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Songrun Xie

Publications and source records attributed to Songrun Xie.

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FlashDiff: Efficient Regional Execution and Scheduling for Diffusion Model Serving

Diffusion models have become the central backbone for modern image, video, and audio generation, but their efficient service remains a challenge. Unlike autoregressive decoding, diffusion inference repeatedly updates high-dimensional spatial or temporal latents over many denoising steps. This all-region execution pattern makes generation latency high and limits serving throughput. Existing multi-GPU parallelization methods can reduce per-step computation, but often introduce substantial activation exchange overhead, causing communication to offset or even outweigh the benefits of parallel execution. This paper presents FlashDiff, a diffusion serving system that improves inference efficiency through adaptive regional execution and scheduling. FlashDiff is based on the observation that diffusion refinement is not uniform across latent regions or denoising steps: different regions often stabilize at different rates, while neighboring steps exhibit strong temporal correlation. FlashDiff leverages these properties to selectively execute only regions that require further refinement and to reallocate the resulting compute slack across concurrent serving requests. FlashDiff consists of three mechanisms. First, it decomposes the latent representation into coherent execution regions using early-stage attention signals, preserving semantic structure while exposing fine-grained parallelism. Second, it uses a lightweight runtime controller to estimate region activity and bypass low-impact updates when further refinement is unlikely to affect output quality. Third, it applies an affinity-aware online scheduler that co-locates dependent regions, balances residual load across GPUs, and reuses reclaimed compute capacity to improve serving efficiency. Across real-world image, video, and audio workloads, FlashDiff reduces end-to-end serving latency by 30-97% and improves throughput by 1.2-2.2x.

cs.DC

Multi-stage Flow Scheduling for LLM Serving

Meeting stringent Time-To-First-Token (TTFT) requirements is crucial for LLM applications. To improve efficiency, modern LLM serving systems adopt disaggregated architectures with diverse parallelisms, introducing complex multi-stage workflows involving reusable KV-block retrieval, collective communication, and P2D transfer. Flows from dependent stages overlap within and across requests on shared bottleneck links, making TTFT highly susceptible to network contention and necessitating stage-aware scheduling. Unfortunately, most existing works schedule flows in a stage-agnostic manner, leading to uncoordinated contention that constitutes a primary cause of SLO violations. In this paper, we present MFS, a holistic multi-stage flow scheduling mechanism designed to maximize TTFT SLO attainment. At its core, MFS approximates the Least-Laxity-First (LLF) scheduling policy without requiring precise knowledge of a request's remaining slack. It achieves this through a Defer-and-Promote principle implemented through a Reverse Multi-Level Queue (RMLQ) structure. By dynamically promoting task precedence as effective laxity diminishes, MFS prioritizes flows with less laxity while preventing requests with loose SLOs from prematurely consuming network bandwidth. We implement MFS as a pluggable module integrated into vLLM, and evaluate it on a 8-server, 32-GPU testbed as well as through large-scale simulations. Our results demonstrate that MFS effectively outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, improving the TTFT SLO attainment by 1.2x--2.4x.

cs.NI

Evaluating Language Models for Efficient Code Generation

We introduce Differential Performance Evaluation (DPE), a framework designed to reliably evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for efficient code generation. Traditional coding benchmarks often fail to provide reliable insights into code efficiency, due to their reliance on simplistic test inputs and the absence of effective compound metrics. DPE addresses these issues by focusing on efficiency-demanding programming tasks and establishing an insightful compound metric for performance evaluation. DPE operates in two phases: To curate efficiency datasets, it selects efficiency-demanding tasks from existing coding benchmarks and generates computationally expensive inputs to stress the efficiency of LLM solutions. To assess the code efficiency, DPE profiles the new solution and compares it globally against a set of reference solutions that exhibit distinct efficiency levels, where the matched level defines its efficiency score. As a proof of concept, we use DPE to create EvalPerf, a benchmark with 121 performance-challenging coding tasks. Our comprehensive evaluation draws interesting findings on the efficiency impact of model sizes, instruction tuning, and prompting. For example, while the scaling law fails to account for code efficiency, general instruction tuning benefits both code correctness and efficiency. We also evaluate the evaluation by examining the effectiveness of DPE, showing that EvalPerf is reliable and convenient to use even across platforms.

cs.SE