The Inference Engineering Pareto Atlas: Which Optimizations Dominate the Cost, Quality, and Latency Frontier?

📅 2026-09-15
📈 Citations: 0
✨ Influential: 0
📄 PDF
🤖 AI Summary
研究通过构建成本、质量和延迟帕累托图谱,评估54种Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct配置在不同GPU上的表现,以找到最佳部署方案。
📝 Abstract
LLM inference optimizations report speedups on different models, GPUs, prompts, and quality metrics, making them hard to compare or combine. We build a cost, quality, and latency Pareto atlas to identify the best configurations for different deployment constraints. Since exhaustive testing is impractical, we measure 54 configurations of Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct running on vLLM 0.12 across L4, A100, and H100 GPUs and use these anchors to calibrate a simulator. It reproduces measurements at anchored batch sizes, with cross campaign drift below 1.5 percent. A separate quality evaluation tests FP16, AWQ 4bit, FP8 weights, and FP8 KV cache on 200 GSM8K questions with five examples per prompt. Sparse attention is evaluated only in simulation. On the calibrated grid, 18 of 36 configurations reach the Pareto frontier. Combined methods reach it more often than individual methods, with 9 of 15 combinations versus 9 of 21 single methods. Quality testing changes the winners. AWQ 4bit reduces per token latency to 0.34 times baseline on L4 but loses 5.9 percent of strict GSM8K accuracy, narrowly missing the 95 percent quality floor within sampling uncertainty. Flexible answer extraction matches FP16 accuracy, suggesting the loss comes from formatting rather than arithmetic. FP8 weights retain 99.4 percent of baseline accuracy at 0.61 to 0.65 times baseline latency across all three GPUs and appear in three of four regime winners. A naive FP8 KV cache maintains normal throughput but answers none of the 200 questions correctly, showing why speed alone is insufficient. Under two prompt designs, n gram speculative decoding measures at 0.90 to 0.98 times baseline and adds no benefit on this stack. The best choice depends on the constraint and GPU: H100 wins for tight latency, while A100 wins for throughput and low cost at 0.106 dollars per million tokens.
Problem

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

LLM inference optimizations
deployment constraints
Pareto frontier
cost, quality, and latency
configuration comparison
Innovation

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

Pareto Atlas
inference optimization
simulator calibration
FP8 weights
combined methods
🔎 Similar Papers
2024-02-08Symposium on Networked Systems Design and ImplementationCitations: 1
S
Srikanta Datta Tumkur
Vizuara
J
Jay Iyer
Vizuara
M
Mehar Simhadri
Vizuara
S
Sai Pavan Kumar
Vizuara
S
Sai Kapil Kumar
Vizuara
R
Ramesh Nampelly
Vizuara