FlexEE: Self-Speculative and KV-Compatible Early Exiting for Offloading-Aware LLM Inference

📅 2026-09-15
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
为解决大语言模型推理中的计算和内存限制问题,FlexEE通过早期退出框架减少执行层数,利用层间监督、自推测解码和动态隐藏状态管理,实现高效推理。
📝 Abstract
Large language model (LLM) inference is often constrained by both computation and memory, especially in offloading-based deployments where model weights are transferred across memory hierarchies during autoregressive decoding. In this setting, reducing the number of executed layers can lower per-token latency while also avoiding costly weight movement. Motivated by this observation, we present FlexEE, an early exiting framework for resource-constrained and offloading-based LLM inference. FlexEE makes early exiting practical for LLM decoding through layer-wise exit supervision for reliable intermediate-layer prediction, self-speculative decoding over a Top-K local vocabulary for low-cost exit decisions, and dynamic hidden state management for KV-cache-correct and memory-aware execution. Across generative and downstream tasks, FlexEE enables efficient early exit with minimal accuracy degradation, delivering up to 1.27$\times$/3.16$\times$ and 1.25$\times$/2.83$\times$ end-to-end speedups on Llama2-7B and Llama3-8B under 0\%/50\% weight offloading, respectively.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

large language model
offloading
inference
computation and memory constraints
autoregressive decoding
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Early Exiting
Self-Speculative Decoding
KV-Cache-Correct
Dynamic Hidden State Management
Q
Qihu Xie
University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
Z
Ziwei Li
University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
Y
Yi Kang
University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China; Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, Hefei, China