arXiv AI
4d ago

LoopAhead: Speculating Ahead for Faster Decoding in Looped Language Models

LoopAhead is a speculative decoding framework designed for looped Transformers, which repeatedly apply the same Transformer layers to improve parameter efficiency. It introduces a lightweight lookahead drafter (LAD) that predicts multiple future tokens using early-loop states, while deeper-loop feedback determines which draft branches to continue or pause, and the full-depth model finalizes token decisions. This approach achieves up to 7.82× faster decoding than traditional autoregressive methods while maintaining the target model’s output distribution.

By Zixuan Liu, Nan Xue, Rui Bao, Yuhang Xu, Xiaofeng Cao, Jiangchao Yao, Zhiyong Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

TSS: Target-Side Sparsification for Speculative Decoding in Domain-Specific Large Language Models

The paper introduces TSS, a target-side sparsification framework that selectively skips layers in a target verifier during speculative decoding for domain-specific large language models. By exploring multi-layer skip configurations with an acceptance- and metric-aware breadth search, TSS reduces verification cost, increases draft acceptance, and can even improve downstream task performance without retraining. Experiments on Spec-Bench demonstrate consistent gains across domains and model scales, notably boosting translation throughput by 1.68× and improving BLEU scores significantly.

By Haibo Hu, Lianming Huang, Qiao Li, Nan Guan, Chun Jason Xue