To tackle the high inference latency exhibited by autoregressive language models, previous studies have proposed an early-exiting framework that allocates adaptive computation paths for each token based on the complexity of generating the subsequent token. However, we observed several shortcomings, including performance degradation caused by a state copying mechanism or numerous exit paths, and sensitivity to exit confidence thresholds. Consequently, we propose a Fast and Robust Early-Exiting (FREE) framework, which incorporates a shallow-deep module and a synchronized parallel decoding. Our framework enables faster inference by synchronizing the decoding process of the current token with previously stacked early-exited tokens. Furthermore, as parallel decoding allows us to observe predictions from both shallow and deep models, we present a novel adaptive threshold estimator that exploits a Beta mixture model to determine suitable confidence thresholds. We empirically demonstrated the superiority of our proposed framework on extensive generation tasks.

In this paper, we propose a novel approach named DisCal to enhance the level of abstractiveness (measured by n-gram overlap) without sacrificing the informativeness (measured by ROUGE) of generated summaries. DisCal exposes diverse pseudo summaries with two supervision to the student model. Firstly, the best pseudo summary is identified in terms of abstractiveness and informativeness and used for sequence-level distillation. Secondly, their ranks are used to ensure the student model to assign higher prediction scores to summaries with higher ranks. Our experiments show that DisCal outperforms prior methods in abstractive summarization distillation, producing highly abstractive and informative summaries.