English

Enabling Performant and Flexible Model-Internal Observability for LLM Inference

Machine Learning 2026-05-13 v1 Artificial Intelligence Performance Software Engineering Systems and Control Systems and Control

Abstract

Today's inference-time workloads increasingly depend on timely access to a model's internal states. We present DMI-Lib, a high-speed deep model inspector that treats internal observability as a first-class systems primitive, decoupling it from the inference hot path via an asynchronous observability substrate built from Ring^2, a GPU-CPU memory abstraction for capturing and staging tensors, and a policy-controlled host backend that exports them. DMI-Lib enables the placement of observation points across a rich space of internal signals and diverse inference backends while preserving serving optimizations and adhering to tight GPU memory budgets. Our experiments demonstrate that DMI-Lib incurs only 0.4%--6.8% overhead in offline batch inference and an average of 6% in moderate online serving, reducing latency overhead by 2x-15x compared to existing baselines with similar observability features. DMI-Lib is open-sourced at https://github.com/ProjectDMX/DMI.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.11093,
  title  = {Enabling Performant and Flexible Model-Internal Observability for LLM Inference},
  author = {Nengneng Yu and Sixian Xiong and Yibo Zhao and Wei Wang and Zaoxing Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.11093},
  year   = {2026}
}