Abstract:Efficient inference deployment of large language models faces severe challenges in resource-constrained scenarios. Although current mainstream inference optimization techniques have improved model inference efficiency to some extent, they still suffer from issues like coarse-grained deployment and poor inference accuracy.Based on the discovery that different operators exhibit varying degrees of GPU affinity, an OATO (operator-aware tensor offloading) approach was proposed. OATO could extract operators′semantic knowledge and used it to design an intelligent scheduling algorithm, which further yielded a globally optimal model-deployment plan. Meanwhile, the OATO approach was integrated into the latest large model inference framework Llama.cpp to implement an operator-aware tensor offloading enhanced inference engine, referred to as OALlama.cpp. Experimental results show that compared with the state-of-the-art inference engines Llama.cpp and FlexGen, OALlama.cpp achieves the best inference performance on three large models. Notably, in the scenario where 75% of the LlaMA3-8B model weights are loaded on the GPU, the first-token generation speed of OALlama.cpp is nearly doubled compared with FlexGen and Llama.cpp.