Communication-Efficient Distributed On-Device LLM Inference Over Wireless Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Kai, He, Hengtao, Song, Shenghui, Zhang, Jun, Letaief, Khaled B.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhang, Kai
He, Hengtao
Song, Shenghui
Zhang, Jun
Letaief, Khaled B.
author_facet Zhang, Kai
He, Hengtao
Song, Shenghui
Zhang, Jun
Letaief, Khaled B.
contents Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across various application domains, but their enormous sizes and computational demands pose significant challenges for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address this issue, we propose a novel distributed on-device LLM inference framework that leverages tensor parallelism to partition the neural network tensors (e.g., weight matrices) of one LLM across multiple edge devices for collaborative inference. A key challenge in tensor parallelism is the frequent all-reduce operations for aggregating intermediate layer outputs across participating devices, which incurs significant communication overhead. To alleviate this bottleneck, we propose an over-the-air computation (AirComp) approach that harnesses the analog superposition property of wireless multiple-access channels to perform fast all-reduce steps. To utilize the heterogeneous computational capabilities of edge devices and mitigate communication distortions, we investigate a joint model assignment and transceiver optimization problem to minimize the average transmission error. The resulting mixed-timescale stochastic non-convex optimization problem is intractable, and we propose an efficient two-stage algorithm to solve it. Moreover, we prove that the proposed algorithm converges almost surely to a stationary point of the original problem. Comprehensive simulation results will show that the proposed framework outperforms existing benchmark schemes, achieving up to 5x inference speed acceleration and improving inference accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_14882
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Communication-Efficient Distributed On-Device LLM Inference Over Wireless Networks
Zhang, Kai
He, Hengtao
Song, Shenghui
Zhang, Jun
Letaief, Khaled B.
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Signal Processing
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across various application domains, but their enormous sizes and computational demands pose significant challenges for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address this issue, we propose a novel distributed on-device LLM inference framework that leverages tensor parallelism to partition the neural network tensors (e.g., weight matrices) of one LLM across multiple edge devices for collaborative inference. A key challenge in tensor parallelism is the frequent all-reduce operations for aggregating intermediate layer outputs across participating devices, which incurs significant communication overhead. To alleviate this bottleneck, we propose an over-the-air computation (AirComp) approach that harnesses the analog superposition property of wireless multiple-access channels to perform fast all-reduce steps. To utilize the heterogeneous computational capabilities of edge devices and mitigate communication distortions, we investigate a joint model assignment and transceiver optimization problem to minimize the average transmission error. The resulting mixed-timescale stochastic non-convex optimization problem is intractable, and we propose an efficient two-stage algorithm to solve it. Moreover, we prove that the proposed algorithm converges almost surely to a stationary point of the original problem. Comprehensive simulation results will show that the proposed framework outperforms existing benchmark schemes, achieving up to 5x inference speed acceleration and improving inference accuracy.
title Communication-Efficient Distributed On-Device LLM Inference Over Wireless Networks
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14882