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Speculative decoding has become a widely adopted technique for accelerating large language model (LLM) inference by drafting multiple candidate tokens and verifying them with a target model in parallel. Its efficiency, however, critically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Shuoyang Sun , Chang Dai , Hao Fang , Kuofeng Gao , Xinhao Zhong , Yi Sun , Fan Mo , Shu-Tao Xia , Bin Chen

Deployment of autoregressive large language models (LLMs) is costly, and as these models increase in size, the associated costs will become even more considerable. Consequently, different methods have been proposed to accelerate the token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Parsa Kavehzadeh , Mohammadreza Pourreza , Mojtaba Valipour , Tinashu Zhu , Haoli Bai , Ali Ghodsi , Boxing Chen , Mehdi Rezagholizadeh

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by using a fast draft model to generate tokens and a more accurate target model to verify them. Its performance depends on the $\textit{acceptance length}$, or number of draft tokens accepted…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Avinash Kumar , Sujay Sanghavi , Poulami Das

Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates inference in large language models by using a smaller draft model to propose tokens, which are then verified by a larger target model. However, the throughput gains of SD are fundamentally limited by a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Sanghyun Byun , Mohanad Odema , Jung Ick Guack , Baisub Lee , Jacob Song , Woo Seong Chung

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by drafting a tree of candidate continuations and verifying it in one target forward. Existing drafters fall into two camps with opposite weaknesses. Autoregressive drafters such as EAGLE-3…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Weijie Shi , Qiang Xu , Fan Deng , Yaguang Wu , Jiarun Liu , Yehong Xu , Hao Chen , Jia Zhu , Jiajie Xu , Xiangjun Huang , Jian Yang , Xiaofang Zhou

We present speculative sampling, an algorithm for accelerating transformer decoding by enabling the generation of multiple tokens from each transformer call. Our algorithm relies on the observation that the latency of parallel scoring of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Charlie Chen , Sebastian Borgeaud , Geoffrey Irving , Jean-Baptiste Lespiau , Laurent Sifre , John Jumper

Large Language Models (LLMs) present a critical trade-off between inference quality and computational cost: larger models offer superior capabilities but incur significant latency, while smaller models are faster but less powerful. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Hang Wu , Jianian Zhu , Yinghui Li , Haojie Wang , Biao Hou , Jidong Zhai

Speculative decoding accelerates memory-bound LLM inference without quality degradation by using a fast drafter to propose multiple candidate tokens and the target model to verify them in parallel. However, conventional sequential…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yaojie Zhang , Jianuo Huang , Junlong Ke , Yuhang Han , Yongji Long , Tianchen Zhao , Biqing Qi , Linfeng Zhang

Speculative decoding has emerged as a popular method to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) while retaining their superior text generation performance. Previous methods either adopt a fixed speculative decoding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Yunlong Hou , Fengzhuo Zhang , Cunxiao Du , Xuan Zhang , Jiachun Pan , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Zhuoran Yang

Cascades and speculative decoding are two common approaches to improving language models' inference efficiency. Both approaches involve interleaving models of different sizes, but via fundamentally distinct mechanisms: cascades employ a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Harikrishna Narasimhan , Wittawat Jitkrittum , Ankit Singh Rawat , Seungyeon Kim , Neha Gupta , Aditya Krishna Menon , Sanjiv Kumar

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing and broadened their applicability across diverse commercial applications. However, the deployment of these models is constrained by high inference time in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Euiin Yi , Taehyeon Kim , Hongseok Jeung , Du-Seong Chang , Se-Young Yun

Long-context large language model (LLM) inference has become the norm for today's AI applications. However, it is severely bottlenecked by the increasing memory demands of its KV cache. Previous works have shown that self-speculative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yikang Yue , Yuqi Xue , Jian Huang

Speculative decoding is widely adopted to reduce latency in large language model (LLM) inference by leveraging smaller draft models capable of handling diverse user tasks. However, emerging AI applications, such as LLM-based agents, present…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Gabriele Oliaro , Zhihao Jia , Daniel Campos , Aurick Qiao

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

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

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

The practice of speculative decoding, whereby inference is probabilistically supported by a smaller, cheaper, ``drafter'' model, has become a standard technique for systematically reducing the decoding time of large language models. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jameson Sandler , Ahmet Üstün , Marco Romanelli , Sara Hooker , 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

We propose an acceleration scheme for large language models (LLMs) through Speculative Decoding with Semantic Adaptive Tokens (SDSAT). The primary objective of this design is to enhance the LLM model's ability to generate draft tokens more…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Chengbo Liu , Yong Zhu

Speculative decoding accelerates inference for Large Language Models by using a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens that are verified in parallel by a larger target model. Prior work shows that the draft model often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Ofir Ben Shoham