English

DuoServe-MoE: Dual-Phase Expert Prefetch and Caching for LLM Inference QoS Assurance

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 2026-04-10 v2

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as Internet/Web services (LLM-as-a-Service) with strict latency Service-Level Objectives (SLOs) under tight GPU memory budgets. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models improve quality and throughput via sparse expert activation, but serving them efficiently is challenging because expert weights dominate memory footprint and incur costly host--device transfers when offloaded. Moreover, MoE serving exhibits a phase disparity: the prefill phase tends to activate experts densely across many tokens, while the decode phase activates only a few experts per step. A uniform expert loading/caching policy across phases leads to either peak-memory blowup (prefill) or tail-latency inflation (decode). We present DuoServe-MoE, a QoS-oriented MoE serving system that decouples prefill and decode and applies phase-specialized expert scheduling. For prefill, DuoServe-MoE uses a two-stream CUDA pipeline to overlap expert prefetching with non-MoE computation, reducing expert residency time and peak GPU memory. For decode, it employs a lightweight layer-level predictor trained offline from activation traces to prefetch only likely experts without model changes. Experiments on representative MoE LLMs show that DuoServe-MoE improves TTFT by up to 5.34×5.34\times and end-to-end latency by up to 7.55×7.55\times over representative baselines, while maintaining low runtime GPU memory usage under resource-constrained deployment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.07379,
  title  = {DuoServe-MoE: Dual-Phase Expert Prefetch and Caching for LLM Inference QoS Assurance},
  author = {Yuning Zhang and Grant Pinkert and Nan Yang and Yanli Li and Dong Yuan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.07379},
  year   = {2026}
}