SpecDec++: Boosting Speculative Decoding via Adaptive Candidate Lengths

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission5261 Authors

Keywords: speculative decoding, reinforcement learning, large language models

TL;DR: We use a trained acceptance prediction head to determine when to stop the current proposal round for speculative decoding.

Abstract: Speculative decoding reduces the inference latency of a target large language model via utilizing a smaller and faster draft model. Its performance depends on a hyperparameter $K$ --- the candidate length, i.e., the number of candidate tokens for the target model to verify in each round. However, previous methods often use simple heuristics to choose $K$, which may result in sub-optimal performance. We study the choice of the candidate length $K$ and formulate it as a Markov Decision Process. We theoretically show that the optimal policy of this Markov decision process takes the form of a threshold policy, i.e., the current speculation should stop and be verified when the probability of getting a rejection exceeds a threshold value. Motivated by this theory, we propose SpecDec++, an enhanced version of speculative decoding that adaptively determines the candidate length on the fly. We augment the draft model with a trained acceptance prediction head to predict the conditional acceptance probability of the candidate tokens. SpecDec++ will stop the current speculation when the predicted probability that at least one token gets rejected exceeds a threshold. We implement SpecDec++ and apply it to the llama-2-chat 7B \& 70B model pair. Our adaptive method achieves a 2.04x speedup on the Alpaca dataset (7.2% improvement over the baseline speculative decoding). On the GSM8K and HumanEval datasets, our method achieves a 2.26x speedup (9.4% improvement) and 2.23x speedup (11.1% improvement), respectively.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

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Submission Number: 5261