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 gpu utilization


FlashMoE: Fast Distributed MoE in a Single Kernel

Neural Information Processing Systems

The computational sparsity of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enables sub-linear growth in compute cost as model size increases, thus offering a scalable path to training massive neural networks. However, existing implementations suffer from low GPU utilization, significant latency overhead, and a fundamental inability to leverage task locality, primarily due to CPU-managed scheduling, host-initiated communication, and frequent kernel launches. To overcome these limitations, we develop FlashMoE, a fully GPU-resident MoE operator that fuses expert computation and inter-GPU communication into a single persistent GPU kernel. FlashMoE enables fine-grained pipelining of dispatch, compute, and combine phases, eliminating launch overheads and reducing idle gaps. Unlike existing work, FlashMoE obviates bulk-synchronous collectives for one-sided, device-initiated, inter-GPU (R)DMA transfers, thus unlocking payload efficiency, where we eliminate bloated or redundant network payloads in sparsely activated layers. When evaluated on an 8-H100 GPU node with MoE models having up to 128 experts and 16K token sequences, FlashMoE achieves up to 9 higher GPU utilization, 6 lower latency, 5.7 higher throughput, and 4 better overlap efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines--despite using FP32 while baselines use FP16. FlashMoE shows that principled GPU kernel-hardware co-design is key to unlocking the performance ceiling of large-scale distributed ML.


Increasing GPU Utilization during Generative Inference for Higher Throughput

Neural Information Processing Systems

Apart from the already-large model parameters, the key/value (KV) cache that holds information about previous tokens in a sequence can grow to be even larger than the model itself. This problem is exacerbated in one of the current LLM serving frameworks which reserves the maximum sequence length of memory for the KV cache to guarantee generating a complete sequence as they do not know the output sequence length. This restricts us to use a smaller batch size leading to lower GPU utilization and above all, lower throughput. We argue that designing a system with a priori knowledge of the output sequence can mitigate this problem.


S 3 : Increasing GPU Utilization during Generative Inference for Higher Throughput

Neural Information Processing Systems

Apart from the already-large model parameters, the key/value (KV) cache that holds information about previous tokens in a sequence can grow to be even larger than the model itself. This problem is exacerbated in one of the current LLM serving frameworks which reserves the maximum sequence length of memory for the KV cache to guarantee generating a complete sequence as they do not know the output sequence length. This restricts us to use a smaller batch size leading to lower GPU utilization and above all, lower throughput. We argue that designing a system with a priori knowledge of the output sequence can mitigate this problem. To this end, we propose $S^3$, which predicts the output sequence length, schedules generation queries based on the prediction to increase device resource utilization and throughput, and handle mispredictions. Our proposed method achieves 6.49 throughput over those systems that assume the worst case for the output sequence length.


XAI-on-RAN: Explainable, AI-native, and GPU-Accelerated RAN Towards 6G

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI)-native radio access networks (RANs) will serve vertical industries with stringent requirements: smart grids, autonomous vehicles, remote healthcare, industrial automation, etc. To achieve these requirements, modern 5G/6G design increasingly leverage AI for network optimization, but the opacity of AI decisions poses risks in mission-critical domains. These use cases are often delivered via non-public networks (NPNs) or dedicated network slices, where reliability and safety are vital. In this paper, we motivate the need for transparent and trustworthy AI in high-stakes communications (e.g., healthcare, industrial automation, and robotics) by drawing on 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP)'s vision for non-public networks. We design a mathematical framework to model the trade-offs between transparency (explanation fidelity and fairness), latency, and graphics processing unit (GPU) utilization in deploying explainable AI (XAI) models. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our proposed hybrid XAI model xAI-Native, consistently surpasses conventional baseline models in performance.


FlashMoE: Fast Distributed MoE in a Single Kernel

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The computational sparsity of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enables sub-linear growth in compute cost as model size increases, thus offering a scalable path to training massive neural networks. However, existing implementations suffer from low GPU utilization, significant latency overhead, and a fundamental inability to leverage task locality, primarily due to CPU-managed scheduling, host-initiated communication, and frequent kernel launches. To overcome these limitations, we develop FlashMoE, a fully GPU-resident MoE operator that fuses expert computation and inter-GPU communication into a single persistent GPU kernel. FlashMoE enables fine-grained pipelining of dispatch, compute, and combine phases, eliminating launch overheads and reducing idle gaps. Unlike existing work, FlashMoE eliminates bulk-synchronous collectives for one-sided, device-initiated, inter-GPU (R)DMA transfers, thereby unlocking payload efficiency by eliminating bloated or redundant network payloads in sparsely activated layers. When evaluated on an 8-H100 GPU node with MoE models comprising up to 128 experts and 16K token sequences, FlashMoE achieves up to 9x higher GPU utilization, 6x lower latency, 5.7x higher throughput, and 4x better overlap efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines, despite using FP32, whereas the baselines use FP16. FlashMoE shows that principled GPU kernel-hardware co-design is key to unlocking the performance ceiling of large-scale distributed ML. We provide code at https://github.com/osayamenja/FlashMoE.


MinatoLoader: Accelerating Machine Learning Training Through Efficient Data Preprocessing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Data loaders are used by Machine Learning (ML) frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow to apply transformations to data before feeding it into the accelerator. This operation is called data preprocessing. Data preprocessing plays an important role in the ML training workflow because if it is inefficiently pipelined with the training, it can yield high GPU idleness, resulting in important training delays. Unfortunately, existing data loaders turn out to waste GPU resources, with $76\%$ GPU idleness when using the PyTorch data loader, for example. One key source of inefficiency is the variability in preprocessing time across samples within the same dataset. Existing data loaders are oblivious to this variability, and they construct batches without any consideration of slow or fast samples. In this case, the entire batch is delayed by a single slow sample, stalling the training pipeline and resulting in head-of-line blocking. To address these inefficiencies, we present MinatoLoader, a general-purpose data loader for PyTorch that accelerates training and improves GPU utilization. MinatoLoader is designed for a single-server setup, containing multiple GPUs. It continuously prepares data in the background and actively constructs batches by prioritizing fast-to-preprocess samples, while slower samples are processed in parallel. We evaluate MinatoLoader on servers with V100 and A100 GPUs. On a machine with four A100 GPUs, MinatoLoader improves the training time of a wide range of workloads by up to $7.5\times$ ($3.6\times$ on average) over PyTorch DataLoader and Pecan, and up to $3\times$ ($2.2\times$ on average) over DALI. It also increases average GPU utilization from 46.4\% with PyTorch to 90.45\%, while preserving model accuracy and enabling faster convergence.


Improving training time and GPU utilization in geo-distributed language model training

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The widespread adoption of language models (LMs) has caused a huge surge in demand for GPUs. Training large LMs requires tens of thousands of GPUs and housing them in the same datacenter (DC) is a challenge due to many constraints including availability of peak power. We focus on training such models across multiple DCs connected via the Wide-Area-Network (WAN). We built Atlas that speeds up the training time using novel workload-aware temporal bandwidth sharing and other design choices. While Atlas improves the training time, it does not completely eliminate the bubbles (idle GPU cycles). We built BubbleTea that runs prefill-as-a-service (part of LM inference) during the bubbles thus improving the GPU utilization without any impact on training. Compared to state-of-the-art designs, Atlas and BubbleTea together achieve up to 17x faster training, and up to 94% GPU utilization. The code will be open-sourced.


Latent Variable Modeling in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Expectation-Maximization for UAV-Based Wildlife Protection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

I N T R O D U C T I O N T h e I r a n i a n l e o p a r d ( P a n t h e r a p a rd u s t u l l i a n a), a subspecies of the P ersian leopard, is critically endangered due to illegal poaching, habitat fragmentation, and h u m a n - w i l d l i f e c o n f l i c t. C o n s e r v a t i o n e f f o r t s a r e i n c r e a s i n g l y t u r n i n g t o t e c h n o l o g y f o r i n n o v a t i v e m o n i t o r i n g a n d i n t e r v e n t i o n m e t h o d s . Metric 10 Agents T raining Time (hrs) Memor y Usage (GB) CPU Utilization (%) GPU Utilization (%) T raining Time Increase (%) Memor y Usage Increase (%) 5.2 4.5 65 45 - - 20 Agents 50 Agents 6.3 5.1 75 55 20 15 8.0 6.8 85 70 53 51 T able 4. P ercentage of High-Risk zones Covered by Each Method (Mean std) F igure 3. P oacher Detection R ate Across Episodes. Higher Entropy Indicates More Diverse Exploration T able 5. KL Divergence between Inferred q(z) and Ground T ruth T ask Distribution T h e E M - b a s e d p o l i c y e x h i b i t s a n i n i t i a l l y h i g h e n t r o p y, e n c o u r a g i n g d i v e r s e a c t i o n s a m p l i n g, a n d g r a d u a l l y an n e a l s as th e po l i c y be c o m e s co n f i d e n t . Metric Cooperative Coverage Number of Agents Involved Coverage Efficiency (%) P oa ch er D et ec ti on R at e (%) Collision Incidents 6 85.3 - 0 P oacher Detection Coordination Conflict A voidance 8 - 92.1 0 10 - - 0 It enables conser vationists and security forces to allocate limited resources more effectiv e l y a n d a c t i n r e a l t i m e b a s e d o n a c t i o n a b l e i n t e l l i g e n c e d e r i v e d f r o m a u t o n o m o u s a g e n t s .


Increasing GPU Utilization during Generative Inference for Higher Throughput

Neural Information Processing Systems

Apart from the already-large model parameters, the key/value (KV) cache that holds information about previous tokens in a sequence can grow to be even larger than the model itself. This problem is exacerbated in one of the current LLM serving frameworks which reserves the maximum sequence length of memory for the KV cache to guarantee generating a complete sequence as they do not know the output sequence length. This restricts us to use a smaller batch size leading to lower GPU utilization and above all, lower throughput. We argue that designing a system with a priori knowledge of the output sequence can mitigate this problem.


OPPO: Accelerating PPO-based RLHF via Pipeline Overlap

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)-based reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a widely adopted paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, its training pipeline suffers from substantial inefficiencies due to sequential multi-model dependencies (e.g., reward model depends on actor outputs) and long-tail response lengths, where a few long responses straggle the stage completion. We present OPPO, a novel, lightweight, and model-agnostic PPO-based RLHF framework that improves training efficiency by overlapping pipeline execution. OPPO introduces two novel techniques: (1) Intra-step overlap, which streams upstream model outputs (e.g., actor model) in right-sized chunks, enabling the downstream model (e.g., reward) to begin prefill while the upstream continues decoding; and (2) Inter-step overlap, which adaptively overcommits a few prompts and defers long generations to future steps, mitigating tail latency without discarding partial work. OPPO integrates easily with existing PPO implementations with a few lines of code change. Extensive evaluations show that OPPO accelerates PPO-based RLHF training by $1.8 \times-2.8 \times$ and improves GPU utilization by $1.4 \times-2.1 \times$ without compromising training convergence.