Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2509.00195

FastTTS: Accelerating Test-Time Scaling for Edge LLM Reasoning

Abstract

Recent advances in reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) are driving the emergence of agentic AI systems. Edge deployment of LLM agents near end users is increasingly necessary to protect data privacy, enable offline use, and provide responsive interaction with local context. However, strict memory constraints on edge devices limit deployment to smaller LLMs, whose reasoning capabilities are much weaker than those of large cloud models, hindering practical deployment of edge agentic AI. Test-Time Scaling (TTS) offers a promising solution by allocating more compute during inference to enhance the reasoning capability of edge LLMs. However, current TTS methods introduce heavy hardware performance overhead on resource-constrained devices, making them impractical for real applications. To address this challenge, we present FastTTS, a serving system that enables fast and efficient TTS for memory-constrained LLM reasoning. After analyzing common patterns across various TTS methods and identifying their performance bottlenecks, we introduce three novel techniques: i) Speculative Beam Extension, which mitigates system stragglers caused by irregular reasoning paths, ii) Asymmetric Multi-Model Memory Allocation, which dynamically balances memory usage between token generation and reasoning-step verification, and iii) Dynamic Prefix-Aware Scheduling, which optimizes reasoning execution to maximize KV-cache reuse across search paths. FastTTS offers a plug-and-play third-party library on top of vLLM, enabling edge LLMs on a single consumer GPU to match cloud-model accuracy and cloud-measured latency. Comprehensive evaluation shows that FastTTS achieves an average 2.2x higher goodput and reduces latency by 38%--68% compared to the vLLM baseline; it pushes the boundaries of low-latency TTS on memory-constrained edge devices and highlights the potential for democratizing agentic AI.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Hao Mark Chen, Zhiwen Mo, Guanxi Lu, Shuang Liang, Lingxiao Ma, Wayne Luk, Hongxiang Fan. 2026-01-31. FastTTS: Accelerating Test-Time Scaling for Edge LLM Reasoning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00195

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

A Probabilistic Approach for Model Alignment with Human Comparisons

A growing trend involves integrating human knowledge into learning frameworks, leveraging subtle human feedback to refine AI models. While these approaches have shown promising results in practice, the theoretical understanding of when and why such approaches are effective remains limited. This work takes steps toward developing a theoretical framework for analyzing the conditions under which human comparisons can enhance the traditional supervised learning process. Specifically, this paper studies the effective use of noisy-labeled data and human comparison data to address challenges arising from noisy environment and high-dimensional models. We propose a two-stage "Supervised Learning+Learning from Human Feedback" (SL+LHF) framework that connects machine learning with human feedback through a probabilistic bisection approach. The two-stage framework first learns low-dimensional representations from noisy-labeled data via an SL procedure and then uses human comparisons to improve the model alignment. To examine the efficacy of the alignment phase, we introduce a concept, termed the "label-noise-to-comparison-accuracy" (LNCA) ratio. This paper identifies from a theoretical perspective the conditions under which the "SL+LHF" framework outperforms the pure SL approach; we then leverage this LNCA ratio to highlight the advantage of incorporating human evaluators in reducing sample complexity. We validate the framework on a real high-dimensional crowdfunding-prediction task: under a fixed query budget, trading labels for comparisons improves accuracy precisely when labels are scarce, and the findings hold when the evaluator is replaced by real large language models. A study conducted via Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) further validates the model primitives.

cs.LG↗

An Initial Introduction to Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has exploded in popularity in recent years. While numerous approaches have been developed, they can be broadly categorized into three main types: centralized training and execution (CTE), centralized training for decentralized execution (CTDE), and decentralized training and execution (DTE). CTE methods assume centralization during training and execution (e.g., with fast, free, and perfect communication) and have the most information during execution. CTDE methods are the most common, as they leverage centralized information during training while enabling decentralized execution -- using only information available to that agent during execution. Decentralized training and execution methods make the fewest assumptions and are often simple to implement. This text is an introduction to cooperative MARL -- MARL in which all agents share a single, joint reward. It is meant to explain the setting, basic concepts, and common methods for the CTE, CTDE, and DTE settings. It does not cover all work in cooperative MARL as the area is quite extensive. I have included work that I believe is important for understanding the main concepts in the area and apologize to those that I have omitted. Topics include simple applications of single-agent methods to CTE as well as some more scalable methods that exploit the multi-agent structure, independent Q-learning and policy gradient methods and their extensions, as well as value function factorization methods including the well-known VDN, QMIX, and QPLEX approaches, and centralized critic methods including MADDPG, COMA, and MAPPO. I also discuss common misconceptions, the relationship between different approaches, and some open questions.

cs.LG↗

Transductive Off-policy Proximal Policy Optimization

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a popular model-free reinforcement learning algorithm, esteemed for its simplicity and efficacy. However, due to its inherent on-policy nature, its proficiency in harnessing data from disparate policies is constrained. This paper introduces a novel off-policy extension to the original PPO method, christened Transductive Off-policy PPO (ToPPO). Herein, we provide theoretical justification for incorporating off-policy data in PPO training and prudent guidelines for its safe application. Our contribution includes a novel formulation of the policy improvement lower bound for prospective policies derived from off-policy data, accompanied by a computationally efficient mechanism to optimize this bound, underpinned by assurances of monotonic improvement. Comprehensive experimental results across six representative tasks underscore ToPPO's promising performance.

cs.LG↗