Experts are all you need: A Composable Framework for Large Language Model Inference

TL;DR

Comp-LLM introduces a composable inference framework for large language models that enhances reasoning, reduces model size, and improves latency by enabling cross-expert collaboration through a dependency graph.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework that decomposes queries into sub-tasks, assigns them to experts, and efficiently combines responses, addressing limitations of MoEs and multi-agent systems.

Findings

Up to 11.01% accuracy improvement over monolithic LLMs.

Model size reduced by 1.67x to 3.56x without significant performance loss.

Latency improved by 1.1x to 1.7x compared to sequential sub-query processing.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art accuracies in a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, this success comes at the cost of increased model sizes which leads to additional computational burden. Mixture of Experts (MoEs) overcome this bottleneck by decoupling model capacity from computation by only activating a subset of parameters or "experts". However, these models require joint pretraining of these experts along with the router and do not model multi-step reasoning. In contrast, multi-agent frameworks improve reasoning by decomposing complex problems into modular subtasks. However, these frameworks rely on sequential "plan--act--observe" loops, which introduce significant latency. Our work, Comp-LLM, addresses these challenges by introducing a composable inference framework that enables cross-expert collaboration via an explicit sub-query dependency graph. Comp-LLM consists of three components: (1) A Sub-query Generator that decomposes an input query, assigns each sub-query to an appropriate expert using embedding similarity, and constructs a dependency graph; (2) A Query Executor that processes nodes in the graph and identifies opportunities for parallelism based on dependencies and resource constraints; and (3) A Response Aggregator that synthesizes intermediate expert responses into a coherent final answer. Across several benchmarks, Comp-LLM achieves up to 11.01% accuracy improvement over monolithic LLMs of similar size, while offering 1.67x--3.56x reduction in model size with no significant degradation relative to the largest model in its family. Additionally, Comp-LLM provides 1.1x--1.7x latency improvement compared to sequential sub-query processing.