Beyond the Buzz: A Pragmatic Take on Inference Disaggregation

As inference scales to multi-node deployments, disaggregation - splitting inference into distinct phases - offers a promising path to improving the throughput-interactivity Pareto frontier. Despite growing enthusiasm and a surge of open-source efforts, practical deployment of disaggregated serving remains limited due to the complexity of the optimization search space and system-level coordination. In this paper, we present the first systematic study of disaggregated inference at scale, evaluating hundreds of thousands of design points across diverse workloads and hardware configurations. We find that disaggregation is most effective for prefill-heavy traffic patterns and larger models. Our results highlight the critical role of dynamic rate matching and elastic scaling in achieving Pareto-optimal performance. Our findings offer actionable insights for efficient disaggregated deployments to navigate the trade-off between system throughput and interactivity.

Position Masking for Language Models

Masked language modeling (MLM) pre-training models such as BERT corrupt the input by replacing some tokens with [MASK] and then train a model to reconstruct the original tokens. This is an effective technique which has led to good results on all NLP benchmarks. We propose to expand upon this idea by masking the positions of some tokens along with the masked input token ids. We follow the same standard approach as BERT masking a percentage of the tokens positions and then predicting their original values using an additional fully connected classifier stage. This approach has shown good performance gains (.3\% improvement) for the SQUAD additional improvement in convergence times. For the Graphcore IPU the convergence of BERT Base with position masking requires only 50\% of the tokens from the original BERT paper.