Cornserve: Efficiently Serving Any-to-Any Multimodal Models

We present Cornserve, an efficient online serving system for an emerging class of multimodal models called Any-to-Any models. Any-to-Any models accept combinations of text and multimodal data (e.g., image, video, audio) as input and also generate combinations of text and multimodal data as output, introducing request type, computation path, and computation scaling heterogeneity in model serving. Cornserve allows model developers to describe the computation graph of generic Any-to-Any models, which consists of heterogeneous components such as multimodal encoders, autoregressive models like Large Language Models (LLMs), and multimodal generators like Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). Given this, Cornserve's planner automatically finds an optimized deployment plan for the model, including whether and how to disaggregate the model into smaller components based on model and workload characteristics. Cornserve's distributed runtime then executes the model per the plan, efficiently handling Any-to-Any model heterogeneity during online serving. Evaluations show that Cornserve can efficiently serve diverse Any-to-Any models and workloads, delivering up to 3.81$\times$ throughput improvement and up to 5.79$\times$ tail latency reduction over existing solutions.

Skeleton-Guided Diffusion Model for Accurate Foot X-ray Synthesis in Hallux Valgus Diagnosis

Medical image synthesis plays a crucial role in providing anatomically accurate images for diagnosis and treatment. Hallux valgus, which affects approximately 19% of the global population, requires frequent weight-bearing X-rays for assessment, placing additional strain on both patients and healthcare providers. Existing X-ray models often struggle to balance image fidelity, skeletal consistency, and physical constraints, particularly in diffusion-based methods that lack skeletal guidance. We propose the Skeletal-Constrained Conditional Diffusion Model (SCCDM) and introduce KCC, a foot evaluation method utilizing skeletal landmarks. SCCDM incorporates multi-scale feature extraction and attention mechanisms, improving the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) by 5.72% (0.794) and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) by 18.34% (21.40 dB). When combined with KCC, the model achieves an average score of 0.85, demonstrating strong clinical applicability. The code is available at https://github.com/midisec/SCCDM.

Back to Fundamentals: Low-Level Visual Features Guided Progressive Token Pruning

Vision Transformers (ViTs) excel in semantic segmentation but demand significant computation, posing challenges for deployment on resource-constrained devices. Existing token pruning methods often overlook fundamental visual data characteristics. This study introduces 'LVTP', a progressive token pruning framework guided by multi-scale Tsallis entropy and low-level visual features with twice clustering. It integrates high-level semantics and basic visual attributes for precise segmentation. A novel dynamic scoring mechanism using multi-scale Tsallis entropy weighting overcomes limitations of traditional single-parameter entropy. The framework also incorporates low-level feature analysis to preserve critical edge information while optimizing computational cost. As a plug-and-play module, it requires no architectural changes or additional training. Evaluations across multiple datasets show 20%-45% computational reductions with negligible performance loss, outperforming existing methods in balancing cost and accuracy, especially in complex edge regions.