Lie Li, Wen Li, Junxiao Shen, Jindong Gu, Guosheng Hu
Unlike autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising many tokens in parallel, offering a promising path to efficient inference. Existing serving frameworks, however, schedule dLLM requests with policies designed for AR models, namely first-come-first-served (FCFS) admission and prefill priority. We find that both policies are ill-suited to dLLMs, wasting much of their speed. FCFS ignores that a dLLM request's decoding cost is highly heterogeneous and unknown at arrival, causing severe head-of-line blocking. Prefill priority, widely used in AR-LLM serving to keep time-to-first-token low, sharply cuts dLLM efficiency, as rounds that run only prompts leave most of the batch idle. We present DWISE, a Denoising Workload-Informed Scheduling Engine for efficient dLLM serving. DWISE schedules requests by their remaining work, measured in a block-level unit shared by prefill and denoising, so both phases share a round. To predict the unknown denoising workload, DWISE combines a lightweight prompt-based predictor at admission with a single refinement from the first denoising round's hidden states, which capture model-specific information absent from the prompt and require no additional model execution. Implemented in SGLang and evaluated on five models from three dLLM families under bursty workloads, DWISE reduces mean end-to-end latency over SGLang by 5.4$\times$ on average and up to 14.9$\times$ while preserving task accuracy. The code will be released publicly.
Woody Haosheng Gan, Deqing Fu University of Southern California, Julian Asilis, Ollie Liu University of Southern California, Vatsal Sharan University of Southern California, Robin Jia University of Southern California, Willie Neiswanger University of Southern California
Steering methods have emerged as effective tools for guiding large language models’ behavior, yet multimodal large language models (MLLMs) lack comparable techniques due to architectural diversity and limited availability of multimodal steering vectors. Inspired by this gap, we demonstrate that steering vectors derived solely from text-only LLM backbones can effectively guide and enhance their multimodal counterparts, revealing a novel cross-modal transfer that enables reuse of existing interpretability tools. Using community-standard methods—Sparse Autoencoders (SAE), Mean Shift, and Linear Probing—we validate this transfer effect across diverse MLLM architectures and visual reasoning tasks. Text-derived steering consistently enhances multimodal performance, with Mean Shift achieving up to +7.3% improvement in spatial relationship accuracy and +3.3% in counting accuracy on CV-Bench, and exhibits strong generalization to out-of-distribution datasets, for example reaching +34.2% on CLEVR counting tasks. This reveals that textual representations alone can effectively enhance visual grounding in MLLMs, bridging the mature ecosystem of text-based steering to MLLMs with minimal additional data collection or computational overhead.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表