SAEM: Stage-Aware Expert Management for Memory-Efficient MoE Inference in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Abstract

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves LLM reasoning by decomposing complex problems into intermediate steps, but its sequential nature increases decoding latency and memory usage. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale capacity through sparse expert activation, yet their full expert weights often exceed GPU memory and require costly GPU-CPU transfers. Existing runtimes treat all tokens uniformly, overlooking a key structural property of CoT traces: consecutive reasoning stages exhibit coherent and predictable expert activation patterns. Ignoring this stage-level regularity leads to inefficient caching and unnecessary data movement. We propose SAEM, a stage-aware MoE inference runtime that detects reasoning stage boundaries and exploits stage-level activation coherence to guide expert placement. SAEM combines stage-aware caching, expert-aligned token repacking, and in-situ CPU execution to reduce data transfer and kernel fragmentation. On mathematical and scientific reasoning workloads, SAEM achieves an average 1.33x throughput improvement over the strongest state-of-the-art caching and offloading baselines under constrained GPU memory, rising to 1.54x when calibration data matches the workload, demonstrating the effectiveness of stage-aware, locality-driven MoE inference for CoT reasoning.