AdaServe: SLO-Customized LLM Serving with Fine-Grained Speculative Decoding

This paper introduces AdaServe, the first LLM serving system to support SLO customization through fine-grained speculative decoding. AdaServe leverages the logits of a draft model to predict the speculative accuracy of tokens and employs a theoretically optimal algorithm to construct token trees for verification. To accommodate diverse SLO requirements without compromising throughput, AdaServe employs a speculation-and-selection scheme that first constructs candidate token trees for each request and then dynamically selects tokens to meet individual SLO constraints while optimizing throughput. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that AdaServe achieves up to 73% higher SLO attainment and 74% higher goodput compared to state-of-the-art systems. These results underscore AdaServe's potential to enhance the efficiency and adaptability of LLM deployments across varied application scenarios.

TidalDecode: Fast and Accurate LLM Decoding with Position Persistent Sparse Attention

Large language models (LLMs) have driven significant advancements across diverse NLP tasks, with long-context models gaining prominence for handling extended inputs. However, the expanding key-value (KV) cache size required by Transformer architectures intensifies the memory constraints, particularly during the decoding phase, creating a significant bottleneck. Existing sparse attention mechanisms designed to address this bottleneck have two limitations: (1) they often fail to reliably identify the most relevant tokens for attention, and (2) they overlook the spatial coherence of token selection across consecutive Transformer layers, which can lead to performance degradation and substantial overhead in token selection. This paper introduces TidalDecode, a simple yet effective algorithm and system for fast and accurate LLM decoding through position persistent sparse attention. TidalDecode leverages the spatial coherence of tokens selected by existing sparse attention methods and introduces a few token selection layers that perform full attention to identify the tokens with the highest attention scores, while all other layers perform sparse attention with the pre-selected tokens. This design enables TidalDecode to substantially reduce the overhead of token selection for sparse attention without sacrificing the quality of the generated results. Evaluation on a diverse set of LLMs and tasks shows that TidalDecode closely matches the generative performance of full attention methods while reducing the LLM decoding latency by up to 2.1x.

Quarl: A Learning-Based Quantum Circuit Optimizer

Optimizing quantum circuits is challenging due to the very large search space of functionally equivalent circuits and the necessity of applying transformations that temporarily decrease performance to achieve a final performance improvement. This paper presents Quarl, a learning-based quantum circuit optimizer. Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to quantum circuit optimization raises two main challenges: the large and varying action space and the non-uniform state representation. Quarl addresses these issues with a novel neural architecture and RL-training procedure. Our neural architecture decomposes the action space into two parts and leverages graph neural networks in its state representation, both of which are guided by the intuition that optimization decisions can be mostly guided by local reasoning while allowing global circuit-wide reasoning. Our evaluation shows that Quarl significantly outperforms existing circuit optimizers on almost all benchmark circuits. Surprisingly, Quarl can learn to perform rotation merging, a complex, non-local circuit optimization implemented as a separate pass in existing optimizers.