WaveFront Decoding: Parallelized Self-Speculative Decoding for Looped Language Models

2026-09-19

AI Summary

为解决循环语言模型解码延迟问题，提出WaveFront解码方法，通过混合深度状态批处理和自我推测解码加速生成过程。

Abstract

Looped language models repeatedly apply a weight-shared block to increase effective depth without increasing parameter count, but the resulting T sequential recurrent-block calls per generated token substantially increase decoding latency. To address the issue, we introduce Wavefront Decoding (WFD), a training-free self-speculative decoding framework designed for looped language models. WFD exploits two properties of these architectures: intermediate recurrence outputs provide effective draft predictions, and weight sharing allows token states at different positions and recurrence depths to be processed in one batched recurrent-block call. WFD organizes these mixed-depth states into a diagonal wavefront, continuously drafting new positions at shallow depth while advancing earlier positions toward full-depth verification. Unlike the phase-separated draft-then-verify schedule, WFD therefore co-batches drafting and verification within the same recurrent calls, while rejected drafts are corrected using full-depth predictions. Across six Spec-Bench task categories, WFD achieves 2.42x speedup on Ouro-2.6B and 3.54x on Huginn-3.5B over autoregressive decoding, consistently outperforming draft-then-verify. Cross-recurrence KV sharing further reduces wavefront KV traffic and increases WFD's speedup to 4.81x on Huginn-3.5B.

Problem

• Looped Language Models
• Decoding Latency
• Recurrent-Block

Innovation

• WaveFront Decoding
• self-speculative decoding
• looped language models
• cross-recurrence KV sharing