We provide additional experimental results to supplement Section 6 . In Section B.1, we include In Section B.2, we present a few example outputs with a visualization In Section B.3, we include results Figure B.1 and Figure B.2 present the empirical The bottom row presents the average number of decoder layer used. The bottom row presents the average number of decoder layer used. Figure B.5 presents two example outputs of CALM for instances from the machine translation, and We observe that the textual distance generally increases as we accelerate the decoding. Interestingly, following our initial intuition, CALM distributes the compute unevenly, using very few layers for certain "easy" tokens, and additional compute to "hard" tokens.

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a widely used approach to accelerate the inference of large language models (LLMs) without reducing generation quality. It operates by first using a compact model to draft multiple tokens efficiently, followed by parallel verification using the target LLM. This approach leads to faster inference compared to auto-regressive decoding. While there are multiple approaches to create a draft model, one promising approach is to use early-exit methods. These methods draft candidate tokens by using a subset of layers of the primary model and applying the remaining layers for verification, allowing a single model to handle both drafting and verification. While this technique reduces memory usage and computational cost, its performance relies on the choice of the exit layer for drafting and the number of tokens drafted (speculation length) in each SD round. Prior works use hyperparameter exploration to statically select these values. However, our evaluations show that these hyperparameter values are task-specific, and even within a task they are dependent on the current sequence context. We introduce DEL (Dynamic Exit Layer), a plug-and-play method that adaptively selects the exit layer and speculation length during inference. DEL dynamically tracks the token acceptance rate if the tokens are drafted at each layer of an LLM and uses that knowledge to heuristically select the optimal exit layer and speculation length. Our experiments across a broad range of models and downstream tasks show that DEL achieves overall speedups of $2.16\times$$\sim$$2.62\times$ over vanilla auto-regressive decoding and improves upon state-of-the-art SD methods, which peak at $2.43\times$, by up to $0.19\times$. The code is available at https://github.com/hoenza/DEL.

Hallucination refers to the inaccurate, irrelevant, and inconsistent text generated from large language models (LLMs). While the LLMs have shown great promise in a variety of tasks, the issue of hallucination still remains a major challenge for many practical uses. In this paper, we tackle the issue of hallucination in abstract text summarization by mitigating exposure bias. Existing models targeted for exposure bias mitigation, namely BRIO, aim for better summarization quality in the ROUGE score. We propose a model that uses a similar exposure bias mitigation strategy but with a goal that is aligned with less hallucination. We conjecture that among a group of candidate outputs, ones with hallucinations will comprise the minority of the whole group. That is, candidates with less similarity with others will have a higher chance of containing hallucinated content. Our method uses this aspect and utilizes contrastive learning, incentiviz-ing candidates with high inter-candidate ROUGE scores. We performed experiments on the XSum and CNN/DM summarization datasets, and our method showed 6.25% and 3.82% improvement, respectively, on the consistency G-Eval score over BRIO.

Speculative decoding is a widely used method that accelerates the generation process of large language models (LLMs) with no compromise in model performance. It achieves this goal by using an existing smaller model for drafting and then employing the target LLM to verify the draft in a low-cost parallel manner. Under such a drafting-verification framework, drafting efficiency has become a bottleneck in the final speedup of speculative decoding. Therefore, generating longer drafts at less cost can lead to better decoding speedup. To achieve this, we introduce Ouroboros, which can generate draft phrases to parallelize the drafting process and meanwhile lengthen drafts in a training-free manner. The experimental results on various typical text generation tasks show that Ouroboros can achieve speedups of up to $2.4\times$ over speculative decoding and $3.9\times$ over vanilla decoding, without fine-tuning draft and target models.