SpecTr: Fast Speculative Decoding via Optimal Transport

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Sun, Ziteng, Suresh, Ananda Theertha, Ro, Jae Hun, Beirami, Ahmad, Jain, Himanshu, Yu, Felix
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Sun, Ziteng
Suresh, Ananda Theertha
Ro, Jae Hun
Beirami, Ahmad
Jain, Himanshu
Yu, Felix
author_facet Sun, Ziteng
Suresh, Ananda Theertha
Ro, Jae Hun
Beirami, Ahmad
Jain, Himanshu
Yu, Felix
contents Autoregressive sampling from large language models has led to state-of-the-art results in several natural language tasks. However, autoregressive sampling generates tokens one at a time making it slow, and even prohibitive in certain tasks. One way to speed up sampling is $\textit{speculative decoding}$: use a small model to sample a $\textit{draft}$ (block or sequence of tokens), and then score all tokens in the draft by the large language model in parallel. A subset of the tokens in the draft are accepted (and the rest rejected) based on a statistical method to guarantee that the final output follows the distribution of the large model. In this work, we provide a principled understanding of speculative decoding through the lens of optimal transport (OT) with $\textit{membership cost}$. This framework can be viewed as an extension of the well-known $\textit{maximal-coupling}$ problem. This new formulation enables us to generalize the speculative decoding method to allow for a set of $k$ candidates at the token-level, which leads to an improved optimal membership cost. We show that the optimal draft selection algorithm (transport plan) can be computed via linear programming, whose best-known runtime is exponential in $k$. We then propose a valid draft selection algorithm whose acceptance probability is $(1-1/e)$-optimal multiplicatively. Moreover, it can be computed in time almost linear with size of domain of a single token. Using this $new draft selection$ algorithm, we develop a new autoregressive sampling algorithm called $\textit{SpecTr}$, which provides speedup in decoding while ensuring that there is no quality degradation in the decoded output. We experimentally demonstrate that for state-of-the-art large language models, the proposed approach achieves a wall clock speedup of 2.13X, a further 1.37X speedup over speculative decoding on standard benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_15141
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SpecTr: Fast Speculative Decoding via Optimal Transport
Sun, Ziteng
Suresh, Ananda Theertha
Ro, Jae Hun
Beirami, Ahmad
Jain, Himanshu
Yu, Felix
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Data Structures and Algorithms
Information Theory
Autoregressive sampling from large language models has led to state-of-the-art results in several natural language tasks. However, autoregressive sampling generates tokens one at a time making it slow, and even prohibitive in certain tasks. One way to speed up sampling is $\textit{speculative decoding}$: use a small model to sample a $\textit{draft}$ (block or sequence of tokens), and then score all tokens in the draft by the large language model in parallel. A subset of the tokens in the draft are accepted (and the rest rejected) based on a statistical method to guarantee that the final output follows the distribution of the large model. In this work, we provide a principled understanding of speculative decoding through the lens of optimal transport (OT) with $\textit{membership cost}$. This framework can be viewed as an extension of the well-known $\textit{maximal-coupling}$ problem. This new formulation enables us to generalize the speculative decoding method to allow for a set of $k$ candidates at the token-level, which leads to an improved optimal membership cost. We show that the optimal draft selection algorithm (transport plan) can be computed via linear programming, whose best-known runtime is exponential in $k$. We then propose a valid draft selection algorithm whose acceptance probability is $(1-1/e)$-optimal multiplicatively. Moreover, it can be computed in time almost linear with size of domain of a single token. Using this $new draft selection$ algorithm, we develop a new autoregressive sampling algorithm called $\textit{SpecTr}$, which provides speedup in decoding while ensuring that there is no quality degradation in the decoded output. We experimentally demonstrate that for state-of-the-art large language models, the proposed approach achieves a wall clock speedup of 2.13X, a further 1.37X speedup over speculative decoding on standard benchmarks.
title SpecTr: Fast Speculative Decoding via Optimal Transport
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Data Structures and Algorithms
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15141