{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/webllm-a-high-performance-in-browser-llm","title":"WebLLM: A High-Performance In-Browser LLM Inference Engine","arxiv_id":"2412.15803","date":"2024-12-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Charlie F. Ruan","Yucheng Qin","Xun Zhou","Ruihang Lai","Hongyi Jin","Yixin Dong","Bohan Hou","Meng-Shiun Yu","Yiyan Zhai","Sudeep Agarwal","Hangrui Cao","Siyuan Feng","Tianqi Chen"],"abstract":"Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have unlocked remarkable capabilities. While deploying these models typically requires server-grade GPUs and cloud-based inference, the recent emergence of smaller open-source models and increasingly powerful consumer devices have made on-device deployment practical. The web browser as a platform for on-device deployment is universally accessible, provides a natural agentic environment, and conveniently abstracts out the different backends from diverse device vendors. To address this opportunity, we introduce WebLLM, an open-source JavaScript framework that enables high-performance LLM inference entirely within web browsers. WebLLM provides an OpenAI-style API for seamless integration into web applications, and leverages WebGPU for efficient local GPU acceleration and WebAssembly for performant CPU computation. With machine learning compilers MLC-LLM and Apache TVM, WebLLM leverages optimized WebGPU kernels, overcoming the absence of performant WebGPU kernel libraries. Evaluations show that WebLLM can retain up to 80% native performance on the same device, with room to further close the gap. WebLLM paves the way for universally accessible, privacy-preserving, personalized, and locally powered LLM applications in web browsers. The code is available at: https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-llm.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15803v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15803v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"webllm-a-high-performance-in-browser-llm","repo_url":"https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-llm","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"CPU"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"GPU"},{"task_slug":"privacy-preserving","task_name":"Privacy Preserving"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2412.15803","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}