MINE: Entropy-coded Memory-efficient Inference for Large Language Models

We present MINE (Memory-efficient INference Engine), a lossless entropy coding approach that accelerates single-stream inference of Large Language Models (LLMs), where existing lossless compression methods yield speedups only for specific data types such as BF16 and under additional assumptions. Single-stream decoding is strongly memory-bound, since every weight must be streamed from memory once per generated token and requests cannot be batched in local or low-latency deployments. At the core of MINE is dtANS-LLM, a GPU entropy coding scheme adapted from the prior dtANS to the needs of LLM inference. It exploits the non-uniform distribution of weights, which persists even after quantization, and exposes hyper-parameters that trade compression ratio against decoding cost. We auto-tune these parameters for each tensor and GPU to obtain the Pareto front between model size and decoding latency. MINE integrates into vLLM as a plugin and selects the best kernel configuration for a given memory budget. On Llama 3.1 8B Instruct with a 2.1-bit EntQuant checkpoint, MINE achieves speedups of 2.52$\times$ and 1.48$\times$ over the fastest baseline on an RTX 4060 Ti and an RTX 5090, at effective bitrates of 2.24 and 3.43 bits per weight. MINE is available as open source.