Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters
4 hours ago
- #inference acceleration
- #model optimization
- #speculative decoding
- Gemma 4 models are being enhanced with Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) drafters for faster inference.
- MTP drafters use speculative decoding to achieve up to 3x speedup without quality loss.
- Speculative decoding reduces latency by letting a lightweight drafter predict multiple tokens, verified in parallel by the main model.
- Benefits include improved responsiveness, better local development on consumer hardware, and enhanced on-device performance with battery savings.
- Architectural improvements include sharing activations and KV cache with the target model, and efficient clustering for edge models.
- Hardware optimizations show speed gains with increased batch sizes on platforms like Apple Silicon and Nvidia A100.
- MTP drafters are available under Apache 2.0 on Hugging Face, Kaggle, and other platforms for various frameworks.