Understand and Accelerate Memory Processing Pipeline for Large Language Model Inference

Deploying large language models on edge devices is increasingly limited by a widening gap between model size and available memory. Existing approaches such as quantization, smaller models, and offloading can raise the effective memory limit, but they still assume that the model can be compressed or partitioned to fit within some budget. We target the harder model-exceeds-memory setting, in which the model remains larger than resident memory throughout execution and storage becomes an active source of weights on the critical path. We observe that MLP activity during autoregressive decoding has strong temporal locality: approximately 82-85% of active neurons persist from one token to the next. This means that most sparse weights needed for the current token are already resident, and only the newly needed rows must be fetched from storage. We present NeuroPrefetcher, a storage-backed LLM inference system that exploits this property through predictive delta prefetching. After layer 0, a single GPU-resident predictor, occupying 2.86% of base model parameters, predicts sparse activity for all downstream MLP layers in one forward pass. The runtime compares these predictions against resident GPU buffers and issues application-scheduled NVMe reads only for incoming delta rows, replacing reactive operating-system demand paging with explicit, model-aware weight movement. On real unified-memory edge hardware, NeuroPrefetcher achieves 7.9-12.0x speedup over llama.cpp across constrained memory budgets.

On-device inference offers privacy, offline use, and instant response, but consumer hardware restricts large language models (LLMs) to low throughput and capability. To overcome this challenge, we present prima.cpp, a distributed on-device inference system that runs 30-70B LLMs on consumer home clusters with mixed CPUs/GPUs, insufficient RAM/VRAM, slow disks, Wi-Fi links, and heterogeneous OSs. We introduce pipelined-ring parallelism (PRP) to overlap disk I/O with compute and communication, and address the prefetch-release conflict in mmap-based offloading. We further propose Halda, a heterogeneity-aware scheduler that co-optimizes per-device CPU/GPU workloads and device selection under RAM/VRAM constraints. On four consumer home devices, a 70B model reaches 674 ms/token TPOT with <6% memory pressure, and a 32B model with speculative decoding achieves 26 tokens/s. Compared with llama.cpp, exo, and dllama, our proposed prima.cpp achieves 5-17 times lower TPOT, supports fine-grained model sizes from 8B to 70B, ensures broader cross-OS and quantization compatibility, and remains OOM-free, while also being Wi-Fi tolerant, privacy-preserving, and hardware-independent. The code is available at https://github.com/OpenCPIL/prima.cpp.

Large language models are increasingly deployed with persistent personalized context, such as accumulated memory profiles or long conversation histories, that is shared across a user's many requests. Production memory systems (e.g., Mem0, MemGPT, and Zep) retrieve a relevant subset of this memory and inject it into the prompt, forcing the serving engine to repeatedly prefill the same content. As the retrieval budget grows, time-to-first-token (TTFT) increases even though the underlying memory is reused across requests. We present InferScale, a GPU-native LLM memory system that replaces repeated prompt prefilling with reusable KV state. InferScale precomputes each memory fact's KV representation, stores it alongside a semantic embedding on the GPU, retrieves relevant facts at serving time, and injects their KV directly into vLLM's paged cache. To support dynamically assembled memories under rotary position embeddings, we introduce Chunked RoPE, which stores keys before rotation and applies their serving-time positions during injection. However, encoding memory facts independently omits the cross-fact context available during joint prefilling. We mitigate this with Context-Window Encoding, which encodes each memory fact together with a small window of preceding conversation context while caching only the target fact's KV. InferScale is implemented through vLLM's KV-connector interface, requiring neither engine modifications nor model fine-tuning. Across three open-weight models on LoCoMo, InferScale keeps TTFT nearly constant as the retrieval budget increases: at k=50 it reduces TTFT by 72-79% (3.6-4.8x), achieves 60.3% accuracy versus 63.3% for Mem0 without serving-time recomputation, and delivers 3.7-4.5x the throughput under concurrent load. Reusable KV state thus decouples memory-conditioned serving latency from retrieved-context size while preserving application quality.