TPP-SD: Accelerating Transformer Point Process Sampling with Speculative Decoding

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Gong, Shukai, Fu, Yiyang, Ran, Fengyuan, Kong, Quyu, Zhou, Feng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Gong, Shukai
Fu, Yiyang
Ran, Fengyuan
Kong, Quyu
Zhou, Feng
author_facet Gong, Shukai
Fu, Yiyang
Ran, Fengyuan
Kong, Quyu
Zhou, Feng
contents We propose TPP-SD, a novel approach that accelerates Transformer temporal point process (TPP) sampling by adapting speculative decoding (SD) techniques from language models. By identifying the structural similarities between thinning algorithms for TPPs and speculative decoding for language models, we develop an efficient sampling framework that leverages a smaller draft model to generate multiple candidate events, which are then verified by the larger target model in parallel. TPP-SD maintains the same output distribution as autoregressive sampling while achieving significant acceleration. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our approach produces samples from identical distributions as standard methods, but with 2-6$\times$ speedup. Our ablation studies analyze the impact of hyperparameters such as draft length and draft model size on sampling efficiency. TPP-SD bridges the gap between powerful Transformer TPP models and the practical need for rapid sequence sampling.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_09252
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TPP-SD: Accelerating Transformer Point Process Sampling with Speculative Decoding
Gong, Shukai
Fu, Yiyang
Ran, Fengyuan
Kong, Quyu
Zhou, Feng
Machine Learning
We propose TPP-SD, a novel approach that accelerates Transformer temporal point process (TPP) sampling by adapting speculative decoding (SD) techniques from language models. By identifying the structural similarities between thinning algorithms for TPPs and speculative decoding for language models, we develop an efficient sampling framework that leverages a smaller draft model to generate multiple candidate events, which are then verified by the larger target model in parallel. TPP-SD maintains the same output distribution as autoregressive sampling while achieving significant acceleration. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our approach produces samples from identical distributions as standard methods, but with 2-6$\times$ speedup. Our ablation studies analyze the impact of hyperparameters such as draft length and draft model size on sampling efficiency. TPP-SD bridges the gap between powerful Transformer TPP models and the practical need for rapid sequence sampling.
title TPP-SD: Accelerating Transformer Point Process Sampling with Speculative Decoding
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09252