Kangaroo: Lossless Self-Speculative Decoding via Double Early Exiting
Authors: name: Fangcheng Liu, name: Yehui Tang, name: Zhenhua Liu, name: Yunsheng Ni, name: Kai Han, name: Yunhe Wang
Organization: HUAWEI Noah's Ark Lab

Speculative decoding has demonstrated its effectiveness in accelerating the
inference of large language models while maintaining a consistent sampling
distribution. However, the conventional approach of training a separate draft
model to achieve a satisfactory token acceptance rate can be costly. Drawing
inspiration from early exiting, we propose a novel self-speculative decoding
framework Kangaroo, which uses a fixed shallow sub-network as a
self-draft model, with the remaining layers serving as the larger target model.
We train a lightweight and efficient adapter module on top of the sub-network
to bridge the gap between the sub-network and the full model's representation
ability. It is noteworthy that the inference latency of the self-draft model
may no longer be negligible compared to the large model, necessitating
strategies to increase the token acceptance rate while minimizing the drafting
steps of the small model. To address this challenge, we introduce an additional
early exiting mechanism for generating draft tokens. Specifically, we halt the
small model's subsequent prediction during the drafting phase once the
confidence level for the current token falls below a certain threshold.
Extensive experiments on the Spec-Bench demonstrate the effectiveness of
Kangaroo. Under single-sequence verification, Kangaroo achieves speedups up to
1.68times on Spec-Bench, outperforming Medusa-1 with 88.7\% fewer additional
parameters (67M compared to 591M). The code for Kangaroo is available at
https://github.com/Equationliu/Kangaroo.