Organizations: Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Internet Information Collaboration, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen · Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen
Speculative Jacobi Decoding (SJD) is an important approach for accelerating autoregressive image generation. Although SJD has shown superior performance, recent studies point out that it usually suffers from a token ambiguity issue during token verification but its reason can not be well explained. To figure out this reason, in this paper, we conduct a visualization analysis on vision token and find that different from text tokens, vision tokens generally corresponds to some local, small, and unclear vision details, which means only using single token is difficult to accurately express a certain semantic, thereby causing token ambiguity issue. To this end, we propose a novel Speculative Jacobi Decoding with Semantics Verification (called SJD-SV), for accelerating autoregressive image generation. The key idea is that leveraging the strong correction characters between tokens to recognize semantic-aware token subsequence and then instead of perform token-by-token verification, turning to perform verification on semantic-aware token subsequence level for accelerating image generation. In particular, our method is plug-in, which can be directly integrated into existing SJD and its variants. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that existing SJD methods achieve significant performance improvement after integrating our SJD-SV method.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: (a) Existing image AR models represents an image as a fine-grained token sequence, such that individual tokens is difficult to accurately and clearly express a certain semantic, thereby introducing token ambiguity; (b) Instead of performing token-by-token verification as existing SJD methods, we turn to perform verification on semantic-aware token subsequence level. Its advantage is that token subsequences can encode more stable semantic information, effectively reducing false rejections during verification.
Figure 2: Analysis of semantic verification on token subsequence.
Configuration
Latency (↓)
NFE (↓)
Acceleration (↑)
FID (↓)
CLIP-Score (↑)
Latency
NFE
Parti-prompt
Lumina-mGPT ( Liu et al., 2024a )
79.37s
2392
1.00 ×
1.00 ×
–
32.09
Jacobi Decoding ( Song et al., 2021 )
82.21s
2300.0
0.97 ×
1.04 ×
–
32.09
SJD ( Teng et al., 2024a )
36.07s
1035.3
2.20 ×
2.31 ×
–
32.09
SJD-SV
30.48s
826.32
2.60 ×
2.89 ×
–
32.13
Table 1: Results of quantitative evaluation on the Parti-prompt and MS-COCO 2017 benchmarks. The best results are highlighted in bold.
Figure 3: Qualitative experiment. Our method shows on average 1.25× NFE acceleration while maintaining image quality.
Method
Accept (All)
Accept (Amb.)
Accept (Clear)
SJD
60.53%
56.49%
61.67%
SJD-SV
64.16 %
62.03 %
65.83 %
Table 2: Ablation study on the token ambiguity issue.
Fallback
Latency
NFE
CLIP
w/o
35.78s
972.92
32.11
w/ (Ours)
30.48s
826.32
32.13
Table 3: Analysis of our fallback mechanism on Parti-prompt.
Strategy
Latency
NFE
CLIP
Fixed-1
26.29s
710.83
31.04
Fixed-2
28.84s
760.92
31.76
Fixed-3
30.53s
822.11
32.09
Fixed-4
32.74s
867.37
32.11
All
33.25s
877.29
32.08
Adaptive (Ours)
30.48s
826.32
32.13
Table 4: Adaptive vs. fixed-length joint probability estimation.
α
NFE
Latency
CLIP
1.0
877.29
33.25s
32.08
0.9
843.53
31.44s
32.11
0.8
826.32
30.48s
32.13
0.7
790.84
29.13s
32.06
0.6
748.26
27.38
32.01
0.5
670.80
24.68
31.88
Table 5: Ablation study of hyperparameter α on Parti-prompt.
SJD-SV
GSD-SV
LANTERN-SV
Time overhead
2.05ms
5.54ms
0.81ms
Table 6: Computational overhead analysis on Parti-prompt.
Configuration
Latency
NFE
Acceleration ( ↑ )
FID
CLIP-Score
( ↓ )
( ↓ )
Latency
NFE
( ↓ )
( ↑ )
Parti-prompt
Emu3 ( Wang et al., 2024 )
780.98s
8193.0
1.00 ×
1.00 ×
–
32.13
Emu3(+SJD)
345.65s
3571.0
2.26 ×
2.29 ×
–
32.14
Emu3(+Ours)
180.30s
2786.1
4.33 ×
2.94 ×
–
32.16
LLamagen ( Sun et al., 2024a )
30.58s
927.5
1.00 ×
1.00 ×
–
28.14
Table 7: Results of other baselines on the Parti-prompt benchmark. The best results are highlighted in bold.
Speculative Jacobi Decoding (SJD) has emerged as a promising method for accelerating autoregressive image generation. Despite its potential, existing SJD approaches often suffer from the low acceptance rate issue of speculative tokens due to token selection ambiguity. Recent works attempt to mitigate this issue primarily from the relaxed token verification perspective but fail to fully exploit the iterative dynamics of decoding. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis and make a novel observation that tokens whose probabilities increase are more likely to match the verification-accepted and correct token. Based on this, we propose a novel Speculative Jacobi Decoding with Verification Prediction (SJD-VP). The key idea is to leverage the change in token probabilities across iterations to guide sampling, favoring tokens whose probabilities increase. This effectively predicts which tokens are likely to pass subsequent verification, boosting the acceptance rate. In particular, our SJD-VP is plug-and-play and can be seamlessly integrated into existing SJD methods. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our SJD-VP method consistently accelerates autoregressive decoding while improving image generation quality.
Bingqi Shan, Baoquan Zhang, Xiaochen Qi +3
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen · Institute of Perceptual Intelligence, Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen · SIFAR
Speculative Jacobi Decoding (SJD) offers a draft-model-free approach to accelerate autoregressive text-to-image synthesis. However, the high-entropy nature of visual generation yields low draft-token acceptance rates in complex regions, creating a bottleneck that severely limits overall throughput. To overcome this, we introduce SJD-PAC, an enhanced SJD framework. First, SJD-PAC employs a proactive drafting strategy to improve local acceptance rates in these challenging high-entropy regions. Second, we introduce an adaptive continuation mechanism that sustains sequence validation after an initial rejection, bypassing the need for full resampling. Working in tandem, these optimizations significantly increase the average acceptance length per step, boosting inference speed while strictly preserving the target distribution. Experiments on standard text-to-image benchmarks demonstrate that SJD-PAC achieves a 3.8× speedup with lossless image quality. Code is available at https://github.com/KangJialiang/SJD-PAC.
Autoregressive (AR) image models have recently demonstrated remarkable generative capability, but their sequential nature results in significant inference latency. Existing training-free acceleration methods typically verify tokens independently, overlooking the strong co-occurrence patterns between adjacent visual tokens. This independence assumption often leads to contextual inconsistency and limits decoding efficiency. In this work, we introduce a novel training-free acceleration framework that performs phrase-level speculative verification, enabling the model to jointly validate multiple correlated tokens within each decoding window. To construct such phrase units, we analyze token co-occurrence statistics from the training corpus and group frequently co-occurring tokens into semantically coherent visual phrases. During inference, the proposed phrase-level verification evaluates aggregated likelihood ratios over each phrase, allowing simultaneous acceptance of multiple tokens while preserving generation quality. Extensive experiments on autoregressive text-to-image generation show that our method significantly reduces the number of function evaluations (NFE) and achieves up to 30% faster decoding without compromising visual fidelity. Our findings reveal that modeling short-range token co-occurrence provides an effective and general principle for accelerating autoregressive inference.