English

DFlash: Block Diffusion for Flash Speculative Decoding

Computation and Language 2026-05-29 v2

Abstract

Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but require inherently sequential decoding, leading to high inference latency and poor GPU utilization. Speculative decoding mitigates this bottleneck by using a fast draft model whose outputs are verified in parallel by the target LLM; however, existing methods still rely on autoregressive drafting, which remains sequential and limits practical speedups. Diffusion LLMs offer a promising alternative by enabling parallel generation, but current diffusion models typically underperform compared with autoregressive models. In this paper, we introduce DFlash, a speculative decoding framework that employs a lightweight block diffusion model for parallel drafting. By generating draft tokens in a single forward pass and conditioning the draft model on context features extracted from the target model, DFlash enables efficient drafting with high-quality outputs and higher acceptance rates. Experiments show that DFlash achieves over 6x lossless acceleration across a range of models and tasks, delivering up to 2.5x higher speedup than the state-of-the-art speculative decoding method EAGLE-3.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.06036,
  title  = {DFlash: Block Diffusion for Flash Speculative Decoding},
  author = {Jian Chen and Yesheng Liang and Zhijian Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.06036},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted at ICML 2026. Camera-ready version. Code: https://github.com/z-lab/dflash