arXiv:2605.11186cs.LGcs.AI2026-05

在内存受限设备上,通过分层自推测加速大模型推理,不降质量还提速近5倍。

CATS: Cascaded Adaptive Tree Speculation for Memory-Limited LLM Inference Acceleration

  • 设计分层自推测框架,根据内存预算动态验证和修正生成的候选词。
  • 在真实边缘设备上实现最高5.08倍的时钟速度提升,且生成质量无下降。
  • 适合资源受限场景,如手机、嵌入式设备部署大模型推理。

大型语言模型(LLM)的自回归解码本质上是内存受限的:每一步生成都需要从内存(如GPU服务器的高带宽内存HBM)加载模型权重和中间结果,导致吞吐量受限于内存带宽而非计算能力。推测解码通过并行验证多个候选词,有效摊薄每次目标模型调用的成本来缓解此问题。然而,现有方法假设HBM足够大,能同时容纳目标模型与辅助推测模型——这一假设在边缘设备等内存受限平台失效。本文分析了内存受限环境下的推理瓶颈,提出CATS框架,基于设备内存预算和参数卸载模式,进行分层验证与纠错。该设计在保持峰值内存占用仅相当于目标模型本身的前提下,最大化接受率与端到端加速效果。我们在五种基准测试中对不同模型进行了实机评估,结果表明,CATS在边缘设备上可实现最高5.08倍的墙钟速度提升,且生成质量无下降,相比最先进方法提升达1.45倍。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Auto-regressive decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) is inherently memory-bound: every generation step requires loading the model weights and intermediate results from memory (e.g., High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for GPU servers), making throughput bottlenecked by memory bandwidth rather than compute. Speculative decoding addresses this by enabling parallel verification of multiple draft tokens, effectively amortizing the cost of each target-model call. However, existing speculative decoding methods are designed under the assumption that HBM is sufficiently large to hold both the target model and an auxiliary draft model simultaneously -- an assumption that breaks down on memory-constrained devices such as edge platforms with limited DRAM. We analyze the inference bottleneck in this memory-limited regime and propose CATS, a self-speculative decoding framework that conducts cascaded verification and correction based on the memory budget and parameter offloading patterns on memory-limited devices. This design maximizes token acceptance rate and end-to-end speedup while keeping the peak memory footprint on the device equal to that of the target model alone. We evaluate CATS on different models across five benchmarks on real edge devices. CATS can achieve a wall-clock speedup of up to 5.08x with no degradation in generation quality, outperforming the SOTA method by up to 1.45x under edge memory constraints.

大模型推理边缘计算推测解码内存优化

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