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Main Authors: Bergner, Benjamin, Skliar, Andrii, Royer, Amelie, Blankevoort, Tijmen, Asano, Yuki, Bejnordi, Babak Ehteshami
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16844
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author Bergner, Benjamin
Skliar, Andrii
Royer, Amelie
Blankevoort, Tijmen
Asano, Yuki
Bejnordi, Babak Ehteshami
author_facet Bergner, Benjamin
Skliar, Andrii
Royer, Amelie
Blankevoort, Tijmen
Asano, Yuki
Bejnordi, Babak Ehteshami
contents Large language models (LLMs) have become ubiquitous in practice and are widely used for generation tasks such as translation, summarization and instruction following. However, their enormous size and reliance on autoregressive decoding increase deployment costs and complicate their use in latency-critical applications. In this work, we propose a hybrid approach that combines language models of different sizes to increase the efficiency of autoregressive decoding while maintaining high performance. Our method utilizes a pretrained frozen LLM that encodes all prompt tokens once in parallel, and uses the resulting representations to condition and guide a small language model (SLM), which then generates the response more efficiently. We investigate the combination of encoder-decoder LLMs with both encoder-decoder and decoder-only SLMs from different model families and only require fine-tuning of the SLM. Experiments with various benchmarks show substantial speedups of up to $4\times$, with minor performance penalties of $1-2\%$ for translation and summarization tasks compared to the LLM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_16844
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Think Big, Generate Quick: LLM-to-SLM for Fast Autoregressive Decoding
Bergner, Benjamin
Skliar, Andrii
Royer, Amelie
Blankevoort, Tijmen
Asano, Yuki
Bejnordi, Babak Ehteshami
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) have become ubiquitous in practice and are widely used for generation tasks such as translation, summarization and instruction following. However, their enormous size and reliance on autoregressive decoding increase deployment costs and complicate their use in latency-critical applications. In this work, we propose a hybrid approach that combines language models of different sizes to increase the efficiency of autoregressive decoding while maintaining high performance. Our method utilizes a pretrained frozen LLM that encodes all prompt tokens once in parallel, and uses the resulting representations to condition and guide a small language model (SLM), which then generates the response more efficiently. We investigate the combination of encoder-decoder LLMs with both encoder-decoder and decoder-only SLMs from different model families and only require fine-tuning of the SLM. Experiments with various benchmarks show substantial speedups of up to $4\times$, with minor performance penalties of $1-2\%$ for translation and summarization tasks compared to the LLM.
title Think Big, Generate Quick: LLM-to-SLM for Fast Autoregressive Decoding
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16844