Heechul Yun | Search arXiv

arXiv2026

Revisiting MemGuard Overhead: A Reproduction Report

As an increasing number of embedded platforms incorporate multiple processing units, shared resource contention induced unpredictable execution time poses a challenge for real-time system design. Memory bandwidth regulation is a popular mitigation approach, and MemGuard is the canonical example. Recently, MemPol introduced a new bandwidth regulation mechanism, which was compared with MemGuard. Specifically, they reported significant overheads for MemGuard, citing up to a 1.79x slowdown, to contextualize MemPol's comparative benefits. This report is meant to clarify and add the necessary nuance to the experiments carried out in that prior work. Specifically, we show that the MemGuard overheads presented in these prior evaluations were unintentionally amplified as the result of using a suboptimal configuration with an older version of MemGuard, wherein the benchmark under test was pinned directly to the master core responsible for handling global timer interrupts. By faithfully reproducing these specific experiments using a modern, decentralized implementation of MemGuard, we demonstrate that the actual execution overhead drops significantly under identical conditions. Consequently, when evaluated with a properly configured recent version, MemGuard exhibits an overhead that is highly comparable to MemPol's overhead. By revisiting these baseline metrics, this report provides an updated and comprehensive perspective required for future evaluations of memory bandwidth regulators.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

LeanStream: A Speculate-and-Refine Streaming Framework for Efficient on-Device LLM Inference

On-device LLM inference is attractive for privacy and responsiveness, but remains challenging on mobile and embedded devices because model weights far exceed available DRAM. Prior systems exploit activation sparsity and offload weights to SSD or flash storage, but face a fundamental systems trade-off: accurate sparse execution decisions require the latest context, whereas efficient computation-I/O overlap requires early prediction. As a result, existing designs either serialize execution or incur redundant weight fetches, extra computation, and large cache overheads. We present LeanStream, a streaming speculate-and-refine framework for efficient on-device LLM inference. LeanStream progressively refines computation, loading, and cache-retention priorities using partial GPU results, enabling fine-grained overlap between GPU execution and storage I/O. We implement LeanStream on both mobile and embedded platforms. Compared with prior on-device LLM inference systems, LeanStream reduces memory usage by 4.8$\times$ to 7.5$\times$ at the best throughput achieved by prior work, while further improving token generation throughput by 1.6$\times$ to 2.1$\times$.

cs.LG↗