English

Token-Driven GammaTune: Adaptive Calibration for Enhanced Speculative Decoding

Computation and Language 2025-06-05 v3 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a smaller draft model to propose tokens, which are then verified by a larger target model. However, selecting an optimal speculation length is critical for maximizing speedup while minimizing wasted computation. We introduce \textit{GammaTune} and \textit{GammaTune+}, training-free adaptive algorithms that dynamically adjust speculation length based on token acceptance rates using a heuristic-based switching mechanism. Evaluated on SpecBench across multiple tasks and model pairs, our method outperforms other heuristic-based approaches and fixed-length speculative decoding, achieving an average speedup of 15\% (±\pm5\%) with \textit{GammaTune} and 16\% (±\pm3\%) with \textit{GammaTune+}, while reducing performance variance. This makes \textit{GammaTune} a robust and efficient solution for real-world deployment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.00030,
  title  = {Token-Driven GammaTune: Adaptive Calibration for Enhanced Speculative Decoding},
  author = {Aayush Gautam and Susav Shrestha and Narasimha Reddy},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.00030},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

6 pages, 2 figures, 1 table

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:41:05.880Z