Multi-SPIN: Multi-Access Speculative Inference for Cooperative Token Generation at the Edge
This work addresses the challenge of efficient LLM inference in heterogeneous multi-user edge environments, offering a practical solution for latency-sensitive applications.
Multi-SPIN extends speculative inference to distributed edge systems, enabling cooperative token generation between resource-constrained devices and servers. It optimizes draft-length control and bandwidth allocation to maximize sum token goodput, achieving up to 88% improvement over baselines.
Speculative inference (SPIN) was originally developed as an efficient architecture to accelerate Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we propose its distributed deployment to enable cooperative token generation in a multiuser edge system; its advantage is to effectively balance computational loads between resource-constrained devices and servers. The resulting architecture, termed Multi-access SPIN (Multi-SPIN), utilizes on-device small language models to generate and upload candidate token drafts, while an edge server operates the LLM to verify them in parallel batches. Given the severe heterogeneity in users' computation and communication capabilities, the draft length emerges as a critical control variable that influences node-level computation loads and multi-access latency, thereby governing the sum token goodput. Consequently, considering frequency-division multiple access, we investigate the problem of multi-access draft control, a joint optimization of draft-length control and bandwidth allocation to maximize sum token goodput. We examine two cases: (1) homogeneous draft lengths across users to facilitate server-side batching, and (2) heterogeneous draft lengths to introduce a new dimension for goodput enhancement. By developing decomposition methods, we reduce these complex optimizations into tractable sub-problems, which allow efficient draft control algorithms to be derived in closed form. Our analysis shows that the optimal bandwidth allocation compensates users with weaker computation-and-communication capabilities in the homogeneous case due to the batching synchronization requirements, whereas its heterogeneous-case counterpart rewards users with higher acceptance rates by relaxing such requirements. Experiments using Llama-2 and Qwen3.5 model pairs across diverse tasks demonstrate that Multi-SPIN improves goodput by up to 88% over heterogeneity-agnostic baselines.