Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zheng, Ce, Zhang, Ke, Sun, Chen, Zhang, Wenqi, Liu, Qiong, Tesfay, Angesom Ataklity
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16273
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914247095615488
author Zheng, Ce
Zhang, Ke
Sun, Chen
Zhang, Wenqi
Liu, Qiong
Tesfay, Angesom Ataklity
author_facet Zheng, Ce
Zhang, Ke
Sun, Chen
Zhang, Wenqi
Liu, Qiong
Tesfay, Angesom Ataklity
contents Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by allowing a small draft model to predict multiple future tokens for verification by a larger target model. In AI-native radio access networks (AI-RAN), this enables device-edge collaborative inference but introduces significant uplink overhead, as existing distributed speculative decoding schemes transmit full vocabulary logits at every step. We propose a sparsify-then-sample strategy, Truncated Sparse Logits Transmission (TSLT), which transmits only the logits and indices of a truncated candidate set. We provide theoretical guarantees showing that the acceptance rate is preserved under TSLT. TSLT is further extended to multi-candidate case, where multiple draft candidates per step increase acceptance probability. Experiments show that TSLT significantly reduces uplink communication while maintaining end-to-end inference latency and model quality, demonstrating its effectiveness for scalable, communication-efficient distributed LLM inference in future AI-RAN systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_16273
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fast Collaborative Inference via Distributed Speculative Decoding
Zheng, Ce
Zhang, Ke
Sun, Chen
Zhang, Wenqi
Liu, Qiong
Tesfay, Angesom Ataklity
Signal Processing
Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by allowing a small draft model to predict multiple future tokens for verification by a larger target model. In AI-native radio access networks (AI-RAN), this enables device-edge collaborative inference but introduces significant uplink overhead, as existing distributed speculative decoding schemes transmit full vocabulary logits at every step. We propose a sparsify-then-sample strategy, Truncated Sparse Logits Transmission (TSLT), which transmits only the logits and indices of a truncated candidate set. We provide theoretical guarantees showing that the acceptance rate is preserved under TSLT. TSLT is further extended to multi-candidate case, where multiple draft candidates per step increase acceptance probability. Experiments show that TSLT significantly reduces uplink communication while maintaining end-to-end inference latency and model quality, demonstrating its effectiveness for scalable, communication-efficient distributed LLM inference in future AI-RAN systems.
title Fast Collaborative Inference via Distributed Speculative Decoding
topic Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16273