Hanlin xu
Author directory2026
Domino: Decoupling Causal Modeling from Autoregressive Drafting in Speculative Decoding
Jianuo Huang | Yaojie Zhang | Qituan Zhang | Hao Lin | Hanlin xu | Linfeng Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jianuo Huang | Yaojie Zhang | Qituan Zhang | Hao Lin | Hanlin xu | Linfeng Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by drafting multiple tokens and verifying them in parallel with the target model. However, its practical speedup is constrained by the trade-off between draft quality and drafting cost: autoregressive drafters model causal dependencies among draft tokens but incur sequential overhead, while parallel drafters reduce drafting cost but weaken intra-block dependency modeling. In this paper, we propose Domino, a speculative decoding framework that decouples causal dependency modeling from expensive autoregressive draft execution. Domino first uses a parallel draft backbone to produce preliminary draft distributions for the entire block, and then applies a lightweight Domino head to refine them with prefix-dependent causal information. To stabilize teacher-forced causal encoding, we further introduce a base-anchored training curriculum that first strengthens the parallel backbone and then gradually shifts optimization toward the causally corrected final distribution. Experiments on Qwen3 models show that Domino achieves up to (5.49×) end-to-end speedup under the Transformers backend and up to (5.8×) throughput speedup under SGLang serving. Code and checkpoints are provided in the supplementary material.
MATCH: Modulating Attention via In-Context Retrieval for Long-Context Transformers
Linrui Ma | Chun Hei Lo | Xinyu Wang | Peng Lu | Xihao Yuan | Hanting Chen | Kai Han | Xinghao Chen | Chengjun Zhan | Hanlin xu | Yichun Yin | Lifeng Shang | Feng Wen | Boxing Chen | Yufei Cui
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Linrui Ma | Chun Hei Lo | Xinyu Wang | Peng Lu | Xihao Yuan | Hanting Chen | Kai Han | Xinghao Chen | Chengjun Zhan | Hanlin xu | Yichun Yin | Lifeng Shang | Feng Wen | Boxing Chen | Yufei Cui
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The quadratic computational cost of traditional attention mechanisms poses a major bottleneck to the scalability and practical deployment of large language models (LLMs), particularly in long-context scenarios. To improve efficiency, existing approaches often enforce rigid structural constraints such as local attention windows. However, these strategies typically lead to substantial performance degradation on tasks requiring precise long-range recall. In this work, we propose MATCH, a scalable and efficient framework that augments sparsified attention mechanisms with dynamically integrated in-context information through an efficient retrieval system. Empirical results show that MATCH significantly improves the performance of sparse-attention models on both synthetic and real-world natural-language tasks. These findings highlight the versatility of MATCH as a general approach for enhancing in-context retrieval capabilities while maintaining the efficiency benefits of sparse attention architectures.