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SWIFT: On-the-Fly Self-Speculative Decoding for LLM Inference Acceleration

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arxiv 2410.06916 v2 pith:NM3GVWSF submitted 2024-10-09 cs.CL

SWIFT: On-the-Fly Self-Speculative Decoding for LLM Inference Acceleration

classification cs.CL
keywords swiftinferenceacrossdecodingdraftllmsmodelsadditional
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a widely used paradigm to accelerate LLM inference without compromising quality. It works by first employing a compact model to draft multiple tokens efficiently and then using the target LLM to verify them in parallel. While this technique has achieved notable speedups, most existing approaches necessitate either additional parameters or extensive training to construct effective draft models, thereby restricting their applicability across different LLMs and tasks. To address this limitation, we explore a novel plug-and-play SD solution with layer-skipping, which skips intermediate layers of the target LLM as the compact draft model. Our analysis reveals that LLMs exhibit great potential for self-acceleration through layer sparsity and the task-specific nature of this sparsity. Building on these insights, we introduce SWIFT, an on-the-fly self-speculative decoding algorithm that adaptively selects intermediate layers of LLMs to skip during inference. SWIFT does not require auxiliary models or additional training, making it a plug-and-play solution for accelerating LLM inference across diverse input data streams. Our extensive experiments across a wide range of models and downstream tasks demonstrate that SWIFT can achieve over a 1.3x-1.6x speedup while preserving the original distribution of the generated text. We release our code in https://github.com/hemingkx/SWIFT.

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Cited by 13 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Dynamic Execution Commitment of Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    A3 reframes dynamic action chunk commitment in VLA models as self-speculative prefix verification, accepting the longest continuous sequence of actions that satisfies consensus-ordered conditional invariance and prefi...

  2. Dynamic Execution Commitment of Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    A3 determines the execution horizon in VLA models as the longest prefix of actions that passes consensus-based verification and sequential consistency checks.

  3. Component-Aware Self-Speculative Decoding in Hybrid Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Component-aware self-speculative decoding achieves high acceptance rates in parallel hybrid models like Falcon-H1 but fails in sequential ones like Qwen3.5, with the gap tied to how components are integrated.

  4. FASER: Fine-Grained Phase Management for Speculative Decoding in Dynamic LLM Serving

    cs.DC 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    FASER delivers up to 53% higher throughput and 1.92x lower latency in dynamic LLM serving by adjusting speculative lengths per request, early pruning of rejects, and overlapping draft/verification phases via frontiers.

  5. SpecEyes: Accelerating Agentic Multimodal LLMs via Speculative Perception and Planning

    cs.CV 2026-03 conditional novelty 7.0

    A small tool-free MLLM plus answer-separability gating bypasses agentic tool loops for many queries, yielding 1.1–3.35× speedup with preserved or higher accuracy.

  6. Depth Exploration for LLM Decoding

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    DEX replaces single-depth selection with parallel exploration over multiple candidate depths, committing the final-depth token while collapsing reusable states to reduce per-token computation.

  7. Dynamic Execution Commitment of Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.CV 2026-05 conditional novelty 6.0

    A3 adaptively sets a VLA model's execution horizon to the longest action prefix the model re-confirms under conditional and sequential re-decoding, matching or improving task success without manual tuning.

  8. When Hidden States Drift: Can KV Caches Rescue Long-Range Speculative Decoding?

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    KV cache reuse improves long-range draft acceptance in speculative decoding but delivers only marginal end-to-end speedups due to drafter limitations.

  9. When Hidden States Drift: Can KV Caches Rescue Long-Range Speculative Decoding?

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    KV cache reuse improves long-range draft acceptance rates in speculative decoding but delivers only marginal end-to-end speedups because shallow drafters cannot accurately estimate target queries and receive sparse gr...

  10. KnapSpec: Self-Speculative Decoding via Adaptive Layer Selection as a Knapsack Problem

    cs.LG 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0

    By modeling layer skipping as a knapsack problem with context-dependent attention/MLP latencies, KnapSpec adaptively selects draft sub-networks that speed up self-speculative decoding by up to 1.47×.

  11. Cassandra: Enabling Reasoning LLMs at Edge via Self-Speculative Decoding

    cs.AR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Cassandra is a self-speculative decoding system that builds a draft model via fine-grained data selection and optimized pruning/mantissa truncation, achieving up to 2.41x speedup over BF16 and 1.81x more tokens than E...

  12. Dynamic Execution Commitment of Vision-Language-Action Models

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A3 adaptively selects verifiable action prefixes in VLA models using group-sampled consensus and conditional re-decoding to balance robustness and speed without manual horizon tuning.

  13. MixReasoning: Switching Modes to Think

    cs.AI 2025-10 conditional novelty 5.0

    A reasoning model can cut token usage by roughly a third to a half without losing accuracy if it switches to brief output on low-uncertainty steps and expands only at high-uncertainty forks.