English
Related papers

Related papers: Direct Alignment of Draft Model for Speculative De…

200 papers

Speculative decoding is a pivotal technique to accelerate the inference of large language models (LLMs) by employing a smaller draft model to predict the target model's outputs. However, its efficacy can be limited due to the low predictive…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Xiaoxuan Liu , Lanxiang Hu , Peter Bailis , Alvin Cheung , Zhijie Deng , Ion Stoica , Hao Zhang

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong reasoning capabilities marks a significant milestone, unlocking new frontiers in complex problem-solving. However, training these reasoning models, typically using Reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Qinghao Hu , Shang Yang , Junxian Guo , Xiaozhe Yao , Yujun Lin , Yuxian Gu , Han Cai , Chuang Gan , Ana Klimovic , Song Han

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate autoregressive inference in large language models (LLMs). Self-draft methods, which leverage the base LLM itself for speculation, avoid the overhead of auxiliary draft…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Zhuofan Wen , Yang Feng

Efficient inference in large language models (LLMs) has become a critical focus as their scale and complexity grow. Traditional autoregressive decoding, while effective, suffers from computational inefficiencies due to its sequential token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Hyun Ryu , Eric Kim

Recent advances with large language models (LLM) illustrate their diverse capabilities. We propose a novel algorithm, staged speculative decoding, to accelerate LLM inference in small-batch, on-device scenarios. We address the low…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Benjamin Spector , Chris Re

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a technique to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) by using a lower complexity draft model to propose candidate tokens verified by a larger target model. To further improve efficiency,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Xiaofan Lu , Yixiao Zeng , Feiyang Ma , Zixu Yu , Marco Levorato

Recent works have revealed the great potential of speculative decoding in accelerating the autoregressive generation process of large language models. The success of these methods relies on the alignment between draft candidates and the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Jikai Wang , Zhenxu Tian , Juntao Li , Qingrong Xia , Xinyu Duan , Zhefeng Wang , Baoxing Huai , Min Zhang

Speculative decoding has become the standard approach for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference. It exploits a lossless draft-then-verify procedure to circumvent the latency of autoregressive decoding, achieving impressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Jameson Sandler , Jacob K. Christopher , Thomas Hartvigsen , Ferdinando Fioretto

Speculative decoding speeds up autoregressive generation in Large Language Models (LLMs) through a two-step procedure, where a lightweight draft model proposes tokens which the target model then verifies in a single forward pass. Although…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Anton Plaksin , Sergei Krutikov , Sergei Skvortsov , Alexander Samarin

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional performance across a wide range of tasks; however, their token-by-token autoregressive generation process significantly hinders inference speed. Speculative decoding presents a promising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Kai Lv , Honglin Guo , Qipeng Guo , Xipeng Qiu

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a smaller draft model to propose multiple tokens that are verified by a larger target model in parallel. While prior work demonstrates substantial speedups…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Linghao Kong , Megan Flynn , Michael Peng , Nir Shavit , Mark Kurtz , Alexandre Marques

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become more prevalent in long-context applications such as interactive chatbots, document analysis, and agent workflows, but it is challenging to serve long-context requests with low latency and high…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Ranajoy Sadhukhan , Jian Chen , Zhuoming Chen , Vashisth Tiwari , Ruihang Lai , Jinyuan Shi , Ian En-Hsu Yen , Avner May , Tianqi Chen , Beidi Chen

Speculative decoding is a prominent technique to speed up the inference of a large target language model based on predictions of an auxiliary draft model. While effective, in application-specific settings, it often involves fine-tuning both…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Nikhil Bhendawade , Irina Belousova , Qichen Fu , Henry Mason , Mohammad Rastegari , Mahyar Najibi

Speculative decoding is a powerful way to accelerate autoregressive large language models (LLMs), but directly porting it to vision-language models (VLMs) faces unique systems constraints: the prefill stage is dominated by visual tokens…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Haiduo Huang , Fuwei Yang , Zhenhua Liu , Xuanwu Yin , Dong Li , Pengju Ren , Emad Barsoum

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks but suffer from high inference latency due to their autoregressive generation. Speculative Decoding (SPD) mitigates this issue by verifying candidate tokens in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Jinze Li , Yixing Xu , Guanchen Li , Shuo Yang , Jinfeng Xu , Xuanwu Yin , Dong Li , Edith C. H. Ngai , Emad Barsoum

Speculative decoding generally dictates having a small, efficient draft model that is either pretrained or distilled offline to a particular target model series, for instance, Llama or Qwen models. However, within online deployment…

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jian Chen , Yesheng Liang , Zhijian Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit high inference latency due to their autoregressive decoding nature. While the draft head in speculative decoding mitigates this issue, its full potential remains unexplored. In this paper, we introduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Kaiqi Zhang , Jing Zhao , Rui Chen

Accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs) has been a critical challenge in generative AI. Speculative decoding (SD) substantially improves LLM inference efficiency. However, its utility is limited by a fundamental…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Sibo Xiao , Jinyuan Fu , Zhongle Xie , Lidan Shou

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising approach to accelerating large language model (LLM) generation using a fast drafter while maintaining alignment with the target model's distribution. However, existing approaches face a…