QuickSilver -- Speeding up LLM Inference through Dynamic Token Halting, KV Skipping, Contextual Token Fusion, and Adaptive Matryoshka Quantization

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Khanna, Danush, Guru, Aditya Kumar, Sridhar, Srivarshinee, Ahmed, Zidan, Bahirwani, Rubhav, Malhotra, Meetu, Jain, Vinija, Chadha, Aman, Das, Amitava, Ghosh, Kripabandhu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Khanna, Danush
Guru, Aditya Kumar
Sridhar, Srivarshinee
Ahmed, Zidan
Bahirwani, Rubhav
Malhotra, Meetu
Jain, Vinija
Chadha, Aman
Das, Amitava
Ghosh, Kripabandhu
author_facet Khanna, Danush
Guru, Aditya Kumar
Sridhar, Srivarshinee
Ahmed, Zidan
Bahirwani, Rubhav
Malhotra, Meetu
Jain, Vinija
Chadha, Aman
Das, Amitava
Ghosh, Kripabandhu
contents Inference accounts for the majority of latency and energy consumption in large language model (LLM) deployments, often exceeding 90% of total cost. While training-time efficiency has seen extensive progress, runtime optimization remains a key bottleneck, particularly under autoregressive decoding. Existing approaches -- such as pruning, quantization, early exits, and speculative decoding -- often require retraining, architectural changes, or disrupt decoding compatibility. We introduce QuickSilver, a modular, token-level framework that enables semantic adaptivity at inference time without altering model weights or structure. QuickSilver integrates four synergistic mechanisms: (i) Dynamic Token Halting, which halts computation for tokens with converged representations; (ii) KV Cache Skipping, which selectively suppresses memory writes to reduce attention overhead; and (iii) Contextual Token Fusion, which collapses redundant tokens into shared paths to shrink sequence length. Unlike speculative decoding or MoE routing, QuickSilver operates entirely on frozen, dense models and requires no auxiliary networks. Applied to GPT-2 and Llama-2 across WikiText-103 and C4, QuickSilver achieves up to 39.6% FLOP reduction with negligible perplexity degradation (<=0.2).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_22396
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle QuickSilver -- Speeding up LLM Inference through Dynamic Token Halting, KV Skipping, Contextual Token Fusion, and Adaptive Matryoshka Quantization
Khanna, Danush
Guru, Aditya Kumar
Sridhar, Srivarshinee
Ahmed, Zidan
Bahirwani, Rubhav
Malhotra, Meetu
Jain, Vinija
Chadha, Aman
Das, Amitava
Ghosh, Kripabandhu
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.0; I.2.7
Inference accounts for the majority of latency and energy consumption in large language model (LLM) deployments, often exceeding 90% of total cost. While training-time efficiency has seen extensive progress, runtime optimization remains a key bottleneck, particularly under autoregressive decoding. Existing approaches -- such as pruning, quantization, early exits, and speculative decoding -- often require retraining, architectural changes, or disrupt decoding compatibility. We introduce QuickSilver, a modular, token-level framework that enables semantic adaptivity at inference time without altering model weights or structure. QuickSilver integrates four synergistic mechanisms: (i) Dynamic Token Halting, which halts computation for tokens with converged representations; (ii) KV Cache Skipping, which selectively suppresses memory writes to reduce attention overhead; and (iii) Contextual Token Fusion, which collapses redundant tokens into shared paths to shrink sequence length. Unlike speculative decoding or MoE routing, QuickSilver operates entirely on frozen, dense models and requires no auxiliary networks. Applied to GPT-2 and Llama-2 across WikiText-103 and C4, QuickSilver achieves up to 39.6% FLOP reduction with negligible perplexity degradation (<=0.2).
title QuickSilver -- Speeding up LLM Inference through Dynamic Token Halting, KV Skipping, Contextual Token Fusion, and Adaptive Matryoshka Quantization
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.0; I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22396