Autoregressive language models demonstrate excellent performance in various scenarios. However, the inference efficiency is limited by its one-step-one-word generation mode, which has become a pressing problem recently as the models become increasingly larger. Speculative decoding employs a “draft and then verify” mechanism to allow multiple tokens to be generated in one step, realizing lossless acceleration. Existing methods mainly adopt fixed heuristic draft structures, which do not adapt to different situations to maximize the acceptance length during verification. To alleviate this dilemma, we propose OPT-Tree, an algorithm to construct adaptive and scalable draft trees, which can be applied to any autoregressive draft model. It searches the optimal tree structure that maximizes the mathematical expectation of the acceptance length in each decoding step. Experimental results reveal that OPT-Tree outperforms the existing draft structures and achieves a speed-up ratio of up to 3.2 compared with autoregressive decoding. If the draft model is powerful enough and the node budget is sufficient, it can generate more than ten tokens in a single step. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jikai0Wang/OPT-Tree.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have driven advances in natural language processing. Still, their growing scale has increased the computational burden, necessitating a balance between efficiency and performance. Low-rank compression, a promising technique, reduces non-essential parameters by decomposing weight matrices into products of two low-rank matrices. Yet, its application in LLMs has not been extensively studied. The key to low-rank compression lies in low-rank factorization and low-rank dimensions allocation. To address the challenges of low-rank compression in LLMs, we conduct empirical research on the low-rank characteristics of large models. We propose a low-rank compression method suitable for LLMs. This approach involves precise estimation of feature distributions through pooled covariance matrices and a Bayesian optimization strategy for allocating low-rank dimensions. Experiments on the LLaMA-2 models demonstrate that our method outperforms existing strong structured pruning and low-rank compression techniques in maintaining model performance at the same compression ratio.