Tianyu Liu

Tianyu Liu, Qitan Lv, Yuhao Shen et al.

Speculative decoding (SD) has become a standard technique for accelerating LLM inference without sacrificing output quality. Recent advances in speculative decoding have shifted from sequential chain-based drafting to tree-structured generation, where the draft model constructs a tree of candidate tokens to explore multiple possible drafts in parallel. However, existing tree-based SD methods typically build a fixed-width, fixed-depth draft tree, which fails to adapt to the varying difficulty of tokens and contexts. As a result, the draft model cannot dynamically adjust the tree structure to early stop on difficult tokens and extend generation for simple ones. To address these challenges, we introduce TALON, a training-free, budget-driven adaptive tree expansion framework that can be plugged into existing tree-based methods. Unlike static methods, TALON constructs the draft tree iteratively until a fixed token budget is met, using a hybrid expansion strategy that adaptively allocates the node budget to each layer of the draft tree. This framework naturally shapes the draft tree into a "deep-and-narrow" form for deterministic contexts and a "shallow-and-wide" form for uncertain branches, effectively optimizing the trade-off between exploration width and generation depth under a given budget. Extensive experiments across 5 models and 6 datasets demonstrate that TALON consistently outperforms state-of-the-art EAGLE-3, achieving up to 5.16x end-to-end speedup over auto-regressive decoding.

Qitan Lv, Tianyu Liu, Qiaosheng Zhang et al.

Despite the impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) pretrained on vast knowledge corpora, advancing their knowledge manipulation-the ability to effectively recall, reason, and transfer relevant knowledge-remains challenging. Existing methods mainly leverage Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on labeled datasets to enhance LLMs' knowledge manipulation ability. However, we observe that SFT models still exhibit the known&incorrect phenomenon, where they explicitly possess relevant knowledge for a given question but fail to leverage it for correct answers. To address this challenge, we propose KALE (Knowledge-Aware LEarning)-a post-training framework that leverages knowledge graphs (KGs) to generate high-quality rationales and enhance LLMs' knowledge manipulation ability. Specifically, KALE first introduces a Knowledge-Induced (KI) data synthesis method that efficiently extracts multi-hop reasoning paths from KGs to generate high-quality rationales for question-answer pairs. Then, KALE employs a Knowledge-Aware (KA) fine-tuning paradigm that enhances knowledge manipulation by internalizing rationale-guided reasoning through minimizing the KL divergence between predictions with and without rationales. Extensive experiments on eight popular benchmarks across six different LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of KALE, achieving accuracy improvements of up to 11.72% and an average of 4.18%.