Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves LLM reasoning by decomposing complex problems into intermediate steps, but its sequential nature increases decoding latency and memory usage. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale capacity through sparse expert activation, yet their full expert weights often exceed GPU memory and require costly GPU-CPU transfers. Existing runtimes treat all tokens uniformly, overlooking a key structural property of CoT traces: consecutive reasoning stages exhibit coherent and predictable expert activation patterns. Ignoring this stage-level regularity leads to inefficient caching and unnecessary data movement. We propose SAEM, a stage-aware MoE inference runtime that detects reasoning stage boundaries and exploits stage-level activation coherence to guide expert placement. SAEM combines stage-aware caching, expert-aligned token repacking, and in-situ CPU execution to reduce data transfer and kernel fragmentation. On mathematical and scientific reasoning workloads, SAEM achieves an average 1.33x throughput improvement over the strongest state-of-the-art caching and offloading baselines under constrained GPU memory, rising to 1.54x when calibration data matches the workload, demonstrating the effectiveness of stage-aware, locality-driven MoE inference for CoT reasoning.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: CoT reasoning employs transition cues to structure multi-step problem solving, facilitating self-correction and the exploration of alternative solution paths.
Fig. 2: Illustration of CoT reasoning in a MoE model, where each token activates its top-2 selected experts.
Fig. 3: Layer-wise expert activation pattern in Qwen3 on MATH‑500 under CoT reasoning, averaged over 100 samples.
MATH-500
AIME 2024
GPQA-Diamond
Qwen3
89.78%
89.50%
92.01%
ERNIE-4.5
89.35%
89.87%
85.27%
TABLE I: Temporal coherence scores ( TCseq ) of expert activation patterns across reasoning stages, segmented by transition cues, measured on Qwen3 and ERNIE-4.5.
Fig. 4: Operation-level breakdown of Bookkeeping and Token Repacking strategies in one MoE layer during decoding, isolating execution overhead (excluding routing) on Qwen3.
Fig. 5: Design Overview of SAEM.
Fig. 6: Lightweight pattern matching for stage transitions.
Fig. 7: Illustration of expert-aligned token repacking for a single MoE layer during decoding with a batch size of four. For clarity, the routing decision is assumed but not shown.
Model
#Blocks
#Shared Experts
#Routed Experts
Top-k
Experts Params.
Total Params.
Qwen3-30B-A3B (Qwen3)
48
0
128
8
29.0B
30.5B
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B (ERNIE-4.5)
28
2
64
6
21.0B
21.8B
TABLE II: Architectural details of MoE models optimized for multi-step reasoning tasks.
Fig. 8: Throughput comparison over batch sizes and ECRs for MATH-500 . Overlaid lines denote speedup relative to the strongest baseline.
Fig. 9: Throughput comparison over batch sizes and ECRs for AIME 2024 . Overlaid lines denote speedup relative to the strongest baseline.
Fig. 10: Throughput comparison over batch sizes and ECRs for GPQA-Diamond . Overlaid lines denote speedup relative to the strongest baseline.
Batch Size
Full GPU (tokens/s)
ECR
SAEM (tokens/s)
CHR Eff. (%)
TP Eff. (%)
1
9.04
50.0%
7.19
90.36
87.87
25.0%
6.45
81.40
90.82
12.5%
6.10
76.09
92.80
8
20.90
50.0%
18.55
97.80
95.69
25.0%
16.35
96.43
98.46
12.5%
13.82
96.75
100.78
TABLE III: Prediction-oracle analysis on Qwen3. Full GPU is the ECR = 100% reference, and SAEM reports the free-running throughput from Fig. 8 . CHR and TP Eff. are defined in Eq. ( 2 ).
Batch Size
Technique
Throughput (tokens/s)
Speedup
1
Best-performing baseline
3.45
–
Cache update only
4.81
1.39 ×
In-situ CPU execution only
2.73
0.79 ×
Token repacker only
5.02
1.46 ×
All
6.10
1.77 ×
8
Best-performing baseline
8.51
–
TABLE IV: Inference speedup breakdown of proposed techniques under 12.5% cache ratio on Qwen3.
While chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables LLMs to solve challenging reasoning tasks, the linear growth of the KV cache leads to substantial memory and inference overhead. Existing approaches such as context compression and multi-token prediction (MTP) improve efficiency from two complementary directions by compressing historical tokens and generating future tokens in parallel. However, effectively combining them remains challenging due to their different training paradigms and architectural assumptions. In this work, we propose MemoSight (Memory-Foresight-Based Reasoning), a unified framework that integrates context compression and MTP to improve inference efficiency while preserving CoT performance. MemoSight adopts a shared minimalist design based on special tokens and token-specific positional layouts for both compression and parallel prediction. Experiments on four reasoning benchmarks show that, compared to the vanilla SFT baseline, MemoSight reduces KV cache usage by up to 66% and improves inference speed by 56%, while incurring less than a 3% drop in average reasoning accuracy, yielding a better efficiency-accuracy trade-off than existing CoT compression methods.
Xinyu Liu, Xin Liu, Bo Jin +8
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, China · Meituan Inc. · NiuTrans Research, Shenyang, China
Fine-grained Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models sparsely activate only a subset of experts per token, reducing activated computation while maintaining high model capacity. However, in memory-constrained inference scenarios, only a small set of experts can be cached. Experts not in the cache must be fetched from slow external storage (e.g., UFS), leading to frequent evictions and substantial I/O overhead. We propose ReMoE, a router fine-tuning framework designed to boost token-wise expert reuse. ReMoE biases the router toward recently selected experts, producing temporally stable routing that better matches cache locality constraints. By increasing short-horizon expert reuse, ReMoE reduces expert fetches from storage without adding inference-time computation. Experiments on DeepSeek and Qwen models show that ReMoE improves expert reuse by 26% while maintaining downstream task performance. Real-system evaluations further confirm these benefits, improving output throughput by 8.4% under vLLM GPU-CPU expert offloading and reducing TPOT by 43.6-49.8% under llama.cpp on Jetson Orin NX, corresponding to a 1.77-1.99× decode speedup across diverse workloads. Checkpoints and usage instructions are available at https://github.com/BUAA-OSCAR/ReMoE.
Xiongwei Zhu, Xiaojian Liao, Tianyang Jiang +3
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China · Huawei Technologies Ltd.
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have gained popularity as a means of scaling the capacity of large language models (LLMs) while maintaining sparse activations and reduced per-token compute. However, in memory-constrained inference settings, expert weights must be offloaded to CPU, creating a performance bottleneck from CPU-GPU transfers during decoding. We propose an expert prefetching scheme that leverages currently computed internal model representations to speculate future experts, enabling memory transfers to overlap with computation. Across multiple MoE architectures, we demonstrate that future experts can be reliably predicted by these internal representations. We also demonstrate that executing speculated experts generally maintains downstream task accuracy, thus preserving more effective compute-memory overlap by eliminating the need to re-fetch true router-selected experts. Integrated into an optimized inference engine, our approach achieves up to 14% reduction in time per output token (TPOT) over on-demand loading of experts from CPU memory. For MoEs where speculative execution alone yields suboptimal accuracy, we further examine lightweight estimators that improve expert prediction hit rates, thereby reducing performance degradation. Our code is released in open-source at https://github.com/axonn-ai/yalis/tree/offload_prefetch.