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Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by proposing tokens with a lightweight draft model and selectively accepting them using a target model. This work introduces DropMatch, a novel approach that matches draft…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Jeongtae Lee , Minjung Jo , Hyunjoon Jeong , Gunho Park , Sunghyeon Woo , Joonghoon Kim , Se Jung Kwon , Dongsoo Lee

Speculative decoding aims to speed up autoregressive generation of a language model by verifying in parallel the tokens generated by a smaller draft model.In this work, we explore the effectiveness of learning-free, negligible-cost draft…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Lawrence Stewart , Matthew Trager , Sujan Kumar Gonugondla , Stefano Soatto

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) reasoning by using a small draft model to generate candidate tokens, which the target LLM either accepts directly or regenerates upon rejection. However, excessive alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Tiancheng Su , Meicong Zhang , Guoxiu He

Large language models typically generate tokens autoregressively, using each token as input for the next. Recent work on Speculative Decoding has sought to accelerate this process by employing a smaller, faster draft model to more quickly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Bradley McDanel

Inference scaling methods for LLMs often rely on decomposing problems into steps (or groups of tokens), followed by sampling and selecting the best next steps. However, these steps and their sizes are often predetermined or manually…

Speculative sampling is a popular technique for accelerating inference in Large Language Models by generating candidate tokens using a fast draft model and accepting or rejecting them based on the target model's distribution. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Valentin De Bortoli , Alexandre Galashov , Arthur Gretton , Arnaud Doucet

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 (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

Speculative decoding is a powerful technique that attempts to circumvent the autoregressive constraint of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). The aim of speculative decoding techniques is to improve the average inference time of a large,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Sudhanshu Agrawal , Wonseok Jeon , Mingu Lee

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by allowing a lightweight draft model to propose outputs that a stronger target model verifies. However, its token-centric nature allows erroneous steps to propagate.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Kiran Purohit , Ramasuri Narayanam , Soumyabrata Pal

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by the target model. The speedup is significantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Alexander Samarin , Sergei Krutikov , Anton Shevtsov , Sergei Skvortsov , Filipp Fisin , Alexander Golubev

Despite their remarkable success in complex tasks propelling widespread adoption, large language-model-based agents still face critical deployment challenges due to prohibitive latency and inference costs. While recent work has explored…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Yilin Guan , Qingfeng Lan , Sun Fei , Dujian Ding , Devang Acharya , Chi Wang , William Yang Wang , Wenyue Hua

We propose Speculative Decoding (SpecDec), for the first time ever, to formally study exploiting the idea of speculative execution to accelerate autoregressive (AR) decoding. Speculative Decoding has two innovations: Spec-Drafter -- an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Heming Xia , Tao Ge , Peiyi Wang , Si-Qing Chen , Furu Wei , Zhifang Sui

We present a simple on the fly method for faster inference of large language models. Unlike other (self-)speculative decoding techniques, our method does not require fine-tuning or black-box optimization to generate a fixed draft model,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Michael R. Metel , Peng Lu , Boxing Chen , Mehdi Rezagholizadeh , Ivan Kobyzev

We propose a novel speculative decoding method tailored for multi-sample reasoning scenarios, such as self-consistency and Best-of-N sampling. Our method exploits the intrinsic consensus of parallel generation paths to synthesize…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Yiwei Li , Jiayi Shi , Shaoxiong Feng , Peiwen Yuan , Xinglin Wang , Yueqi Zhang , Ji Zhang , Chuyi Tan , Boyuan Pan , Yao Hu , Kan Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing by understanding and generating human-like text. However, the increasing demand for more sophisticated LLMs presents significant computational challenges due to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Ze Yang , Yihong Jin , Xinhe Xu

Speculative decoding accelerates LLMs by using a lightweight draft model to generate tokens autoregressively before verifying them in parallel with a larger target model. However, determining the optimal number of tokens to draft remains a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Aditya Sridhar , Nish Sinnadurai , Sean Lie , Vithursan Thangarasa

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

Speculative decoding accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) inference by using a small draft model to predict multiple tokens, and a large target model to verify these tokens in parallel. Recent studies leverage the hidden state of the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Langlin Huang , Chengsong Huang , Jixuan Leng , Di Huang , Jiaxin Huang

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by using a smaller draft model to speculate tokens that a larger target model verifies. Verification is often the bottleneck (e.g. verification is $4\times$ slower than token generation when a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Avinash Kumar , Sujay Sanghavi , Poulami Das