LightLLM is a high-performance serving framework for deploying and executing large language models. It functions as a multi-GPU inference engine and server capable of handling dense architectures, mixture-of-experts designs, and multimodal models that process both text and images.
The system is distinguished by its specialized support for Mixture-of-Experts models using expert parallelism and fused kernels. It implements structured text generation through deterministic state machines and pushdown automata to enforce precise output formats. To optimize throughput, the framework employs speculative decoding, paged key-value cache management, and a separated prefill and decode pipeline.
The platform covers a broad range of operational capabilities, including tensor and data parallelism for scaling across hardware, multi-tier cache offloading for long context windows, and tool use integration for executing external functions. It also provides a standard interface for chat completions and dedicated tools for measuring request throughput and latency under real-world workloads.
The project is implemented in Python and includes base classes for integrating custom model architectures.