Daily Papers

This paper introduces DeepFlow, a scalable and serverless AI platform designed to efficiently serve large language models (LLMs) at scale in cloud environments. DeepFlow addresses key challenges such as resource allocation, serving efficiency, and cold start latencies through four main design components. First, it uses a simple serverless abstraction called the request-job-task model, which helps manage AI workloads across post-training and model serving tasks. Second, it builds an in-house serving engine FlowServe using a microkernel-inspired design, NPU-centric execution, and SPMD-based parallelism to optimize LLM serving. The system also includes novel scheduling policies tailored for both PD-disaggregated and PD-colocated configurations. With optimizations like pre-warmed pods, DRAM pre-loading, and NPU-fork, DeepFlow can scale up to 64 instances in seconds. DeepFlow has been in production for over a year, operating on a large Ascend NPU cluster and providing industrystandard APIs for fine-tuning, agent serving, and model serving to our customers.

Video inpainting, which aims at filling in missing regions of a video, remains challenging due to the difficulty of preserving the precise spatial and temporal coherence of video contents. In this work we propose a novel flow-guided video inpainting approach. Rather than filling in the RGB pixels of each frame directly, we consider video inpainting as a pixel propagation problem. We first synthesize a spatially and temporally coherent optical flow field across video frames using a newly designed Deep Flow Completion network. Then the synthesized flow field is used to guide the propagation of pixels to fill up the missing regions in the video. Specifically, the Deep Flow Completion network follows a coarse-to-fine refinement to complete the flow fields, while their quality is further improved by hard flow example mining. Following the guide of the completed flow, the missing video regions can be filled up precisely. Our method is evaluated on DAVIS and YouTube-VOS datasets qualitatively and quantitatively, achieving the state-of-the-art performance in terms of inpainting quality and speed.

Flow based generative models have charted an impressive path across multiple visual generation tasks by adhering to a simple principle: learning velocity representations of a linear interpolant. However, we observe that training velocity solely from the final layer output underutilizes the rich inter layer representations, potentially impeding model convergence. To address this limitation, we introduce DeepFlow, a novel framework that enhances velocity representation through inter layer communication. DeepFlow partitions transformer layers into balanced branches with deep supervision and inserts a lightweight Velocity Refiner with Acceleration (VeRA) block between adjacent branches, which aligns the intermediate velocity features within transformer blocks. Powered by the improved deep supervision via the internal velocity alignment, DeepFlow converges 8 times faster on ImageNet with equivalent performance and further reduces FID by 2.6 while halving training time compared to previous flow based models without a classifier free guidance. DeepFlow also outperforms baselines in text to image generation tasks, as evidenced by evaluations on MSCOCO and zero shot GenEval.