diff --git a/examples/lookahead/lookahead.cpp b/examples/lookahead/lookahead.cpp
index f54cfdd77f..e75250a0d2 100644
--- a/examples/lookahead/lookahead.cpp
+++ b/examples/lookahead/lookahead.cpp
@@ -50,6 +50,12 @@ int main(int argc, char ** argv) {
     const int N = 5;  // n-gram size
     const int G = 15; // max verification n-grams
 
+    // lookahead requires W + G + 1 sequences for parallel Jacobi decoding
+    params.n_parallel = W + G + 1;
+
+    // unified KV cache is required for coupled sequences in batch splitting
+    params.kv_unified = true;
+
     // init llama.cpp
     llama_backend_init();
     llama_numa_init(params.numa);