Set Block Decoding (SBD) introduces a novel approach to accelerate the inference process in autoregressive language models by integrating next token prediction and masked token prediction. This method allows for parallel sampling of multiple tokens and achieves a significant reduction in computational requirements without compromising accuracy, as demonstrated through fine-tuning existing models like Llama-3.1 and Qwen-3. SBD provides a 3-5x decrease in forward passes needed for generation while maintaining performance levels similar to standard training methods.
machine-learning ✓
language-models ✓
inference ✓
+ acceleration
token-prediction ✓