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Speculative decoding is an effective method for accelerating inference of large language models (LLMs) by employing a small draft model to predict the output of a target model. However, when adapting speculative decoding to domain-specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Fenglu Hong , Ravi Raju , Jonathan Lingjie Li , Bo Li , Urmish Thakker , Avinash Ravichandran , Swayambhoo Jain , Changran Hu

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose tokens that are later verified by a stronger target model. While effective in centralized systems, its behavior in…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Jingwei Song , Wanyi Chen , Xinyuan Song , Max , Chris Tong , Gufeng Chen , Tianyi Zhao , Eric Yang , Bill Shi , Lynn Ai

Low-latency decoding for large language models (LLMs) is crucial for applications like chatbots and code assistants, yet generating long outputs remains slow in single-query settings. Prior work on speculative decoding (which combines a…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Ziyi Zhang , Ziheng Jiang , Chengquan Jiang , Menghan Yu , Size Zheng , Haibin Lin , Henry Hoffmann , Xin Liu

Autoregressive (AR) large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language tasks, yet their inherent sequential decoding limits inference efficiency. In this work, we propose Fast-dLLM v2,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Chengyue Wu , Hao Zhang , Shuchen Xue , Shizhe Diao , Yonggan Fu , Zhijian Liu , Pavlo Molchanov , Ping Luo , Song Han , Enze Xie

Rollout dominates the training time in large language model (LLM) post-training, where the trained model is used to generate tokens given a batch of prompts. This work, SpecActor, achieves fast rollout with speculative decoding that deploys…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Rongxin Cheng , Kai Zhou , Xingda Wei , Siyuan Liu , Mingcong Han , Mingjing Ai , Yeju Zhou , Baoquan Zhong , Wencong Xiao , Rong Chen , Haibo Chen

Inference latency stands as a critical bottleneck in the large-scale deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Speculative decoding methods have recently shown promise in accelerating inference without compromising the output…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Ruilin Wang , Huixia Li , Yuexiao Ma , Xiawu Zheng , Fei Chao , Xuefeng Xiao , Rongrong Ji

Striking an optimal balance between minimal drafting latency and high speculation accuracy to enhance the inference speed of Large Language Models remains a significant challenge in speculative decoding. In this paper, we introduce Falcon,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Xiangxiang Gao , Weisheng Xie , Yiwei Xiang , Feng Ji

Large Language Models (LLMs), constrained by their auto-regressive nature, suffer from slow decoding. Speculative decoding methods have emerged as a promising solution to accelerate LLM decoding, attracting attention from both systems and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Xuliang Wang , Yuetao Chen , Maochan Zhen , Fang Liu , Xinzhou Zheng , Xingwu Liu , Hong Xu , Ming Li

Speculative decoding has rapidly emerged as a leading approach for accelerating language model (LM) inference, as it offers substantial speedups while yielding identical outputs. This relies upon a small draft model, tasked with predicting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Miles Williams , Young D. Kwon , Rui Li , Alexandros Kouris , Stylianos I. Venieris

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP), but their size creates computational bottlenecks. We introduce a novel approach to create accurate, sparse foundational versions of performant LLMs that…

Large language models and large multimodal models (LLMs and LMMs) deliver strong generative performance but suffer from slow decoding, a problem that becomes more severe when handling visual inputs, whose sequences typically contain many…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Zihua Wang , Ruibo Li , Haozhe Du , Joey Tianyi Zhou , Yu Zhang , Xu Yang

Speculative decoding is an inference-acceleration method for large language models (LLMs) where a small language model generates a draft-token sequence which is further verified by the target LLM in parallel. Recent works have advanced this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Wonseok Jeon , Mukul Gagrani , Raghavv Goel , Junyoung Park , Mingu Lee , Christopher Lott

Speculative decoding (SD) is a promising method for accelerating the decoding process of Large Language Models (LLMs). The efficiency of SD primarily hinges on the consistency between the draft model and the verify model. However, existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Longze Chen , Renke Shan , Huiming Wang , Lu Wang , Ziqiang Liu , Run Luo , Jiawei Wang , Hamid Alinejad-Rokny , Min Yang

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant computational bottlenecks during inference due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention mechanisms, particularly as context lengths increase. We introduce SpecAttn, a novel training-free…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Harsh Shah

Inference with modern Large Language Models (LLMs) is expensive and slow, and speculative sampling has emerged as an effective solution to this problem, however, the number of the calls to the draft model for generating candidate tokens in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Junjie Ma , Jinlong Li

The escalating demand for efficient decoding in large language models (LLMs) is particularly critical for reasoning-intensive architectures like OpenAI-o3 and DeepSeek-R1, which depend on extended chain-of-thought reasoning. This study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Siyuan Yan , Mo Zhu , Guo-qing Jiang , Jianfei Wang , Jiaxing Chen , Wentai Zhang , Xiang Liao , Xiao Cui , Chen Zhang , Zhuoran Song , Ran Zhu

This technical report describes the design and training of novel speculative decoding draft models, for accelerating the inference speeds of large language models in a production environment. By conditioning draft predictions on both…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Davis Wertheimer , Joshua Rosenkranz , Thomas Parnell , Sahil Suneja , Pavithra Ranganathan , Raghu Ganti , Mudhakar Srivatsa

The growth in the number of parameters of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a significant surge in computational requirements, making them challenging and costly to deploy. Speculative decoding (SD) leverages smaller models to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Matthieu Zimmer , Milan Gritta , Gerasimos Lampouras , Haitham Bou Ammar , Jun Wang

Optimizing inference for long-context large language models (LLMs) is increasingly important due to the quadratic compute and linear memory cost of Transformers. Existing approximate inference methods, including key-value (KV) cache…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Kevin Galim , Ethan Ewer , Wonjun Kang , Minjae Lee , Hyung Il Koo , Kangwook Lee

Speculative decoding is an emerging technique that accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by allowing a smaller draft model to predict multiple tokens in advance, which are then verified or corrected by a larger target model. In…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-10 Ce Zheng , Tingting Yang