Papers for

real-time translation developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Diffusion language models speed up token generation with parallel block decoding

One Block Ahead: Promoting Sampler State in Diffusion Language Models

Abstract: Block-diffusion language models denoise a whole block of token positions in parallel so each forward pass can emit many tokens. However, blocks are still denoised in strict sequence, a cost that within-block acceleration leaves untouched. Here, we investigate decoding blocks concurrently and propose One Block Ahead (OBA), a training-free decoding algorithm that denoises the next block alongside the current one. We demonstrate that for uniform-state diffusion LMs, where a block's denoising progress is not visible in its intermediate tokens, concurrent decoding is advantageous if the next block's tokens are promoted together with the corresponding sampler state, including the self-conditioning signal and the denoising time. We also derive a break-even criterion that relates the benefit of OBA to the relative cost of a paired-block forward pass. On DiffusionGemma, a state-of-the-art diffusion LM, OBA increases the tokens per forward pass by 42.3% (from 15.64 to 22.25) and the single-request denoising throughput by 16.3%, averaged over ten benchmarks, with a small accuracy regression.

Wed 14 OctComputation and Language
The gist
Making language models faster at producing words is important for many applications. The authors found a way to speed up a specific type of model, called a block-diffusion language model, by letting it work on two blocks of words at the same time instead of one after the other. They introduced a method called One Block Ahead that cleverly shares information between blocks so the model can decode multiple parts together without retraining. This approach boosted the number of tokens generated per step by over 40% and also improved speed with only a small drop in accuracy.
Open → 2610.19510v1

TokenRouter improves decoding speed for token-level large language model routing

TokenRouter: Efficient Serving System for Token-Level LLM Routing

Abstract: Large language model (LLM) routing distributes inference work across different models, advancing the cost-quality Pareto frontier of LLM serving. While coarse-grained routing at the session or query level has been widely adopted in production systems, recent algorithmic work shows that fine-grained token-level routing can yield substantial efficiency and quality gains. However, efficiently serving token-level routed inference poses significant challenges to existing systems. Built on single-LLM assumptions, current systems suffer from severe step desynchronization and frequent batch admission delays under token-level routing, and they also impose high implementation complexity on developers. To address these challenges, we design TokenRouter, an efficient and developer-friendly serving system for token-level routed LLM inference. TokenRouter follows the principle of request-centric programming, model-centric execution: developers describe routing logic from the perspective of a single request, while the runtime launches a subserver for each LLM and dispatches requests asynchronously. Each subserver employs a delayed-batching scheduler, whose optimal hyperparameters are derived from a mathematical throughput model of the system. Across diverse routing algorithms, workloads, and model pairs, TokenRouter achieves 2.01-64.15x higher decoding throughput than existing systems, substantially advancing the serving efficiency of token-level LLM routing. Our code is available at https://github.com/thu-nics/TokenRouter.

Thu 8 OctComputation and Language
The gist
Running large language models can be slow and costly, especially when switching between different models for each word generated. The authors identified that existing systems are not efficient enough for this fine-grained switching, causing delays and complexity. They built TokenRouter, a system that manages requests cleverly and batches work efficiently for different models. This system achieves much faster processing speeds across various scenarios compared to previous methods.
Open → 2610.12242v1

Efficient method compresses speech for better zero-shot language model use

Align, Integrate, and Fire: Efficient Token-Level Alignment for Zero-Shot SpeechLLMs

Abstract: While Large Language Models excel in natural language processing, efficiently extending their capabilities to spoken input remains a significant challenge. Existing methods for building SpeechLLMs often rely on computationally expensive full-model fine-tuning, or employ parameter-efficient projectors that suffer from inefficient token sequence lengths and costly full-model supervision. In this paper, we introduce Aligned Continuous Integrate-and-Fire, a highly efficient framework for zero-shot speech processing. Our method dynamically compresses continuous acoustic frames into the exact discrete token length of the target text utilizing explicit Dynamic Time Warping alignments. This allows our initial training stage to establish a robust acoustic-to-semantic bridge using lightweight distance metrics, entirely bypassing the computationally expensive LLM forward pass. For subsequent fine-tuning, we propose a memory-efficient knowledge distillation objective that targets a single LLM layer, performing competitively with full-model cross-entropy training at a fraction of the computational cost. Through extensive evaluations on Automatic Speech Recognition and Speech Translation, we demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to prior parameter-efficient baselines.

Wed 16 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Understanding spoken language with large language models is hard because speech data is long and complicated. The authors designed a way to squash speech sounds into shorter bits that match the exact words without heavy computation. They first align sounds to text timings, then train a simpler system to link speech to meaning without needing the whole language model each time. This makes teaching the model to understand speech faster and less costly. Their experiments show better speech recognition and translation compared to older methods.
Open → 2609.18516v1