Relay Buffer Independent Communication over Pooled HBM for Efficient MoE Inference on Ascend
On the map: Mixture-of-experts → Efficient MoE training and inference systems
Abstract (arXiv)
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) inference requires large-scale token exchange across devices, making dispatch and combine major bottlenecks in both prefill and decode. Beyond network transfer, routing-driven layout transformation, temporary relay, and output restoration can add substantial overhead. Existing MoE communication paths are often buffer-centric, using explicit inter-process relay and reordering buffers around collective transfer. This report presents a relay-buffer-free communication design for MoE inference acceleration on Ascend systems. The design reorganizes dispatch and combine around direct placement into destination expert windows and direct reading from remote expert windows. Built on globally pooled high-bandwidth memory and symmetric-memory allocation, it removes most intermediate relay and reordering buffers while retaining only lightweight control state, including counts, offsets, and synchronization metadata. We instantiate the design as two schedules for the main phases of MoE inference: a prefill schedule with richer planning state for throughput-oriented execution, and a compact decode schedule for latency-sensitive execution. Experiments on Ascend-based MoE workloads show reduced dispatch and combine latency in both settings. At the serving level, the implementation improves time to first token (TTFT), preserves competitive time per output token (TPOT), and enlarges the feasible scheduling space under practical latency constraints. These results indicate that, on platforms with globally addressable device memory, reducing intermediate buffering and output restoration around expert execution is an effective direction for accelerating MoE inference.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Efficient MoE training and inference systems, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts. Builds on 10 of its 16 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 May 2026.
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10 of 16 references.
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Same direction, newest first
- 2025FUSCO: High-Performance Distributed Data Shuffling via Transformation-Communication Fusion26 Dec
- 2022MegaBlocks: Efficient Sparse Training with Mixture-of-Experts29 Nov
- 2022Tutel: Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts at Scale7 Jun
- 2022DeepSpeed-MoE: Advancing Mixture-of-Experts Inference and Training to Power Next-Generation AI Scale14 Jan
Other references · 6
- 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,820
- 2017Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layercited by 3,509
- 2021Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsitycited by 3,073
- 2025DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Modelscited by 815
- 2024A Survey on Mixture of Experts in Large Language Modelscited by 237
- 2025BigMac: A Communication-Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Model Structure for Fast Training and Inferencecited by 5
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- 2026MoE-SpAc: Efficient MoE Inference Based on Speculative Activation Utility in Heterogeneous Edge Scenarios
- 2025MoE-SpeQ: Speculative Quantized Decoding with Proactive Expert Prefetching and Offloading for Mixture-of-Experts
- 2026EasyBalance: Cross-Layer Load Balancing in Distributed MoE Inference
- 2026ASAP: A Disaggregated and Asynchronous Inference System for MoE Prefill
- 2026Memory-Efficient Expert Routing for Distributed MoE Training
- 2025GRACE-MoE: Grouping and Replication with Locality-Aware Routing for Efficient Distributed MoE Inference