Kangaroo: Lossless Self-Speculative Decoding for Accelerating LLMs via Double Early Exiting

Speculative decoding has demonstrated its effectiveness in accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs) while maintaining an identical sampling distribution. However, the conventional approach of training separate draft model to achieve a satisfactory token acceptance rate can be costly and impractical. In this paper, we propose a novel self-speculative decoding framework Kangaroo with double early exiting strategy, which leverages the shallow sub-network and the LM Head of the well-trained target LLM to construct a self-drafting model. Then, the self-verification stage only requires computing the remaining layers over the early-exited hidden states in parallel. To bridge the representation gap between the sub-network and the full model, we train a lightweight and efficient adapter module on top of the sub-network. One significant challenge that comes with the proposed method is that the inference latency of the self-draft model may no longer be negligible compared to the big model. To boost the token acceptance rate while minimizing the latency of the self-drafting model, we introduce an additional early exiting mechanism for both single-sequence and the tree decoding scenarios. Specifically, we dynamically halt the small model’s subsequent prediction during the drafting phase once the confidence level for the current step falls below a certain threshold. This approach reduces unnecessary computations and improves overall efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate our effectiveness, where Kangaroo achieves walltime speedups up to 2.04 × , outperforming Medusa-1 with 88.7% fewer additional parameters. The code for Kangaroo is available at https://github.com/Equationliu/Kangaroo .