CoRun: Padding is Simple and Efficient for Deterministic LLM Inference
Despite fixed sampling parameters and random seeds, Large Language Model (LLM) inference exhibits output inconsistency, which undermines downstream tasks such as model evaluation and reinforcement learning. A major source of this nondeterminism is batch-dependent GPU execution: dynamic input shapes change kernel tiling and floating-point reduction orders. Existing systems address this problem with batch-invariant kernels, but these kernels restrict optimized tiling and split reductions, increasing more than 2$\times$ latency and reducing serving throughput by up to 74 %. This paper observes that although most kernels are not batch-invariant, they are position-invariant. Leveraging this property, we present CoRun, a scheduling-based system that achieves deterministic inference without requiring batch invariance. CoRun employs isolated prefill and fixed-shape batched decode to handle the two stages of LLM inference, respectively, leveraging CUDA graphs for efficient execution and simplified implementation. Experiments on LLMs with diverse architectures, including Qwen and DeepSeek, show that CoRun ensures determinism while improving throughput by 15-324 % over batch-invariant approaches, reducing time-to-first-token by 51.8 % and time-per-output-token by 48.6 % on average.