# ProServe: Unified Multi-Priority Request Scheduling for LLM Serving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12928 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12928/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Serving systems and request scheduling, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 39 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [Serving systems and request scheduling](https://mlsanity.com/inference/serving-systems-and-request-scheduling/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [SGLang: Efficient Execution of Structured Language Model Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07104/) (2023)
- [DistServe: Disaggregating Prefill and Decoding for Goodput-optimized Large Language Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09670/) (2024)
- [Splitwise: Efficient generative LLM inference using phase splitting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18677/) (2023)
- [Taming Throughput-Latency Tradeoff in LLM Inference with Sarathi-Serve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02310/) (2024)
- [Mooncake: A KVCache-centric Disaggregated Architecture for LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00079/) (2024)
- [Llumnix: Dynamic Scheduling for Large Language Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03243/) (2024)
- [SageAttention: Accurate 8-Bit Attention for Plug-and-play Inference Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02367/) (2024)
- [Fast Distributed Inference Serving for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05920/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model Acceleration based on KV Cache Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19442/) (2024)
- [Inference without Interference: Disaggregate LLM Inference for Mixed Downstream Workloads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11181/) (2024)
- [DynamoLLM: Designing LLM Inference Clusters for Performance and Energy Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00741/) (2024)
- [BurstGPT: A Real-world Workload Dataset to Optimize LLM Serving Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17644/) (2024)
- [Efficient LLM Scheduling by Learning to Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15792/) (2024)
- [Fairness in Serving Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00588/) (2023)
- [Andes: Defining and Enhancing Quality-of-Experience in LLM-Based Text Streaming Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16283/) (2024)
- [KVCache Cache in the Wild: Characterizing and Optimizing KVCache Cache at a Large Cloud Provider](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02634/) (2025)
- [FLAT: An Optimized Dataflow for Mitigating Attention Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06419/) (2021)
- [Strata: Hierarchical Context Caching for Long Context Language Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18572/) (2025)
- [Prefill-Decode Aggregation or Disaggregation? Unifying Both for Goodput-Optimized LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01989/) (2025)
- [PrefillOnly: An Inference Engine for Prefill-only Workloads in Large Language Model Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07203/) (2025)
- [SLOs-Serve: Optimized Serving of Multi-SLO LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08784/) (2025)
- [HyGen: Efficient LLM Serving via Elastic Online-Offline Request Co-location](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14808/) (2025)
- [TokenFlow: Responsive LLM Text Streaming Serving under Request Burst via Preemptive Scheduling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02758/) (2025)
- [HydraInfer: Hybrid Disaggregated Scheduling for Multimodal Large Language Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12658/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The widespread deployment of large language models (LLMs) for interactive applications necessitates serving systems that can handle thousands of concurrent requests with diverse Service Level Objective (SLO) requirements. A critical yet often overlooked dimension in this context is the inherent priority difference among clients; for instance, business-critical functions demand higher performance guarantees, as fulfilling such requests yields significantly greater business value. However, existing LLM serving schedulers fail to jointly optimize for both SLO attainment and client-level priorities. To bridge this gap, we first formalize multi-priority request scheduling as a service gain maximization problem, where satisfying latency requirements for requests of different priorities contributes varying gain. We propose ProServe, a unified two-tier scheduling framework designed to maximize overall service gain. At the engine layer, SlideBatching dynamically adapts batch formation under varying loads, employing a sliding boundary mechanism to balance latency and priority differentiation. Considering potential preemption, efficient block management adopts asynchronous offloading, pipelined reloading, and adaptive copy-budget control to overlap computation with host-device block transfers. At the service layer, GoRouting performs gain-oriented and capability-aware dispatching across distributed instances, proactively reserving capacity for future high-priority or long requests. Extensive evaluation on four open-source and one industrial dataset shows that ProServe outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, improving system gain by up to 35% and SLO attainment by up to 52%.