CLP: Collocation-Length Prediction for Zero-Loss Adaptive Multi-Token Inference
Large language model inference is bottlenecked by autoregressive decoding, where each token requires a full forward pass. Multi-token prediction (MTP) offers a promising acceleration path, but existing approaches suffer from a fundamental architectural flaw: the MTP head for the first token competes with the backbone's own language model (LM) head, leading to severe quality degradation when predictions are accepted. We identify this head-backbone competition as the root cause of repetitive and incoherent outputs in prior MTP-based acceleration methods. To address this, we propose Backbone-as-Architect, a design principle where the backbone LM head always generates the first token, and MTP heads are responsible only for subsequent tokens. Building on this principle, we introduce CLP (Collocation-Length Predictor), a lightweight span-level decision layer that predicts how many additional tokens can be safely accepted at each decoding step. CLP uses only a single linear layer (4.6K--7.7K parameters), replacing the over-engineered 1M-parameter gate networks used in prior work. Experiments on Qwen2.5 models (0.5B, 1.5B, 7B) show that CLP achieves 1.20x--1.29x speedup on 1.5B and 1.14x--1.20x on 7B, with zero quality degradation (repetition ratio < 0.02), while gate-based approaches fail to accelerate (1.07x) or produce severely degraded outputs (repetition ratio > 0.5%). We further demonstrate that shorter prediction horizons (k=2) recover 24% higher MTP head accuracy on large models, establishing a scaling-aware design principle. We identify MTP head prediction accuracy as the binding constraint on acceleration and establish a clear roadmap for future improvements.