201 stage-order conflicts under our FSM mapping, 41 of which arise in the normal split. This arXiv version reports the current validated scope; extended multi-seed training comparisons and deeper workflow evaluations will be released in a subsequent update.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 19

Holmes: Towards Distributed Training Across Clusters with Heterogeneous NIC Environment

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, OPT, and LLaMA have demonstrated remarkable accuracy in a wide range of tasks. However, training these models can incur significant expenses, often requiring tens of thousands of GPUs for months of continuous operation. Typically, this training is carried out in specialized GPU clusters equipped with homogeneous high-speed Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network interface cards (NICs). The acquisition and maintenance of such dedicated clusters is challenging. Current LLM training frameworks, like Megatron-LM and Megatron-DeepSpeed, focus primarily on optimizing training within homogeneous cluster settings. In this paper, we introduce Holmes, a training framework for LLMs that employs thoughtfully crafted data and model parallelism strategies over the heterogeneous NIC environment. Our primary technical contribution lies in a novel scheduling method that intelligently allocates distinct computational tasklets in LLM training to specific groups of GPU devices based on the characteristics of their connected NICs. Furthermore, our proposed framework, utilizing pipeline parallel techniques, demonstrates scalability to multiple GPU clusters, even in scenarios without high-speed interconnects between nodes in distinct clusters. We conducted comprehensive experiments that involved various scenarios in the heterogeneous NIC environment. In most cases, our framework achieves performance levels close to those achievable with homogeneous RDMA-capable networks (InfiniBand or RoCE), significantly exceeding training efficiency within the pure Ethernet environment. Additionally, we verified that our framework outperforms other mainstream LLM frameworks under heterogeneous NIC environment in terms of training efficiency and can be seamlessly integrated with them.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 6, 2023

GraphBit: A Graph-based Agentic Framework for Non-Linear Agent Orchestration

Agentic LLM frameworks that rely on prompted orchestration, where the model itself determines workflow transitions, often suffer from hallucinated routing, infinite loops, and non-reproducible execution. We introduce GraphBit, an engine-orchestrated framework that defines workflows explicitly and deterministically as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Unlike prompted orchestration, agents in GraphBit operate as typed functions, while a Rust-based engine governs routing, state transitions, and tool invocation, ensuring reproducibility and auditability. The engine supports parallel branch execution, conditional control flow over structured state predicates, and configurable error recovery. A three-tier memory architecture consisting of ephemeral scratch space, structured state, and external connectors isolates context across stages, preventing cascading context bloat that degrades reasoning in long-running pipelines. Across GAIA benchmark tasks spanning zero-tool, document-augmented, and web-enabled workflows, GraphBit outperforms six existing frameworks, achieving the highest accuracy (67.6 percent), zero framework-induced hallucinations, the lowest latency (11.9 ms overhead), and the highest throughput. Ablation studies demonstrate that each memory tier contributes measurably to performance, with deterministic execution providing the greatest gains on tool-intensive tasks representative of real-world deployments.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 7

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

Prefill-as-a-Service: KVCache of Next-Generation Models Could Go Cross-Datacenter

Prefill-decode (PD) disaggregation has become the standard architecture for large-scale LLM serving, but in practice its deployment boundary is still determined by KVCache transfer. In conventional dense-attention models, prefill generates huge KVCache traffics that keep prefill and decode tightly coupled within a single high-bandwidth network domain, limiting heterogeneous deployment and resource elasticity. Recent hybrid-attention architectures substantially reduce KVCache size, making cross-cluster KVCache transport increasingly plausible. However, smaller KVCache alone does not make heterogeneous cross-datacenter PD serving practical: real workloads remain bursty, request lengths are highly skewed, prefix caches are unevenly distributed, and inter-cluster bandwidth fluctuates. A naive design that fully externalizes prefill can therefore still suffer from congestion, unstable queueing, and poor utilization. We present Prefill-as-a-Service (PrfaaS), a cross-datacenter serving architecture that selectively offloads long-context prefill to standalone, compute-dense prefill clusters and transfers the resulting KVCache over commodity Ethernet to local PD clusters for decode. Rather than treating reduced KVCache as sufficient, PrfaaS combines model-side KV efficiency with system-side selective offloading, bandwidth-aware scheduling, and cache-aware request placement. This design removes the requirement that heterogeneous accelerators share the same low-latency RDMA fabric, enabling independent scaling of prefill and decode capacity across loosely coupled clusters. In a case study using an internal 1T-parameter hybrid model, a PrfaaS-augmented heterogeneous deployment achieves 54% higher serving throughput and 64% lower P90 TTFT than a homogeneous PD baseline, with approximately 15% throughput gain at equal cost, while consuming only modest cross-datacenter bandwidth.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 21

Hera: Learning Long-Horizon Coordination for Device-Cloud Collaborative LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents excel at solving complex long-horizon tasks through autonomous interaction with environments. However, their real-world deployment faces a fundamental device--cloud dilemma: on-device models are efficient but often brittle, while cloud models are stronger but costly in computation. State-of-the-art LLM device--cloud routers usually make coarse task-level decisions, which cannot adapt to the changing difficulty of multi-step agent interactions. To address this issue, we present Hera, a step-level device--cloud LLM agent coordinator for long-horizon tasks achieving a strong performance--cost Pareto frontier. Hera adopts a novel two-stage training paradigm: (1) imitation learning for cold-start, followed by (2) reinforcement learning that jointly optimizes task success and cloud usage efficiency. The first stage casts step-level routing as a supervised classification problem: the device agent is replayed on cloud trajectories, with each state labeled by the agreement between device and cloud actions. In the second stage, we perform cost-aware reinforcement learning by grouping identical states across trajectories and updating Hera with labels favoring higher expected return and fewer future cloud calls. We evaluate Hera on ALFWorld, WebShop, and AppWorld, where it consistently outperforms prior methods, achieving 92.5% of the cloud-only success rate with cloud use in only 46.3% of steps.

  • 11 authors
·
May 22

P/D-Serve: Serving Disaggregated Large Language Model at Scale

Serving disaggregated large language models (LLMs) over tens of thousands of xPU devices (GPUs or NPUs) with reliable performance faces multiple challenges. 1) Ignoring the diversity (various prefixes and tidal requests), treating all the prompts in a mixed pool is inadequate. To facilitate the similarity per scenario and minimize the inner mismatch on P/D (prefill and decoding) processing, fine-grained organization is required, dynamically adjusting P/D ratios for better performance. 2) Due to inaccurate estimation on workload (queue status or maintained connections), the global scheduler easily incurs unnecessary timeouts in prefill. 3) Block-fixed device-to-device (D2D) KVCache transfer over cluster-level RDMA (remote direct memory access) fails to achieve desired D2D utilization as expected. To overcome previous problems, this paper proposes an end-to-end system P/D-Serve, complying with the paradigm of MLOps (machine learning operations), which models end-to-end (E2E) P/D performance and enables: 1) fine-grained P/D organization, mapping the service with RoCE (RDMA over converged ethernet) as needed, to facilitate similar processing and dynamic adjustments on P/D ratios; 2) on-demand forwarding upon rejections for idle prefill, decoupling the scheduler from regular inaccurate reports and local queues, to avoid timeouts in prefill; and 3) efficient KVCache transfer via optimized D2D access. P/D-Serve is implemented upon Ascend and MindSpore, has been deployed over tens of thousands of NPUs for more than eight months in commercial use, and further achieves 60\%, 42\% and 46\% improvements on E2E throughput, time-to-first-token (TTFT) SLO (service level objective) and D2D transfer time. As the E2E system with optimizations, P/D-Serve achieves 6.7x increase on throughput, compared with aggregated LLMs.

  • 30 authors
·
Aug 15, 2024

Generate, Filter, Control, Replay: A Comprehensive Survey of Rollout Strategies for LLM Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training tool for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). In these systems, the rollout, the trajectory sampled from a prompt to termination, including intermediate reasoning steps and optional tool or environment interactions, determines the data the optimizer learns from, yet rollout design is often underreported. This survey provides an optimizer-agnostic view of rollout strategies for RL-based post-training of reasoning LLMs. We formalize rollout pipelines with unified notation and introduce Generate-Filter-Control-Replay (GFCR), a lifecycle taxonomy that decomposes rollout pipelines into four modular stages: Generate proposes candidate trajectories and topologies; Filter constructs intermediate signals via verifiers, judges, critics; Control allocates compute and makes continuation/branching/stopping decisions under budgets; and Replay retains and reuses artifacts across rollouts without weight updates, including self-evolving curricula that autonomously generate new training tasks. We complement GFCR with a criterion taxonomy of reliability, coverage, and cost sensitivity that characterizes rollout trade-offs. Using this framework, we synthesize methods spanning RL with verifiable rewards, process supervision, judge-based gating, guided and tree/segment rollouts, adaptive compute allocation, early-exit and partial rollouts, throughput optimization, and replay/recomposition for self-improvement. We ground the framework with case studies in math, code/SQL, multimodal reasoning, tool-using agents, and agentic skill benchmarks that evaluate skill induction, reuse, and cross-task transfer. Finally, we provide a diagnostic index that maps common rollout pathologies to GFCR modules and mitigation levers, alongside open challenges for building reproducible, compute-efficient, and trustworthy rollout pipelines.

McAuley-Lab McAuley-Lab
·
Apr 7 3

CodeMonkeys: Scaling Test-Time Compute for Software Engineering

Scaling test-time compute is a promising axis for improving LLM capabilities. However, test-time compute can be scaled in a variety of ways, and effectively combining different approaches remains an active area of research. Here, we explore this problem in the context of solving real-world GitHub issues from the SWE-bench dataset. Our system, named CodeMonkeys, allows models to iteratively edit a codebase by jointly generating and running a testing script alongside their draft edit. We sample many of these multi-turn trajectories for every issue to generate a collection of candidate edits. This approach lets us scale "serial" test-time compute by increasing the number of iterations per trajectory and "parallel" test-time compute by increasing the number of trajectories per problem. With parallel scaling, we can amortize up-front costs across multiple downstream samples, allowing us to identify relevant codebase context using the simple method of letting an LLM read every file. In order to select between candidate edits, we combine voting using model-generated tests with a final multi-turn trajectory dedicated to selection. Overall, CodeMonkeys resolves 57.4% of issues from SWE-bench Verified using a budget of approximately 2300 USD. Our selection method can also be used to combine candidates from different sources. Selecting over an ensemble of edits from existing top SWE-bench Verified submissions obtains a score of 66.2% and outperforms the best member of the ensemble on its own. We fully release our code and data at https://scalingintelligence.stanford.edu/pubs/codemonkeys.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 24, 2025 2

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

AsyncFlow: An Asynchronous Streaming RL Framework for Efficient LLM Post-Training

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a pivotal technology in the post-training phase of large language models (LLMs). Traditional task-colocated RL frameworks suffer from significant scalability bottlenecks, while task-separated RL frameworks face challenges in complex dataflows and the corresponding resource idling and workload imbalance. Moreover, most existing frameworks are tightly coupled with LLM training or inference engines, making it difficult to support custom-designed engines. To address these challenges, we propose AsyncFlow, an asynchronous streaming RL framework for efficient post-training. Specifically, we introduce a distributed data storage and transfer module that provides a unified data management and fine-grained scheduling capability in a fully streamed manner. This architecture inherently facilitates automated pipeline overlapping among RL tasks and dynamic load balancing. Moreover, we propose a producer-consumer-based asynchronous workflow engineered to minimize computational idleness by strategically deferring parameter update process within staleness thresholds. Finally, the core capability of AsynFlow is architecturally decoupled from underlying training and inference engines and encapsulated by service-oriented user interfaces, offering a modular and customizable user experience. Extensive experiments demonstrate an average of 1.59 throughput improvement compared with state-of-the-art baseline. The presented architecture in this work provides actionable insights for next-generation RL training system designs.

  • 19 authors
·
Jul 2, 2025 1

ElasticMoE: An Efficient Auto Scaling Method for Mixture-of-Experts Models

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models promise efficient scaling of large language models (LLMs) by activating only a small subset of experts per token, but their parallelized inference pipelines make elastic serving challenging. Existing strategies fall short: horizontal scaling provisions entire replicas of the current configuration, often tens to hundreds of accelerators, leading to coarse granularity, long provisioning delays, and costly overprovisioning. Vertical scaling offers finer adjustments but typically requires instance restarts, incurring downtime. These limitations make current approaches ill-suited for the bursty, short-lived traffic patterns common in cloud deployments. We present ElasticMoE, an elastic scaling framework for MoE LLMs that achieves fine-grained, low-latency, and zero-downtime scaling. ElasticMoE decouples inference execution from memory operations, enabling scaling steps to proceed concurrently with serving. An HBM Management Module (HMM) reuses weights and KV caches via zero-copy remapping, while high-bandwidth peer-to-peer transfers bring newly added accelerators online without interrupting service. A virtual memory based expert redistribution mechanism migrates MoE experts without costly buffer reallocations, reducing peak memory usage during expert parallelism reconfiguration. Our evaluation on Ascend NPUs with three popular MoE LLMs shows that ElasticMoE achieves up to 9x lower scale-up latency, up to 2x better throughput during scaling, and significantly improves SLO attainment compared to baselines. By enabling fine-grained, concurrent scaling with minimal disruption, ElasticMoE advances the practicality of deploying massive MoE LLMs in dynamic cloud environments.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 2, 2025

A Formal Hierarchical Architecture for Agentic Orchestration with Stack-Based Execution and Lazy Discovery

The rapid expansion of capabilities in Large Language Model (LLM) agents has exposed a critical architectural bottleneck: when agents are given access to a flat, monolithic registry of tools, the model must evaluate hundreds or thousands of options simultaneously. This leads to decision-space explosion, context window saturation, and degraded routing accuracy. To address these limitations, this paper presents a hierarchical, skill-based architecture for agentic orchestration. Capabilities are organized as a rooted tree where internal nodes make routing decisions and leaf nodes execute deterministic tasks. The runtime enforces a single-step execution loop governed by a Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) stack, giving the agent a form of memory akin to a Pushdown Automaton, therefore enabling it to track nested execution contexts and resume deterministically from any depth. Capability discovery follows a manifest-driven, lazy-loading protocol: only the immediate children of the active node are loaded, so memory and prompt costs scale with the explored path rather than the global registry. By replacing global memory with localized stack frames, the architecture prevents outputs from one execution branch from leaking into another, establishing the isolation guarantees required for deployment in regulated enterprise environments. We also discuss UPI Help, an AI-powered digital payments support product, as a motivating production deployment context. We provide a mathematical formalization of the orchestration state, detailed algorithmic analysis of the execution loop, and controlled benchmarks comparing flat and hierarchical routing under increasing tool catalogs, multi-step workflow pressure, and visible schema-token exposure per LLM call.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 12

Balancing Pipeline Parallelism with Vocabulary Parallelism

Pipeline parallelism is widely used to scale the training of transformer-based large language models, various works have been done to improve its throughput and memory footprint. In this paper, we address a frequently overlooked issue: the vocabulary layers can cause imbalanced computation and memory usage across pipeline stages, worsening pipeline bubbles and the memory bottleneck. To tackle this, we partition the vocabulary layers evenly across pipeline devices and group the computation into pipeline passes. To reduce the activation memory overhead, we propose several algorithms to reduce communication barriers within vocabulary layers. Additionally, we utilize a generalizable method to integrate Vocabulary Parallelism with existing pipeline schedules. By combining these techniques, our methods effectively balance the computation and parameter memory, with only a small constant activation memory overhead. Notably, when combined with activation memory-balanced schedules like V-Half, our approach achieves perfect balance in both memory and computation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves computation and memory balance regardless of the vocabulary size, resulting in a 5% to 51% improvement in throughput compared to naive approaches, meanwhile significantly reducing peak memory usage especially for large vocabulary scenarios. Our implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/sail-sg/VocabularyParallelism .

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 7, 2024 3