2025.emnlp-main.748@ACL

Total: 1

#1 Efficient Beam Search for Large Language Models Using Trie-Based Decoding [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Brian J Chan, Mao-xun Huang, Jui-Hung Cheng, Chao-Ting Chen, Hen-Hsen Huang

This work presents a novel trie (prefix-tree)-based parallel decoding method that addresses the memory inefficiency of batch-based beam search. By sharing a single KV cache across beams with common prefixes, our approach dramatically reduces memory usage and enables efficient decoding. We evaluated our method across three attention architectures, Multi-Head Attention (Phi-3.5-mini-instruct), Grouped Query Attention (Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct), and Sliding Window Attention (Mistral-Small-24B-Instruct-2501), using CNN/DailyMail for abstractive summarization and HumanEval for code generation. Our experiments demonstrate substantial memory savings (4–8×) and up to 2.4× faster decoding, without compromising generation quality. These results highlight our method’s suitability for memory-constrained environments and large-scale deployments.

Subject: EMNLP.2025 - Main