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Main Authors: Tan, Wenhui, Li, Minghao, Ma, Xiaoqian, Fan, Siqi, Huang, Xiusheng, Zhang, Liujie, Song, Ruihua, Chen, Weihang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27255
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author Tan, Wenhui
Li, Minghao
Ma, Xiaoqian
Fan, Siqi
Huang, Xiusheng
Zhang, Liujie
Song, Ruihua
Chen, Weihang
author_facet Tan, Wenhui
Li, Minghao
Ma, Xiaoqian
Fan, Siqi
Huang, Xiusheng
Zhang, Liujie
Song, Ruihua
Chen, Weihang
contents Long chain-of-thought reasoning has made autoregressive decoding the dominant inference cost of modern large language models. Existing methods target either the input side (latent compression) or the output side (speculative decoding and multi-token prediction, MTP), but the two lines of work have been pursued independently. Moreover, output-side methods must incur an expensive verifier pass to validate the unreliable draft tokens predicted by MTP. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{Pair-In, Pair-Out (PIPO)}, which unifies both sides by viewing a latent compressor and an MTP head as mirror-image operations: the compressor folds two input tokens into one latent representation, while the MTP head unfolds one hidden state into one additional output token. To remove the verifier cost without sacrificing reliability, PIPO trains a lightweight confidence head that decides whether draft tokens should be accepted. We observe that On-Policy Distillation (OPD) naturally matches the rejection-sampling criterion of speculative decoding, so the confidence head can be trained alongside OPD with negligible extra cost. Experiments on AIME 2025, GPQA-Diamond, LiveCodeBench v6, and LongBench v2 with Qwen3.5-4B and 9B backbones show that PIPO improves pass@4 over regular decoding by up to $+7.15$ points, while delivering up to $2.64\times$ first-token-latency and $2.07\times$ per-token-latency speedups. Project Page: GitHub.com/RedAI-Infra/PIPO.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_27255
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pair-In, Pair-Out: Latent Multi-Token Prediction for Efficient LLMs
Tan, Wenhui
Li, Minghao
Ma, Xiaoqian
Fan, Siqi
Huang, Xiusheng
Zhang, Liujie
Song, Ruihua
Chen, Weihang
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Long chain-of-thought reasoning has made autoregressive decoding the dominant inference cost of modern large language models. Existing methods target either the input side (latent compression) or the output side (speculative decoding and multi-token prediction, MTP), but the two lines of work have been pursued independently. Moreover, output-side methods must incur an expensive verifier pass to validate the unreliable draft tokens predicted by MTP. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{Pair-In, Pair-Out (PIPO)}, which unifies both sides by viewing a latent compressor and an MTP head as mirror-image operations: the compressor folds two input tokens into one latent representation, while the MTP head unfolds one hidden state into one additional output token. To remove the verifier cost without sacrificing reliability, PIPO trains a lightweight confidence head that decides whether draft tokens should be accepted. We observe that On-Policy Distillation (OPD) naturally matches the rejection-sampling criterion of speculative decoding, so the confidence head can be trained alongside OPD with negligible extra cost. Experiments on AIME 2025, GPQA-Diamond, LiveCodeBench v6, and LongBench v2 with Qwen3.5-4B and 9B backbones show that PIPO improves pass@4 over regular decoding by up to $+7.15$ points, while delivering up to $2.64\times$ first-token-latency and $2.07\times$ per-token-latency speedups. Project Page: GitHub.com/RedAI-Infra/PIPO.
title Pair-In, Pair-Out: Latent Multi-Token Prediction for Efficient LLMs
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27255