ElasticMM: Efficient Multimodal LLMs Serving with Elastic Multimodal Parallelism

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Liu, Zedong, Cheng, Shenggan, Tan, Guangming, You, Yang, Tao, Dingwen
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Liu, Zedong
Cheng, Shenggan
Tan, Guangming
You, Yang
Tao, Dingwen
author_facet Liu, Zedong
Cheng, Shenggan
Tan, Guangming
You, Yang
Tao, Dingwen
contents Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) extend LLMs to handle images, videos, and audio by incorporating feature extractors and projection modules. However, these additional components -- combined with complex inference pipelines and heterogeneous workloads -- introduce significant inference overhead. Therefore, efficiently serving MLLMs remains a major challenge. Current tightly coupled serving architectures struggle to distinguish between mixed request types or adapt parallelism strategies to different inference stages, leading to increased time-to-first-token (TTFT) latency and poor resource utilization. To address this, we introduce Elastic Multimodal Parallelism (EMP), a new serving paradigm that elastically adapts to resource heterogeneity across request types and inference stages. Building upon EMP, we develop ElasticMM, an MLLM serving system that (1) separates requests into independent modality groups with dynamic resource allocation via a modality-aware load balancer; (2) decouples inference stages and enables parallelism adjustment and adaptive scaling via elastic partition scheduling; and (3) improves inference efficiency through unified multimodal prefix caching and non-blocking encoding. Experiments on diverse real-world datasets show that ElasticMM outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) serving systems, reducing TTFT by up to 4.2x and achieving 3.2-4.5x higher throughput while meeting service-level objectives (SLOs).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_10069
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ElasticMM: Efficient Multimodal LLMs Serving with Elastic Multimodal Parallelism
Liu, Zedong
Cheng, Shenggan
Tan, Guangming
You, Yang
Tao, Dingwen
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Machine Learning
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) extend LLMs to handle images, videos, and audio by incorporating feature extractors and projection modules. However, these additional components -- combined with complex inference pipelines and heterogeneous workloads -- introduce significant inference overhead. Therefore, efficiently serving MLLMs remains a major challenge. Current tightly coupled serving architectures struggle to distinguish between mixed request types or adapt parallelism strategies to different inference stages, leading to increased time-to-first-token (TTFT) latency and poor resource utilization. To address this, we introduce Elastic Multimodal Parallelism (EMP), a new serving paradigm that elastically adapts to resource heterogeneity across request types and inference stages. Building upon EMP, we develop ElasticMM, an MLLM serving system that (1) separates requests into independent modality groups with dynamic resource allocation via a modality-aware load balancer; (2) decouples inference stages and enables parallelism adjustment and adaptive scaling via elastic partition scheduling; and (3) improves inference efficiency through unified multimodal prefix caching and non-blocking encoding. Experiments on diverse real-world datasets show that ElasticMM outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) serving systems, reducing TTFT by up to 4.2x and achieving 3.2-4.5x higher throughput while meeting service-level objectives (SLOs).
title ElasticMM: Efficient Multimodal LLMs Serving with Elastic Multimodal Parallelism
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10069