SEED: Self-Speculative Decoding via Implicit Encoder-Decoder

Abstract

Self-speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by drafting tokens from the target model itself, but faces a sharp tradeoff between the quality and cost of the draft. Early-exit methods produce drafts cheaply by terminating computation at intermediate layers, but forgo the deeper representations that later layers provide and thus suffer in draft quality. Multi-token prediction preserves draft quality by emitting from the model's final hidden states, but pays for a full forward pass to produce those states at every drafting step. We propose self-speculative encoder-decoder (SEED), a self-speculative method that obtains high-quality drafts cheaply by reusing the deep contextual representations already computed during verification. We reinterpret the standard decoder-only transformer as an implicit encoder-decoder: the first layers (encoder) build deep contextual representations, and the last few layers (decoder) emit tokens from them. Encoding and verification are merged into a single step: verification is performed by the full encoder-decoder, and the contextual representations of the verified prefix are cached for reuse during drafting. Drafting is therefore very fast: between verifications, the lightweight decoder drafts multiple tokens autoregressively, each conditioned on the cached representations and on preceding drafts. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that SEED achieves up to 2.7$\times$ average speedup on 4B-scale models, outperforming both early-exit and MTP-style self-speculative baselines and running 28% faster than the state-of-the-art EAGLE-3, while preserving or even improving the generation quality of standard autoregressive fine-tuning. Code is available at https://github.com/lhk2004/SEED.