APAR: LLMs Can Do Auto-Parallel Auto-Regressive Decoding
Mingdao Liu Aohan Zeng Bowen Wang Peng Zhang Jie Tang Yuxiao Dong
The massive adoption of large language models (LLMs) demands efficient
deployment strategies. However, the auto-regressive decoding process, which is
fundamental to how most LLMs generate text, poses challenges to achieve
efficient serving. In this work, we introduce a parallel auto-regressive
generation method. By instruct-tuning on general domain data that contains
hierarchical structures, we enable LLMs to independently plan their generation
process and perform auto-parallel auto-regressive (APAR) generation,
significantly reducing the number of generation steps. APAR alone can achieve
up to 2x speed-up, and when combined with speculative decoding, the speed-up
can reach up to 4x. In addition, APAR reduces the key-value cache consumption
and attention computation during generation. This leads to a throughput
increase of 20-70% and a latency reduce of 20-35% in high-throughput scenarios,
compared to state-of-the-art serving frameworks.