Fast Chain-of-Thought: A Glance of Future from Parallel Decoding Leads
  to Answers Faster
Authors: name: Hongxuan Zhang; name: Zhining Liu; name: Jiaqi Zheng; name: Chenyi Zhuang; name: Jinjie Gu; name: Guihai Chen
Published: 2023-11-14 15:56:18

Abstract: In this work, we propose FastCoT, a model-agnostic framework based on
parallel decoding without any further training of an auxiliary model or
modification to the LLM itself. FastCoT uses a size-varying context window
whose size changes with position to conduct parallel decoding and
auto-regressive decoding simultaneously, thus fully utilizing GPU computation
resources. In FastCoT, the parallel decoding part provides the LLM with a quick
glance of the future composed of approximate tokens, which could lead to faster
answers compared to regular autoregressive decoding used by causal
transformers. We also provide an implementation of parallel decoding within
LLM, which supports KV-cache generation and batch processing. Through extensive
experiments, we demonstrate that FastCoT saves inference time by nearly 20%
with only a negligible performance drop compared to the regular approach.
Additionally, we show that the context window size exhibits considerable
robustness for different tasks.