Rylan Conway


2026

Real-time AI experiences call for on-device large language models (OD-LLMs) optimized for efficient deployment on resource-constrained hardware. The most useful OD-LLMs produce near-real-time responses and exhibit broad hardware compatibility, maximizing user reach. We present a methodology for designing such models using hardware-in-the-loop architecture search under mobile latency constraints. This system is amenable to industry-scale deployment: it generates models deployable without custom kernels and compatible with standard mobile runtimes like Executorch. Our methodology avoids specialized attention mechanisms and instead uses attention skipping for long-context acceleration. Our approach jointly optimizes model architecture (layers, dimensions) and attention pattern. To efficiently evaluate candidates, we treat each as a pruned version of a pretrained backbone with inherited weights, thereby achieving high accuracy with minimal continued pretraining. We leverage the low cost of latency evaluation in a staged process: learning an accurate latency model first, then searching for the Pareto-frontier across latency and quality.This yields MobileLLM-Flash, a family of foundation models (350M, 650M, 1.4B) for efficient on-device use with strong capabilities, supporting up to 8k context length. MobileLLM-Flash delivers up to 1.8x and 1.6x faster prefill and decode on mobile CPUs with comparable or superior quality. Our analysis of Pareto-frontier design choices offers actionable principles for OD-LLM design.

2019

In a spoken dialogue system, dialogue state tracker (DST) components track the state of the conversation by updating a distribution of values associated with each of the slots being tracked for the current user turn, using the interactions until then. Much of the previous work has relied on modeling the natural order of the conversation, using distance based offsets as an approximation of time. In this work, we hypothesize that leveraging the wall-clock temporal difference between turns is crucial for finer-grained control of dialogue scenarios. We develop a novel approach that applies a time mask, based on the wall-clock time difference, to the associated slot embeddings and empirically demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms existing approaches that leverage distance offsets, on both an internal benchmark dataset as well as DSTC2.