Accelerating Large-Scale Reasoning Model Inference with Sparse Self-Speculative Decoding

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhao, Yilong, Tang, Jiaming, Zhu, Kan, Ye, Zihao, Chang, Chi-Chih, Lin, Chaofan, Park, Jongseok, Xiao, Guangxuan, Abdelfattah, Mohamed S., Gao, Mingyu, Kasikci, Baris, Han, Song, Stoica, Ion
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zhao, Yilong
Tang, Jiaming
Zhu, Kan
Ye, Zihao
Chang, Chi-Chih
Lin, Chaofan
Park, Jongseok
Xiao, Guangxuan
Abdelfattah, Mohamed S.
Gao, Mingyu
Kasikci, Baris
Han, Song
Stoica, Ion
author_facet Zhao, Yilong
Tang, Jiaming
Zhu, Kan
Ye, Zihao
Chang, Chi-Chih
Lin, Chaofan
Park, Jongseok
Xiao, Guangxuan
Abdelfattah, Mohamed S.
Gao, Mingyu
Kasikci, Baris
Han, Song
Stoica, Ion
contents Reasoning language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on challenging tasks by generating elaborate chain-of-thought (CoT) solutions. However, such lengthy generation shifts the inference bottleneck from compute-bound to memory-bound. To generate each token, the model applies full attention to all previously generated tokens, requiring memory access to an increasingly large KV-Cache. Consequently, longer generations demand more memory access for every step, leading to substantial pressure on memory bandwidth. To address this, we introduce SparseSpec, a speculative decoding framework that reuses the same model as the draft and target models (i.e., self-speculation). SparseSpec features a novel sparse attention mechanism, PillarAttn, as the draft model, which accurately selects critical tokens via elegantly reusing information from the verification stage. Furthermore, SparseSpec co-designs self-speculation with three system innovations: (1) a unified scheduler to batch token drafting and verification, (2) delayed verification for CPU/GPU overlap, and (3) dynamic KV-Cache management to maximize memory utilization. Across various models and datasets, SparseSpec outperforms state-of-the-art solutions, with an up to 2.13x throughput speedup.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_01278
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Accelerating Large-Scale Reasoning Model Inference with Sparse Self-Speculative Decoding
Zhao, Yilong
Tang, Jiaming
Zhu, Kan
Ye, Zihao
Chang, Chi-Chih
Lin, Chaofan
Park, Jongseok
Xiao, Guangxuan
Abdelfattah, Mohamed S.
Gao, Mingyu
Kasikci, Baris
Han, Song
Stoica, Ion
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Reasoning language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on challenging tasks by generating elaborate chain-of-thought (CoT) solutions. However, such lengthy generation shifts the inference bottleneck from compute-bound to memory-bound. To generate each token, the model applies full attention to all previously generated tokens, requiring memory access to an increasingly large KV-Cache. Consequently, longer generations demand more memory access for every step, leading to substantial pressure on memory bandwidth. To address this, we introduce SparseSpec, a speculative decoding framework that reuses the same model as the draft and target models (i.e., self-speculation). SparseSpec features a novel sparse attention mechanism, PillarAttn, as the draft model, which accurately selects critical tokens via elegantly reusing information from the verification stage. Furthermore, SparseSpec co-designs self-speculation with three system innovations: (1) a unified scheduler to batch token drafting and verification, (2) delayed verification for CPU/GPU overlap, and (3) dynamic KV-Cache management to maximize memory utilization. Across various models and datasets, SparseSpec outperforms state-of-the-art solutions, with an up to 2.13x throughput speedup.
title Accelerating Large-Scale Reasoning Model Inference with Sparse Self-Speculative Decoding
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01278