This paper documents our characterization study and practices for serving text-to-image requests with stable diffusion models in production. We first comprehensively analyze inference request traces for commercial text-to-image applications. It commences with our observation that add-on modules, i.e., ControlNets and LoRAs, that augment the base stable diffusion models, are ubiquitous in generating images for commercial applications. Despite their efficacy, these add-on modules incur high loading overhead, prolong the serving latency, and swallow up expensive GPU resources. Driven by our characterization study, we present SwiftDiffusion, a system that efficiently generates high-quality images using stable diffusion models and add-on modules. To achieve this, SwiftDiffusion reconstructs the existing text-to-image serving workflow by identifying the opportunities for parallel computation and distributing ControlNet computations across multiple GPUs. Further, SwiftDiffusion thoroughly analyzes the dynamics of image generation and develops techniques to eliminate the overhead associated with LoRA loading and patching while preserving the image quality. Last, SwiftDiffusion proposes specialized optimizations in the backbone architecture of the stable diffusion models, which are also compatible with the efficient serving of add-on modules. Compared to state-of-the-art text-to-image serving systems, SwiftDiffusion reduces serving latency by up to 5x and improves serving throughput by up to 2x without compromising image quality.

A measure of dependence is said to be equitable if it gives similar scores to equally noisy relationship of different types. In practice, we do not know what kind of functional relationship is underlying two given observations, Hence the equitability of dependence measure is critical in analysis and by scoring relationships according to an equitable measure one hopes to find important patterns of any type of further examination. In this paper, we introduce our definition of equitability of a dependence measure, which is naturally from this initial description, and Further more power-equitable(weak-equitable) is introduced which is of the most practical meaning in evaluating the equitablity of a dependence measure.