6.3LGMay 12
ROMER: Expert Replacement and Router Calibration for Robust MoE LLMs on Analog Compute-in-Memory SystemsWenyong Zhou, Yuannuo Feng, Yizhe Chen et al.
Large language models (LLMs) with mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures achieve remarkable scalability by sparsely activating a subset of experts per token, yet their frequent expert switching creates memory bandwidth bottlenecks that compute-in-memory (CIM) architectures are well-suited to mitigate. However, analog CIM systems suffer from inherent hardware imperfections that perturb stored weights, and its negative impact on MoE-based LLMs in noisy CIM environments remains unexplored. In this work, we present the first systematic investigation of MoE-based LLMs under noise model calibrated with real chip measurements, revealing that hardware noise critically disrupts expert load balance and renders clean-trained routing decisions consistently suboptimal. Based on these findings, we propose ROMER, a post-training calibration framework that (1) replaces underactivated experts with high-frequency ones to restore load balance, and (2) recalibrates router logits via percentile-based normalization to stabilize routing under noise. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that ROMER achieves up to 58.6\%, 58.8\%, and 59.8\% reduction in perplexity under real-chip noise conditions for DeepSeek-MoE, Qwen-MoE, and OLMoE, respectively, establishing its effectiveness and generalizability across diverse MoE architectures.
17.4CLJul 30
Recall Before You Rank: Similarity-Guided Top-$K$ Reuse for Efficient Long-Context AttentionWenshuai Yao, Wenyong Zhou, Hanyong Shao et al.
Top-$K$ sparse attention reduces the cost of Softmax and value aggregation by attending to only a small subset of key--value (KV) entries. However, identifying this subset still requires scoring the current query against the full KV cache and performing global Top-$K$ selection, leaving selector cost linear in context length and limiting the practical efficiency of sparse attention for long-context decoding. In this paper, we introduce ReTopK, a training-free method that accelerates dynamic Top-$K$ attention by reusing historical retrieval decisions. ReTopK builds on the observation that similar queries often attend to overlapping supports and that partially overlapping supports can still preserve most of the Exact Top-$K$ attention mass. For each attention head, it maintains a bounded cache of historical query--support pairs, retrieves the most similar cached queries for each new query, unions their stored supports with a recent window, and reranks only the resulting compact candidate set using exact current-query scores. A similarity-based fallback invokes full-history Exact Top-$K$ when reuse is unreliable, while periodic exact refreshes limit cache drift. ReTopK retains the complete KV cache and reuses only selected indices, rather than historical scores, attention weights, or outputs. Across 16K--128K contexts, ReTopK achieves the lowest PG19 perplexity and the highest NIAH and LongBench scores among the evaluated approximate methods. At 128K with $K=512$, ReTopK incurs only a 0.50\% perplexity increase over Exact Top-$K$ while accelerating attention computation by $3.07\times$.
7.1LGApr 12, 2025
MatWheel: Addressing Data Scarcity in Materials Science Through Synthetic DataWentao Li, Yizhe Chen, Jiangjie Qiu et al.
Data scarcity and the high cost of annotation have long been persistent challenges in the field of materials science. Inspired by its potential in other fields like computer vision, we propose the MatWheel framework, which train the material property prediction model using the synthetic data generated by the conditional generative model. We explore two scenarios: fully-supervised and semi-supervised learning. Using CGCNN for property prediction and Con-CDVAE as the conditional generative model, experiments on two data-scarce material property datasets from Matminer database are conducted. Results show that synthetic data has potential in extreme data-scarce scenarios, achieving performance close to or exceeding that of real samples in all two tasks. We also find that pseudo-labels have little impact on generated data quality. Future work will integrate advanced models and optimize generation conditions to boost the effectiveness of the materials data flywheel.