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Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters

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Re: Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters

#11
post #9

MTP support is being addedto llama.cpp, at least for the Qwen models ( https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/20533 ) and I'd imagine Gemma 4 will come soon. The performance uplift on local/self-hosted models in both quality and speed has been amazing in the last few months.

yet, still mostly useless.

Re: Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters

#12
Watching the computer write text sort of reminds me of using a modem to call a BBS in the old days. This seems like going from 300 baud to 1200 - a significant improvement, but still pretty slow, and someday we will wonder how we put up with it.

Re: Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if for a model that small with a permissive license it might not be worth their time to host a commercial grade inference stack? Might be easier to chuck it over the fence and let other providers handle it as it'll run in almost any commercial grade card? Also speculating, but I wonder if it might also create a bit of a pricing problem relative to Gemini flashlight depending on serving cost and quality of ou…

i dont know what are you talking about, i replaced an older gpt4o with a finetuned qwen. there is a huge amount of "AI, that can be done with those models, or partly by those models." Huge amount of people would not notice the difference. And if you prepare the context correctly, even bigger slice of people would not notice.

Genuinely curious, what are you "fine tuning" these smaller models to do reliably? I hear this talked about a lot but very few people actually cough up examples, and I'd love to actually hear of one.

Re: Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters

#14
post #3

Has anyone managed to get this to work in LM Studio? They've got a option in the UI, but it never seems to allow me to enable it.

I've gotten it to work with other models. They've got to be perfectly aligned usually, in terms of provider, quantization etc. Might be a bit before you can get a matched set.

Re: Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters

#15
post #9

MTP support is being addedto llama.cpp, at least for the Qwen models ( https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/20533 ) and I'd imagine Gemma 4 will come soon. The performance uplift on local/self-hosted models in both quality and speed has been amazing in the last few months.

How does this get added in practice?

Re: Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters

#17
post #3

Has anyone managed to get this to work in LM Studio? They've got a option in the UI, but it never seems to allow me to enable it.

Normally when LM Studio doesn't like it it's because of the presence of mmproj files in the folder. Sometimes removing them helps it show up.

They're somehow connected to vision & block speculative decode...don't ask me how/why though

For gemma specifically had more luck with speculative using the llama-server route than lm studio

Re: Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters

#18
post #9

MTP support is being addedto llama.cpp, at least for the Qwen models ( https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/20533 ) and I'd imagine Gemma 4 will come soon. The performance uplift on local/self-hosted models in both quality and speed has been amazing in the last few months.

Yeah important conceptually to remember MTP is kind of just more weights, but speculative decoding is the runtime algorithm that’s a significant add to whatever code is serving the model.

Re: Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters

#20
post #15
post #9

MTP support is being addedto llama.cpp, at least for the Qwen models ( https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/20533 ) and I'd imagine Gemma 4 will come soon. The performance uplift on local/self-hosted models in both quality and speed has been amazing in the last few months.

How does this get added in practice?

According to the linked PR, the original model does come with MTP which is another "head" (=output path) in the same model and (supposedly) runs faster.

The current implementation ignores that head but the PR let the tool recognize it, plus does proper integration (run the MTP while running the slower main path then compare the result, I believe.)

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