Clover: Regressive Lightweight Speculative Decoding with Sequential Knowledge

TL;DR

Clover introduces a novel speculative decoding method that leverages sequential knowledge to significantly improve efficiency in large language model generation, outperforming existing methods like Medusa.

Contribution

The paper proposes Clover, a new speculative decoding algorithm that integrates sequential knowledge via a Regressive Connection and Attention Decoder to enhance hit rates and decoding efficiency.

Findings

Clover achieves up to 91% efficiency improvement on Baichuan-Small.

Clover outperforms Medusa by up to 57% on Baichuan-Large.

The method significantly reduces memory transfer bottlenecks in GPU-based decoding.

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) suffer from low efficiency as the mismatch between the requirement of auto-regressive decoding and the design of most contemporary GPUs. Specifically, billions to trillions of parameters must be loaded to the GPU cache through its limited memory bandwidth for computation, but only a small batch of tokens is actually computed. Consequently, the GPU spends most of its time on memory transfer instead of computation. Recently, parallel decoding, a type of speculative decoding algorithms, is becoming more popular and has demonstrated impressive efficiency improvement in generation. It introduces extra decoding heads to large models, enabling them to predict multiple subsequent tokens simultaneously and verify these candidate continuations in a single decoding step. However, this approach deviates from the training objective of next token prediction used during pre-training, resulting in a low hit rate for candidate tokens. In this paper, we propose a new speculative decoding algorithm, Clover, which integrates sequential knowledge into the parallel decoding process. This enhancement improves the hit rate of speculators and thus boosts the overall efficiency. Clover transmits the sequential knowledge from pre-speculated tokens via the Regressive Connection, then employs an Attention Decoder to integrate these speculated tokens. Additionally, Clover incorporates an Augmenting Block that modifies the hidden states to better align with the purpose of speculative generation rather than next token prediction. The experiment results demonstrate that Clover outperforms the baseline by up to 91% on Baichuan-Small and 146% on Baichuan-Large, respectively, and exceeds the performance of the previously top-performing method, Medusa, by up to 37% on Baichuan-Small and 57% on Baichuan-Large, respectively.