Paper:
Blockwise Parallel Decoding for Deep Autoregressive Models
Deep autoregressive sequence-to-sequence models have demonstrated impressive performance across a wide variety of tasks in recent years. While common architecture classes such as recurrent, convolutional, and self-attention networks make different trade-offs between the amount of computation needed per layer and the length of the critical path at training time, generation still remains an inherently sequential process. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel blockwise parallel decoding scheme in which we make predictions for multiple time steps in parallel then back off to the longest prefix validated by a scoring model. This allows for substantial theoretical improvements in generation speed when applied to architectures that can process output sequences in parallel. We verify our approach empirically through a series of experiments using state-of-the-art self-attention models for machine translation and image super-resolution, achieving iteration reductions of up to 2x over a baseline greedy decoder with no loss in quality, or up to 7x in exchange for a slight decrease in performance. In terms of wall-clock time, our fastest models exhibit real-time speedups of up to 4x over standard greedy decoding.

Review:
This paper presents a parallel inference algorithm that allows performing greedy decoding in sub-linear time. The proposed approach considers using k auxiliary models, in which each one predicts the j-th next word. In this way, these k models can run and predict the next k words in parallel. Then a verification step is conducted to verify the prediction of these k models. If the proposal is correct, then the predictions are accepted and the decoding can move on. In this way, in the best case, the model only requires m/k step to generate a sequence with m tokens.    Pros:  - The idea proposed in this paper is neat and interesting.  - The authors present experiments on tasks in two different domains to empirically demonstrate the efficiency of the decoding algorithm. - The authors proposed both exact and inexact algorithms for making the predictions. - The authors provide a nice analysis of their approach.   Cons:  - The writing of the paper can be improved, and the description of the proposed approach is sometimes confusing and descriptions of experimental settings and results are handwaving.  - The speed-up of the decoding is not guaranteed and require large duplicated computation, although the computation can be amortized.    Comments:  - It is unclear what the knowledge distillation approach is actually used in the experiment.  - I do not fully understand Table 1. It is unclear if the results showing is the exact or the approximate inference approach. It seems that the results showing here is using the exact greedy approach as the authors called it regular. But, in this case, why the Blue score is different for different k? If I understand correctly the p_1 model for different k should be the same, so the exact decoding should give the same output.  - Line 210-214: for approaches except "Regular", the authors should quantify the quality of the decoding quantitively. For example, what is the mean difference in pixel values between images generated by approximation greedy decoding and exact greedy decoding? How many of them can the difference be perceived by a human?     Minor comments:  - Figure 2 is not readable when the paper is printed in white and black.  - Line 109: Figure 3 is not showing what the authors describe.  - Line 199-120: Please explicitly define what do you mean by "Regular" and "Approximate"  in Table 2.   ----- Comments after rebuttal:  Thanks for the clarification and additional experiments on showing performance measured under wall-clock time and Table 1. With the clarification and the results on wall-clock, I update my rating.