Cascadia: An Efficient Cascade Serving System for Large Language Models

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Main Authors: Jiang, Youhe, Fu, Fangcheng, Zhao, Wanru, Rabanser, Stephan, Zhang, Jintao, Lane, Nicholas D., Yuan, Binhang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Jiang, Youhe
Fu, Fangcheng
Zhao, Wanru
Rabanser, Stephan
Zhang, Jintao
Lane, Nicholas D.
Yuan, Binhang
author_facet Jiang, Youhe
Fu, Fangcheng
Zhao, Wanru
Rabanser, Stephan
Zhang, Jintao
Lane, Nicholas D.
Yuan, Binhang
contents Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have intensified the need to deliver both rapid responses and high-quality outputs. More powerful models yield better results but incur higher inference latency, whereas smaller models are faster yet less capable. Recent work proposes balancing this latency-quality trade-off using model cascades, which route simpler queries to smaller models and more complex ones to larger models. However, enabling efficient cascade serving remains challenging. Current frameworks lack effective mechanisms for handling (i) the huge and varying resource demands of different LLMs, (ii) the inherent heterogeneity of LLM workloads, and (iii) the co-optimization of system deployment and routing strategy. Motivated by these observations, we introduce Cascadia, a novel cascade serving framework designed explicitly to schedule request routing and deploy model cascades for fast, quality-preserving LLM serving. Cascadia employs a bi-level optimization method: at the deployment level, it uses a mixed-integer linear program to select resource allocations and parallelism strategies based on LLM information and workload characteristics; at the routing level, it applies a Chebyshev-guided method to iteratively co-optimize the routing strategy and the system deployment produced by the deployment level. Our extensive evaluation on diverse workload traces and different model cascades (DeepSeek and the Llama series) demonstrates that Cascadia significantly outperforms both single-model deployments and the state-of-the-art cascade serving baseline, achieving up to 4$\times$ (2.3$\times$ on average) tighter latency SLOs and up to 5$\times$ (2.4$\times$ on average) higher throughput while maintaining target answer quality.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_04203
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cascadia: An Efficient Cascade Serving System for Large Language Models
Jiang, Youhe
Fu, Fangcheng
Zhao, Wanru
Rabanser, Stephan
Zhang, Jintao
Lane, Nicholas D.
Yuan, Binhang
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have intensified the need to deliver both rapid responses and high-quality outputs. More powerful models yield better results but incur higher inference latency, whereas smaller models are faster yet less capable. Recent work proposes balancing this latency-quality trade-off using model cascades, which route simpler queries to smaller models and more complex ones to larger models. However, enabling efficient cascade serving remains challenging. Current frameworks lack effective mechanisms for handling (i) the huge and varying resource demands of different LLMs, (ii) the inherent heterogeneity of LLM workloads, and (iii) the co-optimization of system deployment and routing strategy. Motivated by these observations, we introduce Cascadia, a novel cascade serving framework designed explicitly to schedule request routing and deploy model cascades for fast, quality-preserving LLM serving. Cascadia employs a bi-level optimization method: at the deployment level, it uses a mixed-integer linear program to select resource allocations and parallelism strategies based on LLM information and workload characteristics; at the routing level, it applies a Chebyshev-guided method to iteratively co-optimize the routing strategy and the system deployment produced by the deployment level. Our extensive evaluation on diverse workload traces and different model cascades (DeepSeek and the Llama series) demonstrates that Cascadia significantly outperforms both single-model deployments and the state-of-the-art cascade serving baseline, achieving up to 4$\times$ (2.3$\times$ on average) tighter latency SLOs and up to 5$\times$ (2.4$\times$ on average) higher throughput while maintaining target answer quality.
title Cascadia: An Efficient Cascade Serving System for Large Language Models
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04203