Expert Offloading

Mixture-of-experts (MoE) language models often exceed the memory of a single GPU. Expert offloading keeps most experts in host memory and loads them on demand, so decoding speed depends on how many experts each token must fetch. Caching and prefetching reduce this cost only as far as the routing allows. Router-only fine-tuning can reshape the routing to reuse experts, but it keeps the experts frozen, so they cannot adapt to the tokens the new routing sends them. We propose MaskCoFT, a masked co-adaptive fine-tuning method that trains routers and experts together with the cross-entropy loss alone. During fine-tuning, a learnable binary mask restricts the Top-K routing of each layer to a subset of experts, and the experts adapt to the tokens redirected to them. At inference, the learned mask becomes a soft prior that re-ranks experts, so every expert remains selectable. We simulate a GPU cache of 4 experts per layer for Mixtral-8x7B and 12 for DeepSeek-V2-Lite. MaskCoFT cuts expert fetches per token by 23.7% and 10.1% relative to the base model. In real offloading system serving, it lowers the time per output token by up to 16.4% and 5.5%, respectively. Its average accuracy over nine benchmarks stays above the base model by 0.92 and 0.53 points.

Semi-autoregressive diffusion large language models (dLLMs) improve decoding parallelism through iterative block-wise denoising, but scaling them with mixture-of-experts (MoE) layers introduces a large expert parameter footprint that exceeds memory-constrained GPU capacity. Expert offloading is a natural remedy, yet existing MoE serving systems target autoregressive decoding and rely on intra-iteration layer-wise prefetching: while computing one layer, they predict and load experts for subsequent layers. Under dLLM inference, block-wise routing expands the active expert working set within each iteration, making such prefetches difficult to complete in time and costly when mispredicted. Consequently, existing prefetch-based solutions often degenerate into on-demand expert loading with high decoding latency. We propose OLED-MoE, an expert offloading system that shifts the optimization target from intra-iteration prefetching to inter-iteration expert retention. Its key insight is that adjacent denoising iterations exhibit strong expert routing overlap, and token confidence indicates which experts are likely to be reused. OLED-MoE uses confidence-guided inter-iteration prediction to retain high-value experts in GPU memory without introducing extra prefetch traffic. It further compensates unavoidable cache misses through CPU-GPU cooperative execution, jointly considering dynamic expert computation load and predicted future reuse. Across diverse dLLM workloads, OLED-MoE reduces time per output token (TPOT) by 1.23x-7.93x and improves expert cache utilization by 1.44x-4.23x over state-of-the-art offloading systems. Notably, OLED-MoE approaches full-residency performance while using only 40% of the expert GPU memory, incurring merely 23% higher TPOT despite a 60% reduction in expert memory footprint. OLED-MoE's source code is publicly available at https://github.com/flashserve/OLED-MoE.

Sparse activation reduces mixture-of-experts computation without eliminating the need to store all experts. We present Routide, a Swift/MLX runtime that executes the text path of a pinned public Qwen3.6-35B-A3B quantized checkpoint while keeping expert weights in iPhone storage and a byte-budgeted subset in memory. We characterize cache-policy sensitivity, numerical comparison boundaries, and measurement limits. Across five recorded 128-token workloads, fixed-route replay gives 0.00% demand hits with a 512 MiB LRU cache, 18.80% with seeded random eviction at the same budget, and 38.58% with 576 MiB LRU. The apparent capacity cliff is therefore a policy/workload interaction, not a universal memory requirement. Same-runtime Mac controls preserve generated sequences across eviction and asynchronous prefetch, including 2,560 exact token comparisons and 10,334 speculative loads. In contrast, complete resident-Python versus recorded-phone sequences disagree on all five tested cases, precluding a general numerical equivalence claim. Two separately scoped iOS 27 memory protocols observe sampled process-footprint peaks of 1.87-2.32 GiB on short prompts and 2.39-2.73 GiB on one longer prompt. We retain a thermal stopping event, negative timing comparisons, and a single qualified whole-device power estimate. These results establish bounded feasibility and identify limitations that a deployment claim must not hide.

Mixture-of-experts (MoE) inference on consumer hardware is bounded by weight memory: a 35B-class model is 19.5GB at 4-bit, and sparsity shrinks the compute per token, not the bytes that must be held. Naive offloading to SSD does not help on its own, because layer N+1's experts must be chosen before layer N's output exists, so the reads cannot start early enough to hide behind compute. We present Edge0, a streaming MoE inference engine that closes the gap with a prerouter: a per-layer head predicts the next layer's routing one token ahead, and the prediction is consumed as the routing itself, so the staged expert set equals the routed set and nothing is dropped. An unmerged recovery LoRA, trained on the student path, pays back the quality lost to int4 quantization and routing replacement. On a single 24GB machine, Edge0 serves a 35B MoE at 20tok/s inside 3GiB of peak active memory, within a few points of its fp16 teacher on average across five public benchmarks. An 8B tier runs on the same framework, and the framework, checkpoints, and adapters are open source.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) creates a structural advantage for offloading: only a small fraction of activated experts need to reside in device memory, and if they can be loaded in time for computation, offloading can in principle approach full-load performance, where all model weights reside in device memory. Yet translating MoE's structural advantage into practical offloading gains remains challenging. We propose SeqMoE to bridge this gap. To maximize expert hits, we build predictive memory management: (i) Sequence-to-sequence prediction. We are the first to recast expert activation prediction as sequence modeling, enabling accurate multi-step, multi-layer forecasts that provide a long and reliable window for downstream decisions. (ii) Joint prefetch scheduling. We formulate prefetch scheduling as Job Sequencing with Deadlines to maximize expected expert hits and improve bandwidth efficiency. (iii) Forecast-driven caching. Leveraging the recursive nature of sequence modeling, we introduce a probabilistic Belady policy for future-aware eviction. To eliminate execution bottleneck, we develop (iv) Graph-compatible offloading runtime. We derive general runtime principles encompassing compute-transparent expert placement and synchronization-free orchestration disciplines for end-to-end graph capture. With 45% expert residency, SeqMoE averages a 96.97% hit rate and 80.22% of full-load performance, advancing the state of the art in MoE offloading.

Large mixture-of-experts (MoE) language models with 26--120 billion parameters exceed the memory capacity of consumer devices through three simultaneous pressures: resident weight matrices, key-value (KV) cache state that grows linearly with context, and dozens of expert sublayers that must be paged on demand. We present RotaryQuant, a three-axis compression system that addresses all three. Mixed-precision weight quantization assigns bit-widths by architectural role: 4-bit for dense layers, 2-bit for routed experts, and 8-bit for the shared expert whose high activation kurtosis resists aggressive compression. LRU expert offloading pages non-resident experts to disk under genuine memory pressure. The novel axis is IsoQuant, a KV cache compression method that applies a Walsh--Hadamard transform followed by block-diagonal SO(4) rotations to isotropize activation distributions before 3-bit scalar quantization, requiring $O(d \log d)$ operations and 256 stored parameters per head versus $O(d^2)$ and 16{,}384 for dense rotation methods. A fused four-kernel Metal GPU pipeline performs attention directly on packed 3-bit tensors without materializing full-precision KV state---a different execution model, not just a quantization scheme. The combined system fits Gemma 4-26B-A4B and Qwen3-30B-A3B within a 16,GB budget and Nemotron-H 120B within 32,GB, running interactively at 9--19 tok/s with near-zero perplexity degradation ($Δ$PPL $\leq +0.0012$) and 100% retrieval accuracy at 32K context.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have outgrown accelerator memory, and offloading expert weights to host memory is now standard. This makes expert cache management an attractive lever: a policy that raised the hit rate would cut expert traffic per token. Evaluating that is a measurement problem, and we find the measurement fragile. With a trace-driven, event-atomic simulator over three MoE models (40, 64, 128 experts), we isolate three evaluation axes that change conclusions, not just numbers. Replay semantics: under a fused-event traffic contract, an inconsistent per-access replay inflates recency-based policies by 27-29% while leaving frequency-based and static ones within 4%, inverting the policy ranking. Workload contamination: probe sets using one instruction template per category produce verbatim-identical generation prefixes; a matched-pair rendering intervention moves the measured early-window effect by 19.4-31.9 points and reverses which workloads look most cache-friendly. Operating regimes: normalized miss fractions do not transfer across models, so the per-step expert union relative to per-layer capacity must be reported -- yet permuting only the temporal order of an identical event stream moves the offline-optimal gap from 44.9% to 30.8%, so it is not sufficient. Corrected, a stable gap to the offline optimum remains (44.2-45.9% over 13 frozen workload compositions). A forced-admission oracle attributes 84.3-96.6% of it to knowing which resident expert is used furthest in the future. A causal next-use predictor, used as an eviction rule, recovers -11.4% of the gap; it picks an optimal victim 3.4% of the time, against 2.4% for a random resident block and 20.6-22.1% for LRU and LFRU. Our position is narrow: in our evaluated settings a large offline-optimal gap substantially overstates the gains recovered by representative lightweight causal mechanisms.

Large Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models are attractive for end-device deployment because only a small subset of experts is active per token, but their routed expert weights often exceed accelerator memory. We target latency-critical single-user settings where routed experts are staged on demand from CPU memory to a GPU or from Flash to a mobile NPU. In this setting, self-speculative decoding faces a new bottleneck: increasing the draft expert set improves accuracy but triggers extra expert loading, while cheap small-footprint drafts have low acceptance; moreover, verifying a multi-token block activates the union of target experts and is no longer close to one target step. We propose DraftExpert, an expansion-aware self-speculative decoding framework for expert-offloaded MoE inference. DraftExpert trains one lightweight accelerator-resident draft expert per layer by self-distilling residual, logit/token, and router-agreement signals from the frozen target MoE. At inference time, it uses a fixed-footprint shared+top-1+draft-expert drafter together with confidence--expansion truncation and target-expert prefetching, while final tokens are still exactly verified by the target model. On DeepSeek-V2-Lite and Moonlight-16B-A3B across CPU-GPU and Flash-NPU offload, DraftExpert improves decode throughput by 1.45x on average, raises draft acceptance to 8487%, and achieves 8688% prefetch hit rates.

Modern local and agentic workloads often need large-model capacity at low concurrency, but run on GPUs that cannot keep a frontier-scale model resident. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are a natural fit because they activate only a small subset of experts per token, but their sparsity saves computation, not residency: the full expert pool still has to be stored, and any expert used by a layer must be in GPU memory when that layer runs. Static layer-level CPU offload makes such models fit, but transfers the expert layer in bulk on every forward pass, losing much of the sparsity advantage. We view low-resource MoE serving as a working-set problem on the GPU. Routed expert weights and the KV cache are two memory-demand streams competing for the same limited VRAM. We implement this view in WiSP (Working-Set Paging), a routing-aware expert pager that plugs into an unmodified serving engine and preserves byte-identical outputs. On a real 24 GiB RTX 3090, WiSP achieves up to 2.0x the decode throughput of static offload at the same memory budget when the model does not fit. A natural next step is to predict future experts and prefetch them. We find that this does not help in single-stream decode: the bottleneck is PCIe bandwidth, not prediction quality, so speculative transfers compete with demand transfers instead of hiding them. This shifts the design question from prefetching to allocation: how should one VRAM budget be divided between resident experts and the KV cache? We answer with MV-WSA (Marginal-Value Working-Set Allocation), which splits memory by marginal latency benefit per byte while enforcing a KV-admission floor. As a startup configurator, MV-WSA is the only policy we test that stays near-best on both prefill and decode; as a live controller, it resizes both pools while serving and reduces end-to-end time by up to 1.19x over a fixed offline split, without changing model outputs.

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models separate total parameter count from per-token active computation, but local inference systems often still require the full model, key-value cache, runtime buffers, and operatingsystem headroom to fit in fast memory. MawForge tests a different systems hypothesis: local MoE serving can be made practical on constrained unified-memory machines by storing the full model on disk, keeping common tensors resident, and materializing routed expert tensors into a bounded execution cache on demand. The central finding is that MawForge is effective as a bounded execution mechanism and measurement substrate for local MoE inference, but not as a cache-maximization policy. Performance depends on balancing expert reuse against resident footprint, KV-cache size, quantization, route locality, and macOS memory pressure.

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$\times$ decode speedup across diverse workloads. Checkpoints and usage instructions are available at https://github.com/BUAA-OSCAR/ReMoE.

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive (AR) models, offering better hardware utilization and bidirectional context through parallel block-level decoding. However, as dLLMs continue to scale up with mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures, their deployment on resource-constrained devices remains an open challenge. Existing AR-based methods often incur either prohibitive I/O overhead or significant compute bottlenecks. In this work, we propose TIDE, a novel resource-efficient inference system that leverages the temporal stability of expert activations during the diffusion process within the block. Specifically, we leverage the temporal stability of expert activations during the diffusion process within the block and introduce an interval-based expert refresh strategy that updates the expert placement in an I/O-aware fashion. To ensure optimal performance, we formulate the inference scheduling as a mathematical programming problem, solving for the optimal interval that minimizes I/O traffic and CPU computation. Most importantly, TIDE is a lossless optimization that requires no model training, providing a "free lunch" acceleration for dLLM inference. In a single GPU-CPU system, we demonstrate that TIDE achieves up to 1.4$\times$ and 1.5$\times$ throughput improvements over prior baselines on LLaDA2.0-mini and LLaDA2.0-flash models, respectively.

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture improves computational efficiency via sparse expert activation, but throughput-oriented inference faces substantial GPU memory pressure due to a significant parameter size and intermediate data. Prior works attempt to mitigate this using expert offloading with micro-batching or by offloading computation to the CPU. However, the fragmented workload resulting from micro-batching degrades operational intensity, causing expert execution to become memory-bound. Meanwhile, CPU offloading is constrained by slow PCIe transfers and its limited applicability to attention computation in the decode stage. Consequently, these inefficiencies prevent effective system utilization, severely restricting the end-to-end throughput of MoE inference. To address these challenges, this paper proposes CoX-MoE, an Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX)-enabled CPU-GPU collaborative system that comprehensively optimizes MoE inference by combining coalesced expert execution with strategic workload orchestration for higher throughput. CoX-MoE introduces (i) a coalescing-aware orchestration policy to jointly optimize resource allocation by adopting ordinary batch, instead of micro-batch, for expert computation and selective attention offloading, and (ii) a static expert-aware stratification scheme that pre-assigns frequently activated experts to the GPU, mitigating PCIe transfer overhead and balancing workload for the CPU and GPU during inference. Compared to state-of-the-art frameworks, CoX-MoE delivers significant gains, achieving up to 7.1x and 2.4x higher throughput than FlexGen and MoE-Lightning, respectively.

Large-scale vision-language mixture-of-experts (VL-MoE) models provide strong multimodal capability, but efficient deployment on memory-constrained platforms remains difficult. Existing MoE offloading systems are largely designed for text-centric workloads and become much less effective for visual-heavy inputs, where large numbers of visual tokens induce broader and less predictable expert accesses. We present VisMMoE, a VL-MoE offloading system built on a single systems insight: pruning redundant visual tokens can improve offloading not only by reducing computation, but also by reshaping expert demand. We refer to this effect as \textit{visual-expert affinity}: token pruning makes expert accesses more concentrated within layers and more stable across layers, producing a smaller and more predictable expert working set. Guided by this insight, VisMMoE combines affinity-aware token compression, lookahead expert prediction, and cache/pipeline orchestration to improve expert locality and prefetch effectiveness under tight memory budgets. We implement VisMMoE on multiple frameworks and evaluate it on representative VL-MoE models and benchmarks. VisMMoE improves end-to-end inference performance by up to 2.68x and 1.61x, respectively, over strong baselines for today's VL-MoE deployments while maintaining competitive accuracy.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have become mainstream for scaling language models to hundreds of billions of expert parameters. Despite sparse expert activation, existing inference engines keep all experts GPU-resident, crowding out the key-value cache in large-batch, long-output offline workloads. We present FluxMoE, which decouples experts from physical GPU residency and adapts their footprint to available memory through a new \emph{expert paging} abstraction. FluxMoE combines PagedTensor for transparent remapping, a bandwidth-balanced hierarchy spanning losslessly compressed GPU memory and host DRAM, and a budget-aware residency planner. Unlike CPU-GPU co-inference and whole-layer offloading, FluxMoE streams weights on demand while keeping expert computation on GPUs. We implement FluxMoE atop vLLM and evaluate it on three MoE models. For GLM-4.5 on 8$\times$H20 GPUs, FluxMoE delivers up to 7.2$\times$ vLLM's throughput and 79.0% lower average Time-Per-Output-Token (TPOT), without measurable model-quality loss using lossless compression. For Mixtral-8$\times$7B-Instruct on 2$\times$L40S GPUs, where weight-resident vLLM cannot fit, FluxMoE delivers 4.3$\times$ KTransformers's throughput and 29.1% lower average TPOT.