arXiv:2604.07931cs.LG2026-04

提出从重尾分布角度改进大模型输出长度预测,更准确高效。

Robust Length Prediction: A Perspective from Heavy-Tailed Prompt-Conditioned Distributions

  • 用同一提示多次生成,建模输出长度的分布特性
  • 新方法在多个场景下预测误差降低,比传统方法更稳定
  • 适合需要精准内存调度和批量处理的推理服务场景

输出长度预测对大模型高效服务至关重要,直接影响批处理、内存分配和调度。现有方法通常以单次采样长度作为标签,隐含假设每个提示对应唯一确定长度。本文发现,在固定模型与解码设置下,相同提示会生成具有重尾特征的输出长度分布,而非单一数值。为此,提出基于提示条件长度分布(ProD)的新方法,通过多次独立生成构建训练目标。两种变体分别采用中位数目标(ProD-M)进行鲁棒点预测,以及分布目标(ProD-D)保留不确定性。理论分析支持其估计误差更优。跨多种场景实验表明,预测质量显著提升。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Output-length prediction is important for efficient LLM serving, as it directly affects batching, memory reservation, and scheduling. For prompt-only length prediction, most existing methods use a one-shot sampled length as the label, implicitly treating each prompt as if it had one true target length. We show that this is unreliable: even under a fixed model and decoding setup, the same prompt induces a \emph{prompt-conditioned output length distribution}, not a deterministic scalar, and this distribution is consistent with \emph{heavy-tailed} behavior. Motivated by this, we cast length prediction as robust estimation from heavy-tailed prompt-conditioned length distributions. We propose prompt-conditioned length distribution (ProD) methods, which construct training targets from multiple independent generations of the same prompt. Two variants are developed to reuse the served LLM's hidden states: \mbox{ProD-M}, which uses a median-based target for robust point prediction, and ProD-D, which uses a distributional target that preserves prompt-conditioned uncertainty. We provide theoretical justifications by analyzing the estimation error under a surrogate model. Experiments across diverse scenarios show consistent gains in prediction quality.

长度预测大模型服务重尾分布

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