The Inference Report

June 22, 2026

Across the infrastructure layer where AI's actual power is consolidating, a pattern emerges that the consumer-facing announcements obscure entirely. Samsung's deployment of ChatGPT Enterprise to over 250,000 employees represents not innovation but scale, the moment when software lock-in becomes operational fact. NVIDIA's higher-temperature cooling systems, allowing liquid cooling at 45 degrees Celsius, reduce the marginal cost of running that software at enterprise volume, which matters more than any capability announcement because it determines who can afford to compete. OpenAI captures the software layer and enterprise dependency, NVIDIA owns the hardware economics that make that dependency affordable, and the field is consolidating around that vertical arrangement while everyone else scrambles for a defensible position between them.

The distributed computing research reveals what happens when that infrastructure encounters reality. Published systems claim efficiency gains and adaptive scheduling, yet the orchestration literature surfaces a methodological crisis: RL results fail to reproduce under production-relevant perturbations, evaluation choices reverse conclusions, and institutional incentives for benchmark gains have outpaced evidence standards for deployment. The gap between measured laboratory performance and production operational evidence has widened to the point where it obscures genuine capability differences from measurement sensitivity. Even on the SWE-rebench, where top-tier models hold stable, middle-rank volatility indicates either real model differentiation in narrow domains or benchmark drift that makes strong inference impossible without disclosure of methodology, task composition, and whether the evaluation itself underwent revision.

Meanwhile, developers are building the scaffolding for agents to operate at scale. Deer-Flow and Cognee standardize on structured knowledge graphs and persistent state across sessions rather than prompt-level context windows. DeusData's codebase-memory-mcp reduces token overhead by 99 percent and returns results in sub-millisecond time, solving the practical problem of agents reasoning over large codebases without burning context. The pattern holds across video production tooling: OpenMontage positions itself as agentic with 52 tools and 500 agent skills, while Palmier-Pro takes the opposite stance as a native macOS editor for human-AI collaboration. Penpot's dominance shows that open-source alternatives gain traction when they preserve existing workflows rather than reinvent them. Agents need scaffolding, and that scaffolding either integrates into existing tools or replaces them entirely. There is little middle ground, and whoever controls that integration layer controls how labor actually gets displaced.

Grant Calloway

AI LabsAll labs
From the WireAll feeds
Research Papers — FocusedAll papers
AFD-Ledger: Deployment Provisioning for Attention--FFN Disaggregation cs.DC

Attention--Feed-Forward Network (FFN) Disaggregation (AFD) is emerging as a promising architecture for serving Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models. While existing AFD systems improve the efficiency of disaggregated execution, they leave a deployment question unanswered: under the same model, workload, time-per-output-token (TPOT) service-level objective (SLO), hardware budget, hardware catalog, and runtime capabilities, does AFD provide higher throughput than the best collocated deployment? Answering this question requires jointly optimizing hardware assignment and deployment organization for both architectures, making exhaustive provisioning prohibitively expensive. We present AFD-Ledger, an offline analytical provisioning system that independently provisions AFD and collocated deployments using an analytical execution model and an evaluation-bounded hardware search. Across deployment spaces where exhaustive provisioning is feasible, AFD-Ledger reduces complete deployment evaluations by 68.8%--83.5% while still recovering the globally optimal deployment. On three physical LongCat 2.0 deployments, it preserves the correct architecture decision while predicting AFD-to-collocated throughput within 6.6%--9.6% of measurement. Using this validated framework, we show that homogeneous AFD improves fixed-budget throughput in only a minority of the studied settings, heterogeneous AFD requires deployment-level hardware complementarity rather than heuristic device selection, and role-specific hardware improvements matter primarily when they enable better deployment organizations by crossing deployment capability--price boundaries.

SparseDitto: Customizing GPU Kernels for Different Sparsity Patterns with LLM-Based Agentic System cs.DC

Sparse matrix kernels are fundamental to scientific computing, graph analytics, and machine learning. Their GPU performance depends strongly on the input sparsity pattern and execution strategy. For the same SpMM on the same matrix, cuSPARSE exhibits a 350x performance gap between CSR and Blocked-ELL. Our study of multiple data formats, specialized systems, and sparse compilers shows that no single implementation consistently dominates across sparsity patterns and operators. This motivates a system that can adapt its representation, execution strategy, and hardware mapping to each workload and target GPU. We present SparseDitto, an LLM-based system that constructs a GPU kernel for each matrix, operator, and target GPU. SparseDitto supports SpMV, SpMM, and SpGEMM within a unified design framework. A lightweight additive model ranks established strategies using structural features of the input matrix. An architecture-aware planner then proposes several candidate designs. Coding and verification agents implement and refine them using measurements from the target GPU. Across three sparse operators and a diverse set of matrices, SparseDitto achieves a geometric-mean speedup of 2.68x over cuSPARSE on an NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPU, with a maximum of 146.61x. On an NVIDIA H200 GPU, it achieves 2.79x, with a maximum of 78.5x. Its generated SpMM kernels also accelerate full-batch GCN training by up to 3.39x.

FedRings: A Scalable and Topology-Aware Federated Learning Framework for LEO Satellite Constellations cs.DC

Federated learning over low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks is limited by frequent link changes, short contact times, and a highly dynamic topology, making centralized or synchronized training inefficient and hard to scale. To address this, we propose FedRings, a decentralized framework that organizes satellites into ring-based communication structures. It uses a spatio-temporal routing strategy with link-aware communication scheduling to align model exchange with actual visibility windows and time-varying connectivity patterns in LEO. Model updates are propagated along the ring using adaptive sparse incremental aggregation, which reduces communication overhead by progressively combining and compressing updates. To handle communication interruptions, a historical compensation mechanism maintains training continuity. By combining topology-aware routing, communication scheduling, and efficient aggregation, FedRings enables stable and efficient learning in dynamic LEO networks while reducing communication cost, and experiments show it consistently outperforms existing methods in realistic settings.

Accelerating Dynamic Graph Clustering on GPU Architectures with cuGraph cs.DC

This work addresses community detection in temporal networks through GPU-accelerated extensions of spectral clustering and modularity-based algorithms originally designed for static graphs. Built on the NVIDIA RAPIDS ecosystem, the framework enables the characterization and tracking of communities in snapshot-based dynamic graphs, either by Leiden greedy optimization with multi-GPU support via Dask-based workload distribution, or eigendecomposition of a symmetric Bethe-Hessian operator. Our multislice modularity backend achieves up to roughly three orders of magnitude speedup over the CPU reference under an equal-work budget, depending on graph density and snapshot count, while preserving compatibility with existing graph analytics pipelines. We demonstrate its applicability on real-world and synthetic datasets, facilitating exploratory analysis of structural network properties over time. Such capabilities are relevant across several application domains, such as epidemic spreading, financial systems, cybersecurity, and trajectory and mobility analysis. We release our implementation as free and open-source software, including Python bindings through the NetworkX-Temporal library for ease of use and zero-code acceleration with existing codebases.

Source-Bounded Exact Recovery over Docker's Logs API cs.DC

Docker can retain records that a collector misses before attachment or during downtime. A persisted read position does not by itself ensure recovery after lifecycle changes. We study what exact recovery contract is achievable through Docker's supported Logs API. We define source-bounded exactness: every retained, distinguishable source record eventually appears exactly once in durable collector output. Our method uses a generation-aware multiset oracle that separates source truncation from collector omission and exposes simultaneous loss and replay. Applied to LogDeck, it uncovered a start-to-attachment race; a one-record attachment overlap, finite Docker-API reconciliation, and exact insertion closed the tested boundary. We compare the fixed revision with unmodified Grafana Alloy 1.18.0, which uses the same API and persists read positions; across 120 collector-runs, LogDeck was exact in 60/60 and Alloy in 20/60. Alloy succeeded at guarded startup and process pause but omitted retained history when recovery required discovering an exited or restarted source. In a causal control, a 5,000-record source exited before collection: stock discovery was exact in 0/20 trials and acquired nothing, while the same reader given the container ID recovered all records exactly in 20/20. This reproduced on OrbStack and independent Ubuntu hosts with Docker 29.4.0 and 24.0.9; both collectors recovered daemon restart, while neither recovered records after source removal. Exactness assumes distinct tuples of physical generation, timestamp, stream, and bytes; 200,000 byte-identical records across two drivers produced no observed collisions. Our results show that lifecycle reacquisition, not a persisted position alone, determines exact recovery within the retained-source horizon. This is a bounded interface claim, not a universal collector ranking or proof of collision freedom.

Bole: Efficient Tree Speculation for Hybrid-Attention Language Models cs.DC

Hybrid-attention large language models combine full attention with recurrent linear attention to reduce long-context inference costs, yet their autoregressive decoding remains memory-bound. Tree speculative decoding offers an attractive acceleration path, but existing tree-speculation systems are designed around the key--value caches of full-attention models. On hybrid models, they traverse recurrent layers branch by branch and materialize a full state for every proposal node, causing verification latency and transient memory to scale poorly with tree and batch sizes. We present Bole, a kernel--runtime co-design that enables efficient tree speculation for hybrid-attention LLMs. Bole transforms the linear-attention recurrence into a tree-structured closed form and realizes it with a resource-efficient GPU kernel, verifying all proposal nodes in parallel and accelerating linear-attention tree verification by 3.4--7.7$\times$. It losslessly encodes speculative state updates as token-level factors and reconstructs only the state selected after sampling, reducing transient state memory by 82--99$\times$ and freeing GPU capacity for KV caches. Its integration into SGLang, a widely deployed production LLM serving engine, couples efficient state management with a batch-wide verification budget calibrated to the complete hybrid forward. Across four models, two GPU platforms, and diverse datasets, Bole delivers up to $4.72\times$ the offline decode throughput of autoregressive decoding and up to $2.03\times$ that of the strongest tree-speculative baseline. Under online agent workloads, it reduces TTFT and TPOT by up to $67.6%$ and $49.9%$, respectively, over the strongest tree-speculative baseline.

BenchmarksFull tables
Artificial AnalysisIntelligence Index

Composite score across coding, math, and reasoning

#ModelScoretok/s$/1M
1Claude Fable 559.90$20.00
2Claude Opus 4.855.769$10.00
3GPT-5.554.863$11.25
4Claude Opus 4.753.553$10.00
5GPT-5.451.4165$5.63
SWE-rebench

Agentic coding on real-world software engineering tasks

#ModelScore
1gpt-5.5-2026-04-23-xhigh62.7%
2Junie61.6%
3Codex60.4%
4Claude Code59.6%
5gpt-5.5-2026-04-23-medium58.9%