Title: BUDDY: BUdget-Driven DYnamic Depth Routing for Adaptive Large Language Models Inference
Primary area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
Keywords: Model Compression, Dynamic Inference

Abstract: Large language models require substantial computational resources for inference due to their massive number of parameters. Model layer pruning accelerates inference by eliminating redundant layers. However, existing layer pruning methods fail to meet users' flexible budget constraints and lack the ability to adaptively adjust the inference path. To address these issues, we propose Buddy, a budget-driven and adaptive inference framework. Specifically, we design a Decision Module that adaptively selects important layers to execute based on user input while satisfying a given budget constraint. Additionally, Buddy reuses the KV cache from the first layer and dynamically updates the context during inference, enabling adaptive adjustments to the inference path based on evolving contextual information. Furthermore, when no explicit budget is provided, a Budget Predictor automatically determines an appropriate inference cost to achieve an optimal trade-off between performance and computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on the Llama model demonstrate that Buddy consistently outperforms baseline methods under various pruning configurations.