Kan Liu

Suyi Li, Lingyun Yang, Xiaoxiao Jiang et al.

Text-to-image (T2I) generation using diffusion models has become a blockbuster service in today's AI cloud. A production T2I service typically involves a serving workflow where a base diffusion model is augmented with various "add-on" modules, notably ControlNet and LoRA, to enhance image generation control. Compared to serving the base model alone, these add-on modules introduce significant loading and computational overhead, resulting in increased latency. In this paper, we present SwiftDiffusion, a system that efficiently serves a T2I workflow through a holistic approach. SwiftDiffusion decouples ControNet from the base model and deploys it as a separate, independently scaled service on dedicated GPUs, enabling ControlNet caching, parallelization, and sharing. To mitigate the high loading overhead of LoRA serving, SwiftDiffusion employs a bounded asynchronous LoRA loading (BAL) technique, allowing LoRA loading to overlap with the initial base model execution by up to k steps without compromising image quality. Furthermore, SwiftDiffusion optimizes base model execution with a novel latent parallelism technique. Collectively, these designs enable SwiftDiffusion to outperform the state-of-the-art T2I serving systems, achieving up to 7.8x latency reduction and 1.6x throughput improvement in serving SDXL models on H800 GPUs, without sacrificing image quality.

Hangjin Jiang, Kan Liu, Yiming Ding

Measuring dependence between two random variables is very important, and critical in many applied areas such as variable selection, brain network analysis. However, we do not know what kind of functional relationship is between two covariates, which requires the dependence measure to be equitable. That is, it gives similar scores to equally noisy relationship of different types. In fact, the dependence score is a continuous random variable taking values in $[0,1]$, thus it is theoretically impossible to give similar scores. In this paper, we introduce a new definition of equitability of a dependence measure, i.e, power-equitable (weak-equitable) and show by simulation that HHG and Copula Dependence Coefficient (CDC) are weak-equitable.