MemBoost: A Memory-Boosted Framework for Cost-Aware LLM Inference
Organizations: Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Finland · Department of Computer Science, Tulane University, LA, USA · Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Aalto University, Finland
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but incur high inference cost in real-world services, especially under workloads with repeated or near-duplicate queries across users and sessions. In this work, we propose MemBoost, a memory-boosted LLM serving framework that enables a lightweight model to reuse previously generated answers and retrieve relevant supporting information for cheap inference, while selectively escalating difficult or uncertain queries to a stronger model. Unlike standard retrieval-augmented generation, which primarily grounds a single response, MemBoost is designed for interactive settings by supporting answer reuse, continual memory growth, and cost-aware routing. Experiments across multiple models under simulated workloads show that MemBoost substantially reduces expensive large-model invocations and overall inference cost, while maintaining high answer quality comparable to the strong model baseline.
Figures & tables
| Component | Hyperparameter | Value |
| Traffic simulation | Workload distribution | Zipfian |
| Zipf exponent ( ) | ||
| Number of requests ( ) | 5,000 | |
| Random seed | 1 | |
| Associative Memory Engine | Embedding model | all-MiniLM-L6-v2 |
| Similarity metric | Cosine (FAISS inner product) |
| Model | Accuracy (%) | ||
| Zipf 0.8 | Zipf 1.1 | Zipf 1.4 | |
| Baselines | |||
| Qwen3.5-2B | 50.0 | 43.5 | 37.1 |
| Ministral-3-3B-Instruct-2512 | 53.8 | 46.4 | 38.2 |
| Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507-FP8 | 74.5 | 75.6 | 80.5 |
| Qwen3-14B-FP8-dynamic (Oracle) | 76.4 | 79.9 | 85.0 |
LLM Inference Serving
Large language model inference serving studies how to run model requests efficiently while meeting latency, throughput, cost, and energy goals.
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