Decoding at the Speed of Thought: Harnessing Parallel Decoding of Lexical Units for LLMs
Chenxi Sun, Hongzhi Zhang, Zijia Lin, Jingyuan Zhang, Fuzheng Zhang, Zhongyuan Wang, Bin Chen, Chengru Song, Di Zhang, Kun Gai, Deyi Xiong
Abstract
Large language models have demonstrated exceptional capability in natural language understanding and generation. However, their generation speed is limited by the inherently sequential nature of their decoding process, posing challenges for real-time applications. This paper introduces Lexical Unit Decoding (LUD), a novel decoding methodology implemented in a data-driven manner, accelerating the decoding process without sacrificing output quality. The core of our approach is the observation that a pre-trained language model can confidently predict multiple contiguous tokens, forming the basis for a lexical unit, in which these contiguous tokens could be decoded in parallel. Extensive experiments validate that our method substantially reduces decoding time while maintaining generation quality, i.e., 33% speed up on natural language generation with no quality loss, and 30% speed up on code generation with a negligible quality loss of 3%. Distinctively, LUD requires no auxiliary models and does not require changes to existing architectures. It can also be integrated with other decoding acceleration methods, thus achieving an even more pronounced inference efficiency boost. We posit that the foundational principles of LUD could define a new decoding paradigm for future language models, enhancing their applicability for a broader spectrum of applications. All codes are be publicly available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/Lexical-Unit-Decoding-LUD-.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.401
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4476–4487
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.401
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Chenxi Sun, Hongzhi Zhang, Zijia Lin, Jingyuan Zhang, Fuzheng Zhang, Zhongyuan Wang, Bin Chen, Chengru Song, Di Zhang, Kun Gai, and Deyi Xiong. 2024. Decoding at the Speed of Thought: Harnessing Parallel Decoding of Lexical Units for LLMs. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 4476–4487, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Decoding at the Speed of Thought: Harnessing Parallel Decoding of Lexical Units for LLMs (Sun et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2024.lrec-main.401.pdf