English

Accelerating Speculative Decoding with Block Diffusion Draft Trees

Computation and Language 2026-04-15 v1

Abstract

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive language models by using a lightweight drafter to propose multiple future tokens, which the target model then verifies in parallel. DFlash shows that a block diffusion drafter can generate an entire draft block in a single forward pass and achieve state-of-the-art speculative decoding performance, outperforming strong autoregressive drafters such as EAGLE-3. Vanilla DFlash, however, still verifies only a single drafted trajectory per round, potentially limiting its acceptance length. We introduce DDTree (Diffusion Draft Tree), a method that constructs a draft tree directly from the per-position distributions of a block diffusion drafter. Under a fixed node budget, DDTree uses a simple best-first heap algorithm to select the continuations that are most likely to match the target model according to a surrogate defined by the draft model's output. The resulting tree is verified efficiently in a single target model forward pass using an ancestor-only attention mask. Because DDTree builds on DFlash, a leading draft model for speculative decoding, these gains place DDTree among the leading approaches to speculative decoding.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.12989,
  title  = {Accelerating Speculative Decoding with Block Diffusion Draft Trees},
  author = {Liran Ringel and Yaniv Romano},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.12989},
  year   = {2026}
}