Jeff Ma

Jae-Won Chung, Jeff J. Ma, Jisang Ahn et al.

Any-to-Any models are an emerging class of multimodal models that accept combinations of multimodal data (e.g., text, image, video, audio) as input and generate them as output. Serving these models are challenging; different requests with different input and output modalities traverse different paths through the model computation graph, and each component of the model have different scaling characteristics. We present Cornserve, a distributed serving system for generic Any-to-Any models. Cornserve provides a flexible task abstraction for expressing Any-to-Any model computation graphs, enabling component disaggregation and independent scaling. The distributed runtime dispatches compute to the data plane via an efficient record-and-replay execution model that keeps track of data dependencies, and forwards tensor data between components directly from the producer to the consumer. Built on Kubernetes with approximately 23K new lines of Python, Cornserve supports diverse Any-to-Any models and delivers up to 3.81$\times$ higher throughput and 5.79$\times$ lower tail latency. Cornserve is open-source, and the demo video is available on YouTube.

Jae-Won Chung, Ruofan Wu, Jeff J. Ma et al.

Energy is now a critical ML computing resource. While measuring energy consumption and observing trends is a valuable first step, accurately understanding and diagnosing why those differences occur is crucial for optimization. To that end, we begin by presenting a large-scale measurement study of inference time and energy across the generative AI landscape with 46 models, 7 tasks, and 1,858 different configurations on NVIDIA H100 and B200 GPUs. Our empirical findings span order-of-magnitude variations: LLM task type can lead to 25$\times$ energy differences, video generation sometimes consumes more than 100$\times$ the energy of images, and GPU utilization differences can result in 3--5$\times$ energy differences. Based on our observations, we present a framework for reasoning about the underlying mechanisms that govern time and energy consumption. The essence is that time and energy are determined by latent metrics like memory and utilization, which are in turn affected by various factors across the algorithm, software, and hardware layers. Our framework also extends directly to throughput per watt, a critical metric for power-constrained datacenters.

Jonathan Lasko, Jeff Ma, Mike Nicoletti et al.

Cognitive load classification is the task of automatically determining an individual's utilization of working memory resources during performance of a task based on physiologic measures such as electroencephalography (EEG). In this paper, we follow a cross-disciplinary approach, where tools and methodologies from speech processing are used to tackle this problem. The corpus we use was released publicly in 2021 as part of the first passive brain-computer interface competition on cross-session workload estimation. We present our approach which used i-vector-based neural network classifiers to accomplish inter-subject cross-session EEG transfer learning, achieving 18% relative improvement over equivalent subject-dependent models. We also report experiments showing how our subject-independent models perform competitively on held-out subjects and improve with additional subject data, suggesting that subject-dependent training is not required for effective cognitive load determination.