BS-Spec: BFP-Based Bit-Sharing for Self-Speculative LLM Decoding with LUT-Driven Mixed-Precision Acceleration

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse inference services, serving workloads span a wide range of batch sizes, context lengths, and performance requirements.

Speculative decoding improves inference throughput, but conventional approaches require a separate draft model and KV cache, while existing self-speculative methods suffer from workload-insensitive draft configurations and inefficient mixed-precision execution.

In this paper, we present BS-Spec, a block floating point (BFP)-based bit-sharing framework that jointly optimizes draft construction, workload-aware precision selection, and hardware execution.

BS-Spec derives multiple draft representations directly from a single BFP target model by partially loading the most significant bits of weights and the KV cache while preserving shared exponents, eliminating separate draft-model storage.

Offline calibration selects the weight and KV-cache precision pair that maximizes estimated speedup for each serving regime, and a precision lookup table applies the selected configuration at runtime.

To support this adaptive execution, we design a mixed-precision BFP accelerator with a lookup table (LUT)-based variable-precision datapath for both draft and target computation.

Experimental results show that BS-Spec achieves up to $1.9\times$ speedup over conventional autoregressive decoding and improves speedup over the evaluated bit-sharing self-speculative decoding baselines by $67.2\%$ on average, demonstrating the benefits of jointly co-designing bit sharing, precision adaptation, and specialized hardware for diverse LLM serving workloads.