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Cornserve: A Distributed Serving System for Any-to-Any Multimodal Models

arXiv cs.LG / 3/13/2026

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Key Points

  • Cornserve is a distributed serving system for generic Any-to-Any multimodal models, enabling flexible task abstractions that express computation graphs and support component disaggregation with independent scaling.
  • The runtime uses a record-and-replay execution model to manage data dependencies and forwards tensor data directly from producers to consumers, dispatching compute to the data plane as needed.
  • Built on Kubernetes with roughly 23,000 lines of Python, it supports diverse Any-to-Any models and achieves up to 3.81x higher throughput and 5.79x lower tail latency.
  • Cornserve is open-source, and a demo video is available on YouTube.

Abstract

Any-to-Any models are an emerging class of multimodal models that accept combinations of multimodal data (e.g., text, image, video, audio) as input and generate them as output. Serving these models are challenging; different requests with different input and output modalities traverse different paths through the model computation graph, and each component of the model have different scaling characteristics. We present Cornserve, a distributed serving system for generic Any-to-Any models. Cornserve provides a flexible task abstraction for expressing Any-to-Any model computation graphs, enabling component disaggregation and independent scaling. The distributed runtime dispatches compute to the data plane via an efficient record-and-replay execution model that keeps track of data dependencies, and forwards tensor data between components directly from the producer to the consumer. Built on Kubernetes with approximately 23K new lines of Python, Cornserve supports diverse Any-to-Any models and delivers up to 3.81\times higher throughput and 5.79\times lower tail latency. Cornserve is open-source, and the demo video is available on YouTube.