Mirror Speculative Decoding: Breaking the Serial Barrier in LLM Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Bhendawade, Nikhil, Nishu, Kumari, Kundu, Arnav, Bartels, Chris, Cho, Minsik, Belousova, Irina
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Bhendawade, Nikhil
Nishu, Kumari
Kundu, Arnav
Bartels, Chris
Cho, Minsik
Belousova, Irina
author_facet Bhendawade, Nikhil
Nishu, Kumari
Kundu, Arnav
Bartels, Chris
Cho, Minsik
Belousova, Irina
contents Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by using a draft model to look ahead, but gains are capped by the cost of autoregressive draft generation: increasing draft size elevates acceptance rates but introduces additional latency overhead exacerbating the speed-accuracy tradeoff. Prior methods (Medusa, Hydra, EAGLE) partially reduce draft cost but either degrade acceptance or introduce overheads that limit scaling. We present Mirror Speculative Decoding (Mirror-SD), an inference algorithm that breaks the latency-acceptance tradeoff. Mirror-SD launches branch-complete rollouts from early-exit signals in parallel with the target model's suffix and explicitly maps computation across heterogeneous accelerators (GPU and NPU) to exploit cross-device parallelism. The draft speculates forward continuations for the target to verify, while the target simultaneously speculates correction paths for the draft, converting speculation into two complementary execution pipelines. To further cut draft latency without weakening acceptance semantics, we add speculative streaming so the draft emits multiple tokens per step. This dual strategy of parallel heterogeneous execution plus multi-token speculative streaming pushes speculative decoding toward its ideal regime of high acceptance with low overhead. On SpecBench with server-scale models from 14B to 66B parameters, Mirror-SD delivers consistent end-to-end gains, achieving 2.8x-5.8x wall-time speedups across diverse tasks and a 30% average relative improvement over the strongest baseline, EAGLE3.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_13161
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mirror Speculative Decoding: Breaking the Serial Barrier in LLM Inference
Bhendawade, Nikhil
Nishu, Kumari
Kundu, Arnav
Bartels, Chris
Cho, Minsik
Belousova, Irina
Computation and Language
Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by using a draft model to look ahead, but gains are capped by the cost of autoregressive draft generation: increasing draft size elevates acceptance rates but introduces additional latency overhead exacerbating the speed-accuracy tradeoff. Prior methods (Medusa, Hydra, EAGLE) partially reduce draft cost but either degrade acceptance or introduce overheads that limit scaling. We present Mirror Speculative Decoding (Mirror-SD), an inference algorithm that breaks the latency-acceptance tradeoff. Mirror-SD launches branch-complete rollouts from early-exit signals in parallel with the target model's suffix and explicitly maps computation across heterogeneous accelerators (GPU and NPU) to exploit cross-device parallelism. The draft speculates forward continuations for the target to verify, while the target simultaneously speculates correction paths for the draft, converting speculation into two complementary execution pipelines. To further cut draft latency without weakening acceptance semantics, we add speculative streaming so the draft emits multiple tokens per step. This dual strategy of parallel heterogeneous execution plus multi-token speculative streaming pushes speculative decoding toward its ideal regime of high acceptance with low overhead. On SpecBench with server-scale models from 14B to 66B parameters, Mirror-SD delivers consistent end-to-end gains, achieving 2.8x-5.8x wall-time speedups across diverse tasks and a 30% average relative improvement over the strongest baseline, EAGLE3.
title Mirror Speculative Decoding: Breaking the Serial Barrier in LLM Inference
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13161