6.7ARJul 31
Themis: Software-Defined Hardware PrefetchingKeisuke Kamahori, Neil Adit, Kan Zhu et al. · uw
Data cache misses represent a significant portion of stall cycles in datacenter workloads. Hardware prefetchers that reduce such stalls by fetching data ahead of time have become increasingly sophisticated. However, to achieve high coverage, they have to prefetch aggressively, generating many inaccurate accesses that waste memory bandwidth. This is problematic in datacenter environments where memory bandwidth is a limited resource due to high multi-tenancy. We observe that for datacenter workloads, inaccurate prefetches can be effectively filtered on a data page granularity, without sacrificing prefetch coverage. However, storing per-page metadata about prefetch usefulness in hardware is costly, so we propose a novel hardware-software interface for data prefetching: The software directs the hardware on where to prefetch, and the hardware identifies and issues prefetches in the regions of interest. We propose Themis, a profile-guided hardware prefetching solution that implements this new interface. Themis utilizes page-level hints stored in page-table entries to disable the prefetcher for certain data pages at runtime. Themis requires no binary or ISA changes and can be used to optimize processes without disrupting their execution. Themis is also orthogonal to existing works on prefetching and can be applied to optimize any hardware prefetcher. Our results show that Themis is able to achieve around 40% reduction in useless prefetch requests, resulting in speedup for all the evaluated prefetchers for datacenter workloads, including 4.1% for BOP, 3.1% for SPP+PPF, and 1.4% for Pythia.
VibeServe: Can AI Agents Build Bespoke LLM Serving Systems?Keisuke Kamahori, Shihang Li, Simon Peter et al.
For years, we have built LLM serving systems like any other critical infrastructure: a single general-purpose stack, hand-tuned over many engineer-years, meant to support every model and workload. In this paper, we take the opposite bet: a multi-agent loop that automatically synthesizes bespoke serving systems for different usage scenarios. We propose VibeServe, the first agentic loop that generates entire LLM serving stacks end-to-end. VibeServe uses an outer loop to plan and track the search over system designs, and an inner loop to implement candidates, check correctness, and measure performance on the target benchmark. In the standard deployment setting, where existing stacks are highly optimized, VibeServe remains competitive with vLLM, showing that generation-time specialization need not come at the cost of performance. More interestingly, in non-standard scenarios, VibeServe outperforms existing systems by exploiting opportunities that generic systems miss in six scenarios involving non-standard model architectures, workload knowledge, and hardware-specific optimizations. Together, these results suggest a different point in the design space for infrastructure software: generation-time specialization rather than runtime generality. Code is available at https://github.com/uw-syfi/vibe-serve.
Fiddler: CPU-GPU Orchestration for Fast Inference of Mixture-of-Experts ModelsKeisuke Kamahori, Tian Tang, Yile Gu et al. · uw
Large Language Models (LLMs) with the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have shown promising performance on various tasks. However, due to the huge model sizes, running them in resource-constrained environments where the GPU memory is not abundant is challenging. Some existing systems propose to use CPU resources to solve that, but they either suffer from the significant overhead of frequently moving data between CPU and GPU, or fail to consider distinct characteristics of CPUs and GPUs. This paper proposes Fiddler, a resource-efficient inference system for MoE models with limited GPU resources. Fiddler strategically utilizes CPU and GPU resources by determining the optimal execution strategy. Our evaluation shows that, unlike state-of-the-art systems that optimize for specific scenarios such as single batch inference or long prefill, Fiddler performs better in all scenarios. Compared against different baselines, Fiddler achieves 1.26 times speed up in single batch inference, 1.30 times in long prefill processing, and 11.57 times in beam search inference. The code of Fiddler is publicly available at https://github.com/efeslab/fiddler.
5.8AISep 30, 2025
AgentFlux: Decoupled Fine-Tuning & Inference for On-Device Agentic SystemsRohan Kadekodi, Zhan Jin, Keisuke Kamahori et al. · uw
The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) as agentic orchestrators has revolutionized task automation, but the need for privacy-preserving, cost-effective solutions demands on-device inference capabilities. However, local LLMs consistently underperform compared to frontier models in tool calling scenarios, struggling with both tool selection from large tool sets and accurate argument generation for complex parameter structures. We introduce a methodology that disaggregates a tool-calling task into two distinct subtasks: tool selection and argument generation. We propose "decoupled fine-tuning", a novel post-training approach that employs LoRA fine-tuning to create dedicated LoRA adapters for tool selection and tool-specific argument generation using separate loss masking for each of the subtasks. Furthermore, we present AgentFlux, an inference framework that leverages the LoRA adapters created using decoupled fine-tuning to perform efficient agent orchestration with the help of local models on end-user devices. AgentFlux decomposes the tool-call generation step into tool selection and argument generation, and dynamically loads the corresponding LoRA adapters to generate tool calls. Additionally, AgentFlux implements hierarchical orchestration to restrict the number of tools required for tool selection. Our experiments on the MCP-Bench benchmark demonstrate that the Qwen-2.5-7B model trained using decoupled fine-tuning improves the tool calling accuracy of the base model by 46%, and outperforms other local reasoning, non-reasoning and fine-tuned models of similar size in all cases, and models that are 2x larger, in most cases.