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Set Block Decoding is a Language Model Inference Accelerator

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arxiv 2509.04185 v1 pith:BTDH3AUH submitted 2025-09-04 cs.LG

Set Block Decoding is a Language Model Inference Accelerator

classification cs.LG
keywords predictiontokendecodingnextallowsblockfine-tuninggeneration
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Autoregressive next token prediction language models offer powerful capabilities but face significant challenges in practical deployment due to the high computational and memory costs of inference, particularly during the decoding stage. We introduce Set Block Decoding (SBD), a simple and flexible paradigm that accelerates generation by integrating standard next token prediction (NTP) and masked token prediction (MATP) within a single architecture. SBD allows the model to sample multiple, not necessarily consecutive, future tokens in parallel, a key distinction from previous acceleration methods. This flexibility allows the use of advanced solvers from the discrete diffusion literature, offering significant speedups without sacrificing accuracy. SBD requires no architectural changes or extra training hyperparameters, maintains compatibility with exact KV-caching, and can be implemented by fine-tuning existing next token prediction models. By fine-tuning Llama-3.1 8B and Qwen-3 8B, we demonstrate that SBD enables a 3-5x reduction in the number of forward passes required for generation while achieving same performance as equivalent NTP training.

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Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

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

  1. Set Diffusion: Interpolating Token Orderings Between Autoregression and Diffusion for Fast and Flexible Decoding

    cs.LG 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Set diffusion factorizes likelihood over arbitrary token sets and uses a set-causal diffusion architecture to support KV caching and any-order decoding, yielding improved speed-quality tradeoffs versus prior diffusion LMs.

  2. SpecBlock: Block-Iterative Speculative Decoding with Dynamic Tree Drafting

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    SpecBlock achieves 8-13% higher mean speedup than EAGLE-3 at 44-52% drafting cost via block-iterative drafting with hidden-state inheritance, dynamic rank-head branching, valid-prefix masking, and optional cost-aware ...

  3. Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion: A Tri-Mode Language Model Unifying Autoregressive, Diffusion, and Self-Speculation Decoding

    cs.CL 2026-07 accept novelty 6.0

    Joint AR–diffusion training yields one tri-mode LM that switches AR, diffusion, and self-speculation, beating open AR/diffusion models on accuracy and tokens-per-forward.

  4. Orthrus: Memory-Efficient Parallel Token Generation via Dual-View Diffusion

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Orthrus unifies autoregressive and diffusion views on a shared KV cache to deliver lossless parallel token generation with up to 7.8x speedup and O(1) memory overhead.

  5. Orthrus: Memory-Efficient Parallel Token Generation via Dual-View Diffusion

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Orthrus unifies autoregressive LLMs and diffusion models via shared KV cache and consensus to enable up to 7.8x parallel token generation speedup with O(1) memory overhead and lossless results.

  6. SpecBlock: Block-Iterative Speculative Decoding with Dynamic Tree Drafting

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    SpecBlock achieves 8-19% higher speedup than EAGLE-3 in LLM speculative decoding by using repeated block expansions with hidden-state inheritance, a dynamic rank head, and a valid-prefix training mask.

  7. FBS: Modeling Native Parallel Reading inside a Transformer

    cs.AI 2026-01 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    FBS introduces a causal trainable loop via PAW, CH, and SG modules to model native parallel reading in Transformers, yielding better quality-efficiency on benchmarks with complementary ablations.