Title: Libra: Effective yet Efficient Load Balancing for Large-scale MoE Inference
Primary area: infrastructure, software libraries, hardware, systems, etc.
Keywords: Mixture-of-Experts, Model inference, Expert load imbalance, Dynamic load balancing

Abstract: Distributed inference of large-scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models faces a critical challenge: expert load imbalance. Numerous system-level approaches have been proposed for load balancing, but they either fail to achieve a satisfactory level of balance or introduce new bottlenecks due to the overhead of the load balancing mechanism itself. To this end, we propose Libra, a system that achieves near-optimal load balancing with minimal overhead. Libra adopts sophisticated mechanisms that accurately predict future expert activations and, based on these predictions, systematically perform load balancing. At the same time, it effectively hides the associated overhead by reconstructing the execution flow so that these costs are overlapped with MoE computation. Evaluations with two large-scale state-of-the-art MoE models on 8 H200 GPUs demonstrate that Libra improves throughput by up to 19.2\%.