Jianuo Huang
Author directory2026
Mask Tokens as Prophet: Fine-Grained Cache Eviction for Efficient dLLM Inference
Jianuo Huang | Yaojie Zhang | Yicun Yang | Benhao Huang | Linfeng Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Jianuo Huang | Yaojie Zhang | Yicun Yang | Benhao Huang | Linfeng Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) present a promising alternative to dominant autoregressive models (ARMs) by the ability of parallel decoding at the expense of substantial computation and memory costs. Specifically, the cache mechanism for bidirectional attention in dLLMs demands large memory footprint, restricting their ability to handle long contexts under resource-limited settings. Existing cache eviction strategies are primarily designed for ARMs and fail to account for the role of mask tokens and specific characteristics in dLLMs, resulting in suboptimal performance.To address these challenges, we introduce MaskKV, a training-free cache eviction framework tailored to dLLMs, focusing on the effect of mask tokens in dLLMs. MaskKV is built on two key innovations: (1) a mask-query guided scoring mechanism that leverages attention weights to identify and evict less critical prompt tokens for each head; (2) an adaptive cache budgeting strategy that improves efficiency by reducing allocation in intermediate layers and concentrating resources on prompt-preferring heads. On LLaDA with MaskKV, compressing the KV cache to only 256 pairs (less than 5% of tokens) retains 94% of the full-cache performance on LongBench and achieves up to 31 × acceleration at 32k prompt length. Our code will be released on Github.
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.