Ashish Sirasao

Hyoukjun Kwon, Krishnakumar Nair, Jamin Seo et al.

Real-time multi-task multi-model (MTMM) workloads, a new form of deep learning inference workloads, are emerging for applications areas like extended reality (XR) to support metaverse use cases. These workloads combine user interactivity with computationally complex machine learning (ML) activities. Compared to standard ML applications, these ML workloads present unique difficulties and constraints. Real-time MTMM workloads impose heterogeneity and concurrency requirements on future ML systems and devices, necessitating the development of new capabilities. This paper begins with a discussion of the various characteristics of these real-time MTMM ML workloads and presents an ontology for evaluating the performance of future ML hardware for XR systems. Next, we present XRBENCH, a collection of MTMM ML tasks, models, and usage scenarios that execute these models in three representative ways: cascaded, concurrent, and cascaded-concurrent for XR use cases. Finally, we emphasize the need for new metrics that capture the requirements properly. We hope that our work will stimulate research and lead to the development of a new generation of ML systems for XR use cases. XRBench is available as an open-source project: https://github.com/XRBench

Devleena Das, Rajeev Patwari, Elliott Delaye et al.

Aggressive weight quantization to 2-bit precision offers substantial throughput and memory gains for large language model (LLM) inference, but typically incurs severe accuracy degradation. These gains are particularly relevant for edge and on-device deployment, where memory capacity and bandwidth are primary constraints. In this work, we extend Recover-LoRA -- a lightweight, data-free accuracy recovery method originally developed for general model weight corruption -- to the setting of ultra-low-bit quantization. We propose a selective mixed-precision strategy in which only gate and up projection layers of the MLP are quantized to 2-bit (W2), while all other linear layers remain at higher precision, yielding a mixed-precision GateUp configuration. We demonstrate via roofline analysis across three model families (4B--20B) and two hardware platforms that a W4/W2-GateUp deployment (4-bit base with 2-bit gate/up) delivers 7.5--23.3\% TPS improvement over uniform W4 depending on model and context length, while confining quantization error to a predictable subset of layers. We then apply Recover-LoRA -- training low-rank adapters on the quantized layers via logit distillation with synthetic data -- to recover accuracy lost from 2-bit quantization of the gate and up layers. In a case study on Qwen3-4B, Recover-LoRA achieves 80--95\% accuracy recovery on 9 of 12 benchmarks, using only 10k synthetic training samples and no labeled data. We further demonstrate that synthetic data performs comparably to curated labeled data for distillation-based recovery, and that recovery generalizes to out-of-distribution evaluation tasks. Our results present Recover-LoRA as a practical post-quantization accuracy recovery tool for aggressive weight compression in deployment settings.

Yuchen Yang, Xinyi Wang, Dong Li et al.

Full surround monodepth (FSM) methods can learn from multiple camera views simultaneously in a self-supervised manner to predict the scale-aware depth, which is more practical for real-world applications in contrast to scale-ambiguous depth from a standalone monocular camera. In this work, we focus on enhancing the scale-awareness of FSM methods for depth estimation. To this end, we propose to improve FSM from two perspectives: depth network structure optimization and training pipeline optimization. First, we construct a transformer-based depth network with neighbor-enhanced cross-view attention (NCA). The cross-attention modules can better aggregate the cross-view context in both global and neighboring views. Second, we formulate a transformer-based feature matching scheme with progressive training to improve the structure-from-motion (SfM) pipeline. That allows us to learn scale-awareness with sufficient matches and further facilitate network convergence by removing mismatches based on SfM loss. Experiments demonstrate that the resulting Scale-aware full surround monodepth (SA-FSM) method largely improves the scale-aware depth predictions without median-scaling at the test time, and performs favorably against the state-of-the-art FSM methods, e.g., surpassing SurroundDepth by 3.8% in terms of accuracy at delta<1.25 on the DDAD benchmark.

Jianming Tong, Hanshen Xiao, Krishna Kumar Nair et al.

Multi-user virtual reality enables immersive interaction. However, rendering avatars for numerous participants on each headset incurs prohibitive computational overhead, limiting scalability. We introduce a framework, Privatar, to offload avatar reconstruction from headset to untrusted devices within the same local network while safeguarding attacks against adversaries capable of intercepting offloaded data. Privatar's key insight is that domain-specific knowledge of avatar reconstruction enables provably private offloading at minimal cost. (1) System level. We observe avatar reconstruction is frequency-domain decomposable via BDCT with negligible quality drop, and propose Horizontal Partitioning (HP) to keep high-energy frequency components on-device and offloads only low-energy components. HP offloads local computation while reducing information leakage to low-energy subsets only. (2) Privacy level. For individually offloaded, multi-dimensional signals without aggregation, worst-case local Differential Privacy requires prohibitive noise, ruining utility. We observe users' expression statistical distribution are slowly changing over time and trackable online, and hence propose Distribution-Aware Minimal Perturbation. DAMP minimizes noise based on each user's expression distribution to significantly reduce its effects on utility, retaining formal privacy guarantee. Combined, HP provides empirical privacy against expression identification attacks. DAMP further augments it to offer a formal guarantee against arbitrary adversaries. On a Meta Quest Pro, Privatar supports 2.37x more concurrent users at 6.5% higher reconstruction loss and 9% energy overhead, providing a better throughout-loss Pareto frontier over quantization, sparsity and local construction baselines. Privatar provides both provable privacy guarantee and stays robust against both empirical and NN-based attacks.

Guanchen Li, Xiandong Zhao, Lian Liu et al.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are engineered to be robust in contextual understanding and exhibit outstanding performance in various natural language processing tasks. However, their considerable size incurs significant computational and storage costs. Modern pruning strategies employ one-shot techniques to compress PLMs without the need for retraining on task-specific or otherwise general data; however, these approaches often lead to an indispensable reduction in performance. In this paper, we propose SDS, a Sparse-Dense-Sparse pruning framework to enhance the performance of the pruned PLMs from a weight distribution optimization perspective. We outline the pruning process in three steps. Initially, we prune less critical connections in the model using conventional one-shot pruning methods. Next, we reconstruct a dense model featuring a pruning-friendly weight distribution by reactivating pruned connections with sparse regularization. Finally, we perform a second pruning round, yielding a superior pruned model compared to the initial pruning. Experimental results demonstrate that SDS outperforms the state-of-the-art pruning techniques SparseGPT and Wanda under an identical sparsity configuration. For instance, SDS reduces perplexity by 9.13 on Raw-Wikitext2 and improves accuracy by an average of 2.05% across multiple zero-shot benchmarks for OPT-125M with 2:4 sparsity.

Mingjie Lu, Yuanxian Huang, Ji Liu et al.

Understanding driving scenarios is crucial to realizing autonomous driving. Previous works such as map learning and BEV lane detection neglect the connection relationship between lane instances, and traffic elements detection tasks usually neglect the relationship with lane lines. To address these issues, the task is presented which includes 4 sub-tasks, the detection of traffic elements, the detection of lane centerlines, reasoning connection relationships among lanes, and reasoning assignment relationships between lanes and traffic elements. We present Separated RoadTopoFormer to tackle the issues, which is an end-to-end framework that detects lane centerline and traffic elements with reasoning relationships among them. We optimize each module separately to prevent interaction with each other and aggregate them together with few finetunes. For two detection heads, we adopted a DETR-like architecture to detect objects, and for the relationship head, we concat two instance features from front detectors and feed them to the classifier to obtain relationship probability. Our final submission achieves 0.445 OLS, which is competitive in both sub-task and combined scores.

Yixing Xu, Chao Li, Xuanwu Yin et al.

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is one of the most popular methods among parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods to adapt pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to specific downstream tasks. However, the model trained based on LoRA often has an unsatisfactory performance due to its low-rank assumption. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Dual LoRA to improve the performance by incorporating an inductive bias into the original LoRA. Specifically, we separate low-rank matrices into two groups: the magnitude group to control whether or not and how far we should update a parameter and the direction group to decide whether this parameter should move forward or backward, to better simulate the parameter updating process of the full fine-tuning based on gradient-based optimization algorithms. We show that this can be simply achieved by adding a ReLU function to the magnitude group and a sign function to the direction group. We conduct several experiments over a wide range of NLP tasks, including natural language generation (NLG), understanding (NLU), and commonsense reasoning datasets on GPT-2, RoBERTa, DeBERTa, and LLaMA-1/2/3 as baseline models. The results show that we consistently outperform LoRA and its state-of-the-art variants with the same number of trainable parameters.

Sai Gokhale, Devleena Das, Rajeev Patwari et al.

Long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant memory bottlenecks during inference due to the linear growth of key-value (KV) cache with sequence length. While individual optimization techniques like KV cache quantization, chunked prefill, and model weight quantization have shown promise, their joint effects and optimal configurations for edge deployment remain underexplored. We introduce KV Pareto, a systems-level framework that systematically maps the trade-off frontier between total memory consumption and task accuracy across these three complementary optimization techniques. Our framework evaluates multiple LLM architectures (Qwen, Llama, Mistral) with varying KV quantization schemes (int2/4/8, mixed-precision), granularities (per-token, per-tensor, per-block), and 4-bit weight quantization via AWQ. Our framework identifies model-specific Pareto-optimal configurations that achieve 68-78% total memory reduction with minimal (1-3%) accuracy degradation on long-context tasks. We additionally verify the selected frontiers on additional benchmarks of Needle-in-a-Haystack, GSM8k and MMLU as well as extended context lengths of up to 128k to demonstrate the practical need of joint optimization for efficient LLM inference.

Hanyu Wei, Zunhai Su, Peng Lu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) underpin interactive multimedia applications such as captioning, retrieval, recommendation, and creative content generation, yet their autoregressive decoding incurs substantial latency. Speculative decoding reduces latency using a lightweight draft model, but deployment is often limited by the cost and complexity of acquiring, tuning, and maintaining an effective draft model. Recent approaches usually require auxiliary training or specialization, and even training-free methods incur costly search or optimization. We propose SDFP, a fully training-free and plug-and-play framework that builds the draft model via Fisher Information Trace (FIT)-based layer pruning of a given LLM. Using layer sensitivity as a proxy for output perturbation, SDFP removes low-impact layers to obtain a compact draft while preserving compatibility with the original model for standard speculative verification. SDFP needs no additional training, hyperparameter tuning, or separately maintained drafts, enabling rapid, deployment-friendly draft construction. Across benchmarks, SDFP delivers 1.32x-1.5x decoding speedup without altering the target model's output distribution, supporting low-latency multimedia applications.

Haowei Zhu, Dehua Tang, Ji Liu et al.

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in the field of image generation due to their outstanding capabilities. However, these models require substantial computing resources because of the multi-step denoising process during inference. While traditional pruning methods have been employed to optimize these models, the retraining process necessitates large-scale training datasets and extensive computational costs to maintain generalization ability, making it neither convenient nor efficient. Recent studies attempt to utilize the similarity of features across adjacent denoising stages to reduce computational costs through simple and static strategies. However, these strategies cannot fully harness the potential of the similar feature patterns across adjacent timesteps. In this work, we propose a novel pruning method that derives an efficient diffusion model via a more intelligent and differentiable pruner. At the core of our approach is casting the model pruning process into a SubNet search process. Specifically, we first introduce a SuperNet based on standard diffusion via adding some backup connections built upon the similar features. We then construct a plugin pruner network and design optimization losses to identify redundant computation. Finally, our method can identify an optimal SubNet through few-step gradient optimization and a simple post-processing procedure. We conduct extensive experiments on various diffusion models including Stable Diffusion series and DiTs. Our DiP-GO approach achieves 4.4 x speedup for SD-1.5 without any loss of accuracy, significantly outperforming the previous state-of-the-art methods.

Ji Liu, Dehua Tang, Yuanxian Huang et al.

Traditional channel-wise pruning methods by reducing network channels struggle to effectively prune efficient CNN models with depth-wise convolutional layers and certain efficient modules, such as popular inverted residual blocks. Prior depth pruning methods by reducing network depths are not suitable for pruning some efficient models due to the existence of some normalization layers. Moreover, finetuning subnet by directly removing activation layers would corrupt the original model weights, hindering the pruned model from achieving high performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel depth pruning method for efficient models. Our approach proposes a novel block pruning strategy and progressive training method for the subnet. Additionally, we extend our pruning method to vision transformer models. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing depth pruning methods across various pruning configurations. We obtained three pruned ConvNeXtV1 models with our method applying on ConvNeXtV1, which surpass most SOTA efficient models with comparable inference performance. Our method also achieves state-of-the-art pruning performance on the vision transformer model.

Ji Liu, Zifeng Zhang, Mingjie Lu et al.

Lane detection is a fundamental task in autonomous driving, and has achieved great progress as deep learning emerges. Previous anchor-based methods often design dense anchors, which highly depend on the training dataset and remain fixed during inference. We analyze that dense anchors are not necessary for lane detection, and propose a transformer-based lane detection framework based on a sparse anchor mechanism. To this end, we generate sparse anchors with position-aware lane queries and angle queries instead of traditional explicit anchors. We adopt Horizontal Perceptual Attention (HPA) to aggregate the lane features along the horizontal direction, and adopt Lane-Angle Cross Attention (LACA) to perform interactions between lane queries and angle queries. We also propose Lane Perceptual Attention (LPA) based on deformable cross attention to further refine the lane predictions. Our method, named Sparse Laneformer, is easy-to-implement and end-to-end trainable. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Sparse Laneformer performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods, e.g., surpassing Laneformer by 3.0% F1 score and O2SFormer by 0.7% F1 score with fewer MACs on CULane with the same ResNet-34 backbone.

Rajeev Patwari, Ashish Sirasao, Devleena Das

Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly deployed as local agents on personal devices with CPUs, NPUs and integrated GPUs. However, forecasting inference performance on devices with such heterogeneity remains challenging due to the dynamic compute and memory demands. Existing approaches rely on GPU benchmarking or machine learning-based latency predictors, which are often hardware-specific and lack generalizability. To this end, we introduce LIFE, a lightweight and modular analytical framework that is comprised of modular analytical model of operators, configurable to characterize LLM inference workloads in a hardware and dataset-agnostic manner. LIFE characterizes the influence of software and model optimizations, such as quantization, KV cache compression, LoRA adapters, chunked prefill, different attentions, and operator fusion, on performance metrics such as time-to-first-token (TTFT), time-per-output-token (TPOT) and tokens-per-second (TPS). LIFE enables performance forecasting using only hardware specifications, such as TOPS and memory bandwidth, without requiring extensive dataset benchmarking. We validate LIFE's forecasting with inference on AMD Ryzen CPUs, NPUs, iGPUs and NVIDIA V100 GPUs, with Llama2-7B variants, demonstrating the utility of LIFE in forecasting LLM performance through lens of system efficiency to enable efficient LLM deployment across different hardware platforms.

Devleena Das, Rajeev Patwari, Ashish Sirasao

Inference optimizations such as quantization, pruning, format and datatype conversion, model export, and serialization can lead to functional degradations in language model task performance. While most efforts on performance recovery for deployment focus on robust quantization techniques, we focus on recovering model accuracies from any sources that degrade model weights, such as improper model serialization. In this work, we propose Recover-LoRA, a lightweight and dataset agnostic method to recover accuracy in degraded models. Recover-LoRA uses synthetic data and logit distillation to learn LoRA adapters on selective layers that facilitate aligning the degraded model to its full precision model. We investigate the utility of Recover-LoRA across a diverse set of small language models (SLMs), including models with varying attention architectures, multi-head attention (MHA) and group-query attention (GQA), as well as several evaluation datasets. Our results show that Recover-LoRA recovers model accuracies by 5-17% on MHA and GQA SLMs.

Rachid Karami, Rajeev Patwari, Hyoukjun Kwon et al.

The integration of generative AI models, particularly large language models (LLMs), into real-time multi-model AI applications such as video conferencing and gaming is giving rise to a new class of workloads: real-time generative AI (RTGen). These workloads combine the compute intensity and dynamic execution patterns of generative models with the stringent latency and concurrency constraints of real-time inference. To meet the diverse demands of RTGen workloads, modern edge platforms increasingly adopt heterogeneous system-on-chip (SoC) architectures that integrate CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs. Despite the potential of heterogeneous SoC, the scheduling space complexity and performance implications of RTGen workloads on such platforms remain underexplored. In this work, we perform a comprehensive characterization of RTGen workloads on AMD's latest heterogeneous SoC, Ryzen AI. We construct realistic multi-model scenarios inspired by industry use cases and profile model performance across all available backends. Using this data, we evaluate five scheduling policies and their impact on both real-time metrics (e.g., deadline violation rate) and LLM performance (e.g., time-to-first-token and tokens-per-second). Our results show that scheduling decisions significantly affect workload performance (e.g., leading to a 41.7% difference in deadline violation rates on average), and highlight the need for scheduling strategies that are aware of workload dynamics and hardware heterogeneity. Our findings underscore the importance of workload-aware, dynamic heterogeneous scheduling in enabling high-performance, on-device RTGen applications.

Vijay Janapa Reddi, Christine Cheng, David Kanter et al.

Machine-learning (ML) hardware and software system demand is burgeoning. Driven by ML applications, the number of different ML inference systems has exploded. Over 100 organizations are building ML inference chips, and the systems that incorporate existing models span at least three orders of magnitude in power consumption and five orders of magnitude in performance; they range from embedded devices to data-center solutions. Fueling the hardware are a dozen or more software frameworks and libraries. The myriad combinations of ML hardware and ML software make assessing ML-system performance in an architecture-neutral, representative, and reproducible manner challenging. There is a clear need for industry-wide standard ML benchmarking and evaluation criteria. MLPerf Inference answers that call. In this paper, we present our benchmarking method for evaluating ML inference systems. Driven by more than 30 organizations as well as more than 200 ML engineers and practitioners, MLPerf prescribes a set of rules and best practices to ensure comparability across systems with wildly differing architectures. The first call for submissions garnered more than 600 reproducible inference-performance measurements from 14 organizations, representing over 30 systems that showcase a wide range of capabilities. The submissions attest to the benchmark's flexibility and adaptability.

Sean O. Settle, Manasa Bollavaram, Paolo D'Alberto et al.

Deep learning as a means to inferencing has proliferated thanks to its versatility and ability to approach or exceed human-level accuracy. These computational models have seemingly insatiable appetites for computational resources not only while training, but also when deployed at scales ranging from data centers all the way down to embedded devices. As such, increasing consideration is being made to maximize the computational efficiency given limited hardware and energy resources and, as a result, inferencing with reduced precision has emerged as a viable alternative to the IEEE 754 Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic. We propose a quantization scheme that allows inferencing to be carried out using arithmetic that is fundamentally more efficient when compared to even half-precision floating-point. Our quantization procedure is significant in that we determine our quantization scheme parameters by calibrating against its reference floating-point model using a single inference batch rather than (re)training and achieve end-to-end post quantization accuracies comparable to the reference model.