Daily Papers

Mooncake is the serving platform for Kimi, a leading LLM service provided by Moonshot AI. It features a KVCache-centric disaggregated architecture that separates the prefill and decoding clusters. It also leverages the underutilized CPU, DRAM, and SSD resources of the GPU cluster to implement a disaggregated cache of KVCache. The core of Mooncake is its KVCache-centric scheduler, which balances maximizing overall effective throughput while meeting latency-related Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Unlike traditional studies that assume all requests will be processed, Mooncake faces challenges due to highly overloaded scenarios. To mitigate these, we developed a prediction-based early rejection policy. Experiments show that Mooncake excels in long-context scenarios. Compared to the baseline method, Mooncake can achieve up to a 525% increase in throughput in certain simulated scenarios while adhering to SLOs. Under real workloads, Mooncake's innovative architecture enables Kimi to handle 75% more requests.

Serving Large Language Models (LLMs) is a GPU-intensive task where traditional autoscalers fall short, particularly for modern Prefill-Decode (P/D) disaggregated architectures. This architectural shift, while powerful, introduces significant operational challenges, including inefficient use of heterogeneous hardware, network bottlenecks, and critical imbalances between prefill and decode stages. We introduce HeteroScale, a coordinated autoscaling framework that addresses the core challenges of P/D disaggregated serving. HeteroScale combines a topology-aware scheduler that adapts to heterogeneous hardware and network constraints with a novel metric-driven policy derived from the first large-scale empirical study of autoscaling signals in production. By leveraging a single, robust metric to jointly scale prefill and decode pools, HeteroScale maintains architectural balance while ensuring efficient, adaptive resource management. Deployed in a massive production environment on tens of thousands of GPUs, HeteroScale has proven its effectiveness, increasing average GPU utilization by a significant 26.6 percentage points and saving hundreds of thousands of GPU-hours daily, all while upholding stringent service level objectives.

The performance of multi-turn, agentic LLM inference is increasingly dominated by KV-Cache storage I/O rather than computation. In prevalent disaggregated architectures, loading the massive KV-Cache from external storage creates a fundamental imbalance: storage NICs on prefill engines become bandwidth-saturated, while those on decoding engines remain idle. This asymmetry severely constrains overall system throughput. We present DualPath, an inference system that breaks this bottleneck by introducing dual-path KV-Cache loading. Beyond the traditional storage-to-prefill path, DualPath enables a novel storage-to-decode path, in which the KV-Cache is loaded into decoding engines and then efficiently transferred to prefill engines via RDMA over the compute network. DualPath combines this optimized data path -- which inherently avoids network congestion and avoids interference with latency-critical model execution communications -- with a global scheduler that dynamically balances load across prefill and decode engines. Our evaluation on three models with production agentic workloads demonstrates that DualPath improves offline inference throughput by up to 1.87times on our in-house inference system. It can also improve online serving throughput by an average factor of 1.96times without violating SLO.

The open radio access network (O-RAN), with its disaggregated and open architecture, is poised to meet the demands of the next generation of wireless communication. However, to unlock the full potentials of O-RAN, real-time network modeling and optimization are essential. A promising solution for such requirement is the use of network digital twin (NDT). NDT provides a comprehensive view of a network, covering both physical and logical components, including infrastructure, protocols, and algorithms. NDT, as a real-time virtual representation of O-RAN facilitates a variety of operations, such as emulations, test, optimization, monitoring, and analysis of a new configuration in a risk-free environment, without requiring them to be implemented in real network. Such capability enables the vendors and network operators for a faster adoption of new solutions with frequent updates, while ensuring the resiliency of the existing services via planning ahead under various "what-if" scenarios. In this paper, we first describe what exactly NDT means in the context of O-RAN, as well as its key enablers. We then describe the NDT application within the O-RAN in both prior and post-deployment. Finally, we provide two practical uses cases, namely network energy efficiency and traffic steering, where the NDT can be leveraged effectively.

We study a mismatch between the deep learning recommendation models' flat architecture, common distributed training paradigm and hierarchical data center topology. To address the associated inefficiencies, we propose Disaggregated Multi-Tower (DMT), a modeling technique that consists of (1) Semantic-preserving Tower Transform (SPTT), a novel training paradigm that decomposes the monolithic global embedding lookup process into disjoint towers to exploit data center locality; (2) Tower Module (TM), a synergistic dense component attached to each tower to reduce model complexity and communication volume through hierarchical feature interaction; and (3) Tower Partitioner (TP), a feature partitioner to systematically create towers with meaningful feature interactions and load balanced assignments to preserve model quality and training throughput via learned embeddings. We show that DMT can achieve up to 1.9x speedup compared to the state-of-the-art baselines without losing accuracy across multiple generations of hardware at large data center scales.

Over the past year, the vLLM Semantic Router project has released a series of work spanning: (1) core routing mechanisms -- signal-driven routing, context-length pool routing, router performance engineering, policy conflict detection, low-latency embedding models, category-aware semantic caching, user-feedback-driven routing adaptation, hallucination detection, and hierarchical content-safety classification for privacy and jailbreak protection; (2) fleet optimization -- fleet provisioning and energy-efficiency analysis; (3) agentic and multimodal routing -- multimodal agent routing, tool selection, CUA security, and multi-turn context memory and safety; (4) governance and standards -- inference routing protocols and multi-provider API extensions. Each paper tackled a specific problem in LLM inference, but the problems are not independent; for example, fleet provisioning depends on the routing policy, which depends on the workload mix, shifting as organizations adopt agentic and multimodal workloads. This paper distills those results into the Workload-Router-Pool (WRP) architecture, a three-dimensional framework for LLM inference optimization. Workload characterizes what the fleet serves (chat vs. agent, single-turn vs. multi-turn, warm vs. cold, prefill-heavy vs. decode-heavy). Router determines how each request is dispatched (static semantic rules, online bandit adaptation, RL-based model selection, quality-aware cascading). Pool defines where inference runs (homogeneous vs. heterogeneous GPU, disaggregated prefill/decode, KV-cache topology). We map our prior work onto a 3x3 WRP interaction matrix, identify which cells we have covered and which remain open, and propose twenty-one concrete research directions at the intersections, each grounded in our prior measurements, tiered by maturity from engineering-ready to open research.

This document presents a vision for a novel AI infrastructure design that has been initially validated through inference simulations on state-of-the-art large language models. Advancements in deep learning and specialized hardware have driven the rapid growth of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI systems. However, traditional GPU-centric architectures face scalability challenges for inference workloads due to limitations in memory capacity, bandwidth, and interconnect scaling. To address these issues, the FengHuang Platform, a disaggregated AI infrastructure platform, is proposed to overcome memory and communication scaling limits for AI inference. FengHuang features a multi-tier shared-memory architecture combining high-speed local memory with centralized disaggregated remote memory, enhanced by active tensor paging and near-memory compute for tensor operations. Simulations demonstrate that FengHuang achieves up to 93% local memory capacity reduction, 50% GPU compute savings, and 16x to 70x faster inter-GPU communication compared to conventional GPU scaling. Across workloads such as GPT-3, Grok-1, and QWEN3-235B, FengHuang enables up to 50% GPU reductions while maintaining end-user performance, offering a scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solution for AI inference infrastructure. FengHuang provides an optimal balance as a rack-level AI infrastructure scale-up solution. Its open, heterogeneous design eliminates vendor lock-in and enhances supply chain flexibility, enabling significant infrastructure and power cost reductions.

AI agent inference is driving an inference heavy datacenter future and exposes bottlenecks beyond compute - especially memory capacity, memory bandwidth and high-speed interconnect. We introduce two metrics - Operational Intensity (OI) and Capacity Footprint (CF) - that jointly explain regimes the classic roofline analysis misses, including the memory capacity wall. Across agentic workflows (chat, coding, web use, computer use) and base model choices (GQA/MLA, MoE, quantization), OI/CF can shift dramatically, with long context KV cache making decode highly memory bound. These observations motivate disaggregated serving and system level heterogeneity: specialized prefill and decode accelerators, broader scale up networking, and decoupled compute-memory enabled by optical I/O. We further hypothesize agent-hardware co design, multiple inference accelerators within one system, and high bandwidth, large capacity memory disaggregation as foundations for adaptation to evolving OI/CF. Together, these directions chart a path to sustain efficiency and capability for large scale agentic AI inference.

Existing large language model (LLM) serving systems fall into two categories: 1) a unified system where prefill phase and decode phase are co-located on the same GPU, sharing the unified computational resource and storage, and 2) a disaggregated system where the two phases are disaggregated to different GPUs. The design of the disaggregated system addresses the latency interference and sophisticated scheduling issues in the unified system but leads to storage challenges including 1) replicated weights for both phases that prevent flexible deployment, 2) KV cache transfer overhead between the two phases, 3) storage imbalance that causes substantial wasted space of the GPU capacity, and 4) suboptimal resource adjustment arising from the difficulties in migrating KV cache. Such storage inefficiency delivers poor serving performance under high request rates. In this paper, we identify that the advantage of the disaggregated system lies in the disaggregated computation, i.e., partitioning the computational resource to enable the asynchronous computation of two phases. Thus, we propose a novel LLM serving system, semi-PD, characterized by disaggregated computation and unified storage. In semi-PD, we introduce a computation resource controller to achieve disaggregated computation at the streaming multi-processor (SM) level, and a unified memory manager to manage the asynchronous memory access from both phases. semi-PD has a low-overhead resource adjustment mechanism between the two phases, and a service-level objective (SLO) aware dynamic partitioning algorithm to optimize the SLO attainment. Compared to state-of-the-art systems, semi-PD maintains lower latency at higher request rates, reducing the average end-to-end latency per request by 1.27-2.58x on DeepSeek series models, and serves 1.55-1.72x more requests adhering to latency constraints on Llama series models.

Large language model (LLM) serving has transformed from stateless to stateful systems, utilizing techniques like context caching and disaggregated inference. These optimizations extend the lifespan and domain of the KV cache, necessitating a new architectural approach. We present MemServe, a unified system that integrates both inter-request and intra-request optimizations. MemServe introduces MemPool, an elastic memory pool managing distributed memory and KV caches across serving instances. Using MemPool APIs, MemServe combines context caching with disaggregated inference for the first time, supported by a global scheduler that enhances cache reuse through a global prompt tree-based locality-aware policy. Tests show that MemServe significantly improves job completion time and time-to-first-time.

Industrial Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is limited by the scarcity of high-quality datasets and the complex variability of industrial energy consumption patterns. To address data scarcity and privacy issues, we introduce the Synthetic Industrial Dataset for Energy Disaggregation (SIDED), an open-source dataset generated using Digital Twin simulations. SIDED includes three types of industrial facilities across three different geographic locations, capturing diverse appliance behaviors, weather conditions, and load profiles. We also propose the Appliance-Modulated Data Augmentation (AMDA) method, a computationally efficient technique that enhances NILM model generalization by intelligently scaling appliance power contributions based on their relative impact. We show in experiments that NILM models trained with AMDA-augmented data significantly improve the disaggregation of energy consumption of complex industrial appliances like combined heat and power systems. Specifically, in our out-of-sample scenarios, models trained with AMDA achieved a Normalized Disaggregation Error of 0.093, outperforming models trained without data augmentation (0.451) and those trained with random data augmentation (0.290). Data distribution analyses confirm that AMDA effectively aligns training and test data distributions, enhancing model generalization.

Energy disaggregation estimates appliance-by-appliance electricity consumption from a single meter that measures the whole home's electricity demand. Recently, deep neural networks have driven remarkable improvements in classification performance in neighbouring machine learning fields such as image classification and automatic speech recognition. In this paper, we adapt three deep neural network architectures to energy disaggregation: 1) a form of recurrent neural network called `long short-term memory' (LSTM); 2) denoising autoencoders; and 3) a network which regresses the start time, end time and average power demand of each appliance activation. We use seven metrics to test the performance of these algorithms on real aggregate power data from five appliances. Tests are performed against a house not seen during training and against houses seen during training. We find that all three neural nets achieve better F1 scores (averaged over all five appliances) than either combinatorial optimisation or factorial hidden Markov models and that our neural net algorithms generalise well to an unseen house.

Disaggregated inference has become an essential framework that separates the prefill (P) and decode (D) stages in large language model inference to improve throughput. However, the KV cache transfer faces significant delays between prefill and decode nodes. The block-wise calling method and discontinuous KV cache memory allocation increase the number of calls to the transmission kernel. Additionally, existing frameworks often fix the roles of P and D nodes, leading to computational imbalances. In this paper, we propose FlowKV, a novel disaggregated inference framework, which reduces the average transmission latency of KV cache by 96%, from 0.944s to 0.053s, almost eliminating the transfer time relative to the total request latency by optimizing the KV cache transfer. FlowKV introduces the Load-Aware Scheduler for balanced request scheduling and flexible PD node allocation. This design maximizes hardware resource utilization, achieving peak system throughput across various scenarios, including normal, computational imbalance, and extreme overload conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that FlowKV significantly accelerates inference by 15.2%-48.9% on LongBench dataset compared to the baseline and supports applications with heterogeneous GPUs.

Reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes from monocular video remains fundamentally challenging due to the need to jointly infer motion, structure, and appearance from limited observations. Existing dynamic scene reconstruction methods based on Gaussian Splatting often entangle static and dynamic elements in a shared representation, leading to motion leakage, geometric distortions, and temporal flickering. We identify that the root cause lies in the coupled modeling of geometry and appearance across time, which hampers both stability and interpretability. To address this, we propose SplitGaussian, a novel framework that explicitly decomposes scene representations into static and dynamic components. By decoupling motion modeling from background geometry and allowing only the dynamic branch to deform over time, our method prevents motion artifacts in static regions while supporting view- and time-dependent appearance refinement. This disentangled design not only enhances temporal consistency and reconstruction fidelity but also accelerates convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SplitGaussian outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in rendering quality, geometric stability, and motion separation.

We present core attention disaggregation (CAD), a technique that improves long-context large language model training by decoupling the core attention computation, softmax(QK^T)V, from the rest of the model and executing it on a separate pool of devices. In existing systems, core attention is colocated with other layers; at long context lengths, its quadratic compute growth compared to the near-linear growth of other components causes load imbalance and stragglers across data and pipeline parallel groups. CAD is enabled by two observations. First, core attention is stateless: it has no trainable parameters and only minimal transient data, so balancing reduces to scheduling compute-bound tasks. Second, it is composable: modern attention kernels retain high efficiency when processing fused batches of token-level shards with arbitrary lengths. CAD partitions core attention into token-level tasks and dispatches them to dedicated attention servers, which dynamically rebatch tasks to equalize compute without sacrificing kernel efficiency. We implement CAD in a system called DistCA, which uses a ping-pong execution scheme to fully overlap communication with computation and in-place execution on attention servers to reduce memory use. On 512 H200 GPUs and context lengths up to 512k tokens, DistCA improves end-to-end training throughput by up to 1.35x, eliminates data and pipeline parallel stragglers, and achieves near-perfect compute and memory balance.

Our research aims to unify existing works' diverging opinions on how architectural components affect the adversarial robustness of CNNs. To accomplish our goal, we synthesize a suite of three generalizable robust architectural design principles: (a) optimal range for depth and width configurations, (b) preferring convolutional over patchify stem stage, and (c) robust residual block design through adopting squeeze and excitation blocks and non-parametric smooth activation functions. Through extensive experiments across a wide spectrum of dataset scales, adversarial training methods, model parameters, and network design spaces, our principles consistently and markedly improve AutoAttack accuracy: 1-3 percentage points (pp) on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, and 4-9 pp on ImageNet. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/poloclub/robust-principles.

Current approaches to dichotomous image segmentation (DIS) treat image matting and object segmentation as fundamentally different tasks. As improvements in image segmentation become increasingly challenging to achieve, combining image matting and grayscale segmentation techniques offers promising new directions for architectural innovation. Inspired by the possibility of aligning these two model tasks, we propose a new architectural approach for DIS called Confidence-Guided Matting (CGM). We created the first CGM model called Background Erase Network (BEN). BEN is comprised of two components: BEN Base for initial segmentation and BEN Refiner for confidence refinement. Our approach achieves substantial improvements over current state-of-the-art methods on the DIS5K validation dataset, demonstrating that matting-based refinement can significantly enhance segmentation quality. This work opens new possibilities for cross-pollination between matting and segmentation techniques in computer vision.

The task of vision-based 3D occupancy prediction aims to reconstruct 3D geometry and estimate its semantic classes from 2D color images, where the 2D-to-3D view transformation is an indispensable step. Most previous methods conduct forward projection, such as BEVPooling and VoxelPooling, both of which map the 2D image features into 3D grids. However, the current grid representing features within a certain height range usually introduces many confusing features that belong to other height ranges. To address this challenge, we present Deep Height Decoupling (DHD), a novel framework that incorporates explicit height prior to filter out the confusing features. Specifically, DHD first predicts height maps via explicit supervision. Based on the height distribution statistics, DHD designs Mask Guided Height Sampling (MGHS) to adaptively decouple the height map into multiple binary masks. MGHS projects the 2D image features into multiple subspaces, where each grid contains features within reasonable height ranges. Finally, a Synergistic Feature Aggregation (SFA) module is deployed to enhance the feature representation through channel and spatial affinities, enabling further occupancy refinement. On the popular Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance even with minimal input frames. Source code is released at https://github.com/yanzq95/DHD.

Graph Domain Adaptation (GDA) typically uses adversarial learning to align graph embeddings in Euclidean space. However, this paradigm suffers from two critical challenges: Structural Degeneration, where hierarchical and semantic representations are entangled, and Optimization Instability, which arises from oscillatory dynamics of minimax adversarial training. To tackle these issues, we propose DisRFM, a geometry-aware GDA framework that unifies Riemannian embedding and flow-based transport. First, to overcome structural degeneration, we embed graphs into a Riemannian manifold. By adopting polar coordinates, we explicitly disentangle structure (radius) from semantics (angle). Then, we enforce topology preservation through radial Wasserstein alignment and semantic discrimination via angular clustering, thereby preventing feature entanglement and collapse. Second, we address the instability of adversarial alignment by using Riemannian flow matching. This method learns a smooth vector field to guide source features toward the target along geodesic paths, guaranteeing stable convergence. The geometric constraints further guide the flow to maintain the disentangled structure during transport. Theoretically, we prove the asymptotic stability of the flow matching and derive a tighter bound for the target risk. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DisRFM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Visual recognition requires rich representations that span levels from low to high, scales from small to large, and resolutions from fine to coarse. Even with the depth of features in a convolutional network, a layer in isolation is not enough: compounding and aggregating these representations improves inference of what and where. Architectural efforts are exploring many dimensions for network backbones, designing deeper or wider architectures, but how to best aggregate layers and blocks across a network deserves further attention. Although skip connections have been incorporated to combine layers, these connections have been "shallow" themselves, and only fuse by simple, one-step operations. We augment standard architectures with deeper aggregation to better fuse information across layers. Our deep layer aggregation structures iteratively and hierarchically merge the feature hierarchy to make networks with better accuracy and fewer parameters. Experiments across architectures and tasks show that deep layer aggregation improves recognition and resolution compared to existing branching and merging schemes. The code is at https://github.com/ucbdrive/dla.

Deep Image Prior (DIP) shows that some network architectures naturally bias towards smooth images and resist noises, a phenomenon known as spectral bias. Image denoising is an immediate application of this property. Although DIP has removed the requirement of large training sets, it still presents two practical challenges for denoising: architectural design and noise-fitting, which are often intertwined. Existing methods mostly handcraft or search for the architecture from a large design space, due to the lack of understanding on how the architectural choice corresponds to the image. In this study, we analyze from a frequency perspective to demonstrate that the unlearnt upsampling is the main driving force behind the denoising phenomenon in DIP. This finding then leads to strategies for estimating a suitable architecture for every image without a laborious search. Extensive experiments show that the estimated architectures denoise and preserve the textural details better than current methods with up to 95% fewer parameters. The under-parameterized nature also makes them especially robust to a higher level of noise.

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have shown impressive performance in both understanding and generation with a single architecture. However, UMMs still exhibit a fundamental inconsistency: understanding favors compact embeddings, whereas generation favors reconstruction-rich representations. This structural trade-off produces misaligned decision boundaries, degraded cross-modal coherence, and heightened vulnerability under distributional and adversarial shifts. In this paper, we present UniGame, a self-adversarial post-training framework that directly targets the inconsistencies. By applying a lightweight perturber at the shared token interface, UniGame enables the generation branch to actively seek and challenge fragile understanding, turning the model itself into its own adversary. Experiments demonstrate that UniGame significantly improves the consistency (+4.6%). Moreover, it also achieves substantial improvements in understanding (+3.6%), generation (+0.02), out-of-distribution and adversarial robustness (+4.8% and +6.2% on NaturalBench and AdVQA). The framework is architecture-agnostic, introduces less than 1% additional parameters, and is complementary to existing post-training methods. These results position adversarial self-play as a general and effective principle for enhancing the coherence, stability, and unified competence of future multimodal foundation models. The official code is available at: https://github.com/AIFrontierLab/UniGame

The rapid advancement of generators (e.g., StyleGAN, Midjourney, DALL-E) has produced highly realistic synthetic images, posing significant challenges to digital media authenticity. These generators are typically based on a few core architectural families, primarily Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Diffusion Models (DMs). A critical vulnerability in current forensics is the failure of detectors to achieve cross-generator generalization, especially when crossing architectural boundaries (e.g., from GANs to DMs). We hypothesize that this gap stems from fundamental differences in the artifacts produced by these distinct architectures. In this work, we provide a theoretical analysis explaining how the distinct optimization objectives of the GAN and DM architectures lead to different manifold coverage behaviors. We demonstrate that GANs permit partial coverage, often leading to boundary artifacts, while DMs enforce complete coverage, resulting in over-smoothing patterns. Motivated by this analysis, we propose the Triarchy Detector (TriDetect), a semi-supervised approach that enhances binary classification by discovering latent architectural patterns within the "fake" class. TriDetect employs balanced cluster assignment via the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm and a cross-view consistency mechanism, encouraging the model to learn fundamental architectural distincts. We evaluate our approach on two standard benchmarks and three in-the-wild datasets against 13 baselines to demonstrate its generalization capability to unseen generators.

Monolithic serving with chunked prefill improves GPU utilization by batching prefill and decode together, but suffers from fine-grained phase interference. Engine-level prefill-decode (PD) disaggregation avoids interference but incurs higher hardware and coordination overhead. Prior intra-GPU disaggregation approaches multiplex prefill and decode within a single GPU, using SLO-based tuning guided by heuristics from offline profiling or reactive feedback loops. However, these methods respond reactively to performance issues rather than anticipating them, limiting adaptability under dynamic workloads. We ask: can we achieve proactive intra-GPU disaggregation that adapts effectively to dynamic workloads? The key challenge lies in managing the conflicting resource demands of prefill and decode under varying conditions. We first show that GPU resources exhibit diminishing returns -- beyond a saturation point, more allocation yields minimal latency benefit. Second, we observe that memory bandwidth contention becomes a critical bottleneck. These insights motivate a design that dynamically partitions GPU resources across prefill and decode phases, while jointly considering compute capacity, memory footprint, and bandwidth contention. Evaluated on diverse LLMs and workloads, our system Nexus achieves up to 2.2x higher throughput, 20x lower TTFT, and 2.5x lower TBT than vLLM; outperforms SGLang by up to 2x; and matches or exceeds disaggregated vLLM.