Text-to-image generation executes a diffusion workflow comprising multiple models centered on a base diffusion model. Existing serving systems treat each workflow as an opaque monolith, provisioning, placing, and scaling all constituent models together, which obscures internal dataflow, prevents model sharing, and enforces coarse-grained resource management. In this paper, we make a case for micro-serving diffusion workflows with LegoDiffusion, a system that decomposes a workflow into loosely coupled model-execution nodes that can be independently managed and scheduled. By explicitly managing individual model inference, LegoDiffusion unlocks cluster-scale optimizations, including per-model scaling, model sharing, and adaptive model parallelism. Collectively, LegoDiffusion outperforms existing diffusion workflow serving systems, sustaining up to 3x higher request rates and tolerating up to 8x higher burst traffic.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Top : a basic diffusion workflow using Flux-Dev ( Labs, 2024 ) . Middle : add ControlNets ( Zhang et al., 2023b ) alongside the base diffusion model, which process an additional input reference image and pass the intermediaries to diffusion model to control the composition in image generation. Bottom : Further add LoRA ( Hu et al., 2022 ) to change image styles by patching LoRA weights onto diffusion model weights.
Figure 2. Latent parallelism and ControlNets parallelism.
Figure 3. Left : Loading time of workflow scaling and base diffusion model (DM) scaling. Right : Latency-throughput tradeoff of models in a SD3 workflow. Both use H800 GPUs.
Table 1. Primitives in LegoDiffusion ’s Python library for defining models and composing diffusion workflows.
Figure 6. A simplified case of integrating Flux with LegoDiffusion .
Figure 7. A simplified diffusion workflow using Flux ( Labs, 2024 ) .
Figure 8. Illustrating data fetch. For simplicity, we primarily illustrate tensor fetch process in data store. C.N. : ControlNet.
Setting
Diffusion Model
Workflow
Single-model Deployments (3 workflows each)
S1
SD3 ( Esser et al., 2024 )
(Basic, +C.N. 1, +C.N. 2)
S2
SD3.5-Large ( stabilityai, 2025 )
(Basic, +C.N. 1, +C.N. 2)
S3
Flux-Schnell ( Labs, 2024 )
(Basic, +C.N. 1, +C.N. 2)
S4
Flux-Dev ( Labs, 2024 )
(Basic, +C.N. 1, +C.N. 2)
Mixed-model Deployments (6 workflows each)
Table 2. Evaluation Settings . We use workflows of representative diffusion models. S1–S4 represent single-model deployments, each including three workflow variants: a Basic workflow (text encoders, diffusion model, and decoder), plus two using adapters ( Basic + C.N. 1 and Basic + C.N. 2 ). S5–S6 represent mixed-model deployments. C.N. : ControlNet.
Figure 9. End-to-end performance across six settings (S1–S6 in Table 2 ), evaluated under varying request traffic rates (a–f, j), SLO requirements (g), traffic burstiness (h), and testbed sizes (i).
Figure 10. Left: Normalized latency of LegoDiffusion across different numbers of available GPUs with intra-/inter-node parallelism (§ 5 ). Flux-S: Flux-Schnell. Right: Effectiveness of admission control (A.C.) in settings S1-4. RS : Rate Scale.
Figure 11. Left: Data fetching latency of varying sizes of tensor blocks. Right: The distribution of tensor block sizes found in typical SD3 and Flux workflows.
Technique
LOC / (Support adaptive adjustment?)
Katz ( Li et al., 2025b )
xDiT ( Fang et al., 2024 )
LegoDiffusion
Latent parallel
92 (No)
68 (No)
74 (Yes)
ControlNet parallel
127 (No)
N.A.
79 (Yes)
Async LoRA loading
182 (Yes)
N.A.
61 (Yes)
Table 3. Effective LOC and adaptive-runtime support.
Text-to-image (T2I) workflows are increasingly deployed on serverless platforms because users often compose customized workflows and invoke them intermittently. Existing platforms typically deploy each workflow as an opaque GPU function, provisioning, placing, and scaling all constituent models in the workflow together. This monolithic design obscures workflow structure, inflates scaling overhead, forces users to manage low-level GPU coordination, and limits fine-grained fairness in multi-tenant clusters. In this paper, we present ServerlessT2I, a serverless-native system that decomposes a T2I workflow into loosely coupled model functions that can be independently managed and scheduled. By explicitly managing individual model execution, ServerlessT2I enables per-model scaling, declarative workflow composition, transparent GPU-resident communication, and fairness-aware scheduling. To make this decomposition efficient, ServerlessT2I harvests slack GPU memory left idle by compute-bound T2I inference to build a data plane that reduces model loading and data communication overheads. \sys{} further introduces a fair scheduler for multi-tenant serving. Using production traces, ServerlessT2I sustains up to 2× higher request rates than existing T2I workflow serving systems with the same GPU budget; for a fixed request rate, it saves up to 3× GPU resources while satisfying service level objectives (SLOs).
Xiaoxiao Jiang, Suyi Li, Sheng Yao +5
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Alibaba Group
Personalized text-to-image generation lets users fine-tune diffusion models into repositories of concept-specific checkpoints, but serving these repositories efficiently is difficult for two reasons: natural-language requests are often ambiguous and can be misrouted to visually similar checkpoints, and standard post-training quantization can distort the fragile representations that encode personalized concepts. We present PersonalQ, a unified framework that connects checkpoint selection and quantization through a shared signal -- the checkpoint's trigger token. Check-in performs intent-aligned selection by combining intent-aware hybrid retrieval with LLM-based reranking over checkpoint context and asks a brief clarification question only when multiple intents remain plausible; it then rewrites the prompt by inserting the selected checkpoint's canonical trigger. Complementing this, Trigger-Aware Quantization (TAQ) applies trigger-aware mixed precision in cross-attention, preserving trigger-conditioned key/value rows (and their attention weights) while aggressively quantizing the remaining pathways for memory-efficient inference. Experiments show that PersonalQ improves intent alignment over retrieval and reranking baselines, while TAQ consistently offers a stronger compression-quality trade-off than prior diffusion PTQ methods, enabling scalable serving of personalized checkpoints without sacrificing fidelity.
Qirui Wang, Qi Guo, Yiding Sun +4
School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China · Nankai University, China
Efficient serving of diffusion large language models (dLLMs) is hindered by convergence heterogeneity: when batching multiple requests, different sequences converge at different rates, causing faster requests to stall behind slower stragglers and introducing compute bubbles and tail latency. We present BlockServe, a continuous batching framework that integrates block-grained scheduling -- immediately evicting completed requests at block boundaries -- with mixed-state execution that extends dual cache and parallel decoding to heterogeneous batches via gather-scatter indexing. Furthermore, a compute-aware admission controller expands effective batch capacity through token-budgeted refill. On Dream and LLaDA across five benchmarks, BlockServe achieves 1.9--10.6× throughput over Fast-dLLM with comparable generation quality, establishing block-grained scheduling as a foundation for high-throughput offline dLLM inference.