Spiffy: Multiplying Diffusion LLM Acceleration via Lossless Speculative Decoding

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Agrawal, Sudhanshu, Garrepalli, Risheek, Goel, Raghavv, Lee, Mingu, Lott, Christopher, Porikli, Fatih
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Agrawal, Sudhanshu
Garrepalli, Risheek
Goel, Raghavv
Lee, Mingu
Lott, Christopher
Porikli, Fatih
author_facet Agrawal, Sudhanshu
Garrepalli, Risheek
Goel, Raghavv
Lee, Mingu
Lott, Christopher
Porikli, Fatih
contents Diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful alternative to autoregressive LLMs (AR-LLMs) with the potential to operate at significantly higher token generation rates. However, currently available open-source dLLMs often generate at much lower rates, typically decoding only a single token at every denoising timestep in order to maximize output quality. We present Spiffy, a speculative decoding algorithm that accelerates dLLM inference by $\mathbf{2.8{-}3.1\times}$ while provably preserving the model's output distribution. This work addresses the unique challenges involved in applying ideas from speculative decoding of AR-LLMs to the dLLM setting. Spiffy proposes draft states by leveraging the dLLM's distribution itself in an auto-speculative manner. This approach is efficient and effective, and eliminates the overheads of training and running an independent draft model. To structure the candidate draft states, we propose a novel directed draft graph which is uniquely designed to take advantage of the bidirectional, block-wise nature of dLLM generation and can be verified in parallel by the dLLM. To further optimize the structure of these draft graphs, we introduce an efficient, offline calibration algorithm that procedurally determines high-quality graph configurations. These optimized draft graphs, enabling increased acceptance rates, lead to a significant boost in the overall speedup achieved by the system. Crucially, Spiffy is also complementary to other recent innovations in improving dLLM generation speeds such as KV-caching and multi-token unmasking. We demonstrate that when combined with such parallel decoding algorithms, Spiffy is able to effectively multiply the benefits of these methods leading to total speedups of up to $\mathbf{7.9\times}$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_18085
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Spiffy: Multiplying Diffusion LLM Acceleration via Lossless Speculative Decoding
Agrawal, Sudhanshu
Garrepalli, Risheek
Goel, Raghavv
Lee, Mingu
Lott, Christopher
Porikli, Fatih
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful alternative to autoregressive LLMs (AR-LLMs) with the potential to operate at significantly higher token generation rates. However, currently available open-source dLLMs often generate at much lower rates, typically decoding only a single token at every denoising timestep in order to maximize output quality. We present Spiffy, a speculative decoding algorithm that accelerates dLLM inference by $\mathbf{2.8{-}3.1\times}$ while provably preserving the model's output distribution. This work addresses the unique challenges involved in applying ideas from speculative decoding of AR-LLMs to the dLLM setting. Spiffy proposes draft states by leveraging the dLLM's distribution itself in an auto-speculative manner. This approach is efficient and effective, and eliminates the overheads of training and running an independent draft model. To structure the candidate draft states, we propose a novel directed draft graph which is uniquely designed to take advantage of the bidirectional, block-wise nature of dLLM generation and can be verified in parallel by the dLLM. To further optimize the structure of these draft graphs, we introduce an efficient, offline calibration algorithm that procedurally determines high-quality graph configurations. These optimized draft graphs, enabling increased acceptance rates, lead to a significant boost in the overall speedup achieved by the system. Crucially, Spiffy is also complementary to other recent innovations in improving dLLM generation speeds such as KV-caching and multi-token unmasking. We demonstrate that when combined with such parallel decoding algorithms, Spiffy is able to effectively multiply the benefits of these methods leading to total speedups of up to $\mathbf{7.9\times}$.
title Spiffy: Multiplying Diffusion LLM Acceleration via Lossless Speculative Decoding
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18085