Multi-Access Speculative Inference: Uplink or Downlink?

Abstract

Multi-access speculative inference (Multi-SPIN) extends SPIN to multi-device edge networks to accelerate cooperative token generation. It allows on-device small language models (SLMs) to autoregressively draft multiple tokens for individual generation tasks, while an edge-server large language model (LLM) verifies them in parallel. The major communication overhead arises when a drafted token is rejected by the server, in which case sampling the correction token requires access to both the SLM-output draft distribution and the LLM-output target distribution over the full token vocabulary. Existing designs typically perform correction at the server by uploading the draft distribution, but transmitting a vocabulary-wide distribution creates a critical uplink (UL) bottleneck. Alternatively, the correction can be performed at the device by downloading the target distribution, leveraging the high transmission rates available on the downlink (DL). Motivated by this insight, we introduce communication-mode selection as a new design dimension for Multi-SPIN. Specifically, each device can adaptively switch between the UL and DL modes to balance the UL bottleneck against the shared DL resource constraint, thereby relieving the overall communication burden. We formulate a sum-token-goodput maximization problem that jointly accounts for mode selection, draft-length control, and power allocation. For mode selection, we reveal a simple optimal structure that enables efficient search over the number of UL devices, with the corresponding transmit powers optimized accordingly. For draft-length control, we develop a greedy-search algorithm that adapts device-specific draft lengths to heterogeneous computation and communication capabilities. Experimental results on Qwen2.5 and DeepSeek-R1 model pairs demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly improves token goodput.