English
Related papers

Related papers: Improving Multi-candidate Speculative Decoding

200 papers

Speculative decoding (SD), where a draft model provides multiple candidate tokens for the target model to verify in parallel, has demonstrated significant potential for accelerating LLM inference. Yet, existing SD approaches adhere to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Enyu Zhou , Kai Sheng , Hao Chen , Xin 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

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

In this paper, we introduce a simple training-free technique to improve the performance of drafter-based speculative decoding (SpD) methods that incorporates language modeling head (LM head) during drafting process. A drafter-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Raghavv Goel , Sudhanshu Agrawal , Mukul Gagrani , Junyoung Park , Yifan Zao , He Zhang , Tian Liu , Yiping Yang , Xin Yuan , Jiuyan Lu , Chris Lott , Mingu Lee

Large language models (LLMs) have shown outstanding performance across numerous real-world tasks. However, the autoregressive nature of these models makes the inference process slow and costly. Speculative decoding has emerged as a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Zongyue Qin , Zifan He , Neha Prakriya , Jason Cong , Yizhou Sun

Speculative decoding accelerates inference in large language models (LLMs) by generating draft tokens for target model verification. Current approaches for obtaining draft tokens rely on lightweight draft models or additional model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Guofeng Quan , Wenfeng Feng , Chuzhan Hao , Guochao Jiang , Yuewei Zhang , Hao Wang

To mitigate the high inference latency stemming from autoregressive decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs), Speculative Decoding has emerged as a novel decoding paradigm for LLM inference. In each decoding step, this method first drafts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Heming Xia , Zhe Yang , Qingxiu Dong , Peiyi Wang , Yongqi Li , Tao Ge , Tianyu Liu , Wenjie Li , Zhifang Sui

Diffusion-based Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive models, offering unique advantages through bidirectional attention and parallel generation paradigms. However, the generation results…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Yifeng Gao , Ziang Ji , Yuxuan Wang , Biqing Qi , Hanlin Xu , Linfeng Zhang

LLMs have low GPU efficiency and high latency due to autoregressive decoding. Speculative decoding (SD) mitigates this using a small draft model to speculatively generate multiple tokens, which are then verified in parallel by a target…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Sungkyun Kim , Jaemin Kim , Dogyung Yoon , Jiho Shin , Junyeol Lee , Jiwon Seo

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 has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) by employing a small language model to draft a hypothesis sequence, which is then validated by the LLM. The effectiveness…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Zhuocheng Gong , Jiahao Liu , Ziyue Wang , Pengfei Wu , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai , Dongyan Zhao , Rui Yan

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 (SD) has become a popular technique to accelerate Large Language Model (LLM) inference, yet its real-world effectiveness remains unclear as prior evaluations rely on research prototypes and unrealistically small batch…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Xiaoxuan Liu , Jiaxiang Yu , Jongseok Park , Ion Stoica , Alvin Cheung

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) generation by using an efficient draft model to propose the next few tokens, which are verified by the LLM in a single forward call, reducing latency while preserving its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Milan Gritta , Huiyin Xue , Gerasimos Lampouras

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

Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by decoupling generation and verification. While recent methods improve draft quality by tightly coupling the drafter with the target model, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jingwei Song , Xinyu Wang , Hanbin Wang , Xiaoxuan Lei , Bill Shi , Shixin Han , Eric Yang , Xiao-Wen Chang , Lynn Ai

Speculative decoding, which combines a draft model with a target model, has emerged as an effective approach to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference. However, existing methods often face a trade-off between the acceptance rate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Danying Ge , Jianhua Gao , Qizhi Jiang , Yifei Feng , Weixing Ji

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by using a draft model to look ahead, but gains are capped by the cost of autoregressive draft generation: increasing draft size elevates acceptance rates but introduces additional latency…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Nikhil Bhendawade , Kumari Nishu , Arnav Kundu , Chris Bartels , Minsik Cho , Irina Belousova

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their increasing parameter sizes significantly slow down inference. Speculative decoding mitigates this issue by leveraging a smaller draft…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Kuan-Wei Lu , Ding-Yong Hong , Pangfeng Liu , Jan-Jan Wu

The performance of large language models (LLMs) is closely linked to their underlying size, leading to ever-growing networks and hence slower inference. Speculative decoding has been proposed as a technique to accelerate autoregressive…