A rigor-matched audit of periodic-step layer skipping for efficient llm inference: conflayers versus swift, with a supplemental analysis of trained routing alternatives
Layer-skipping methods for efficient LLM inference decide, at some granularity, which transformer layers to execute for a given input. We present a rigor-matched, three-seed audit of two periodic-step, search-based methods that make this decision online at inference time and re-evaluate it every few generation steps: a confidence-gated early-exit baseline (ConfLayers) and genuine self-speculative decoding (SWIFT, Xia et al. 2024), together with vanilla autoregressive decoding, across Qwen2.5-0.5B and Qwen2.5-1.5B (Yang et al. 2024) on GSM8K (Cobbe et al. 2021) and CNN/DailyMail (Nallapati et al. 2016; See et al. 2017). SWIFT is strongest on accuracy in three of four cells, while ConfLayers is dominated everywhere, with particularly large deficits on GSM8K at 1.5B. Separating online-search overhead from pure inference cost, we find that SWIFT's true inference speed is faster than ConfLayers's in all four cells (5-21%), reversing the naive wall-clock ranking in three; ConfLayers's search overhead is small and stable (1-2% of cost), whereas SWIFT's is larger and more variable across seeds (up to 28.7%). We additionally examine two trained routing methods, LayerRoute (Sikdar, 2026), a per-sequence, input-conditioned hard gate, and LayerDrop (Fan et al. 2020), a fixed, input-independent pruning pattern, as a supplemental analysis rather than a head-to-head comparison because both operate at a coarser decision granularity. Under a verified protocol with genuine per-input gating, a genuine full-model baseline, and genuine inference-time compute skipping, both show modest real speedups (1.08-1.33x) but accuracy well below the periodic-step methods, including near-total LayerRoute collapse on GSM8K at 1.5B (0.003 mean exact-match across three seeds). We release the full audit protocol as a template for rigor-matched efficiency comparisons.