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Related papers: Improving Multi-candidate Speculative Decoding

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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

Speculative decoding accelerates Large Language Models (LLMs) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens that are verified in parallel by the target model. However, existing draft model training objectives are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Zihao An , Taichi Liu , Ziqiong Liu , Dong Li , Ruofeng Liu , Emad Barsoum

The acceleration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with speculative decoding provides a significant runtime improvement without any loss of accuracy. Currently, EAGLE-2 is the state-of-the-art speculative decoding method, improving on EAGLE…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Oscar Brown , Zhengjie Wang , Andrea Do , Nikhil Mathew , Cheng Yu

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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate executable outputs, JSON objects, and API calls, where a single syntax error can make the output unusable. Constrained decoding enforces validity token-by-token via masking and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Avinash Reddy , Thayne T. Walker , James S. Ide , Amrit Singh Bedi

Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) excel in video understanding but suffer from high inference latency during autoregressive generation. Speculative Decoding (SD) mitigates this by applying a draft-and-verify paradigm, yet existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Yicheng Ji , Jun Zhang , Jinpeng Chen , Cong Wang , Lidan Shou , Gang Chen , Huan Li

Large language models (LLMs) deliver impressive generation quality, but incur very high inference cost because each output token is generated auto-regressively through all model layers. Early-exit based self-speculative decoding (EESD) has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Ruanjun Li , Ziheng Liu , Yuanming Shi , Jiawei Shao , Chi Zhang , Xuelong Li

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference using a smaller draft model. In this paper, we establish a surprising connection between speculative decoding and channel simulation, which aims at simulating a noisy channel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Szymon Kobus , Deniz Gündüz

Growing demands from tasks like code generation, deep reasoning, and long-document understanding have made long-context generation a crucial capability for large language models (LLMs). Speculative decoding is one of the most direct and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Zhendong Tan , Xingjun Zhang , Chaoyi Hu , Junjie Peng , Kun Xia

Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a widely used paradigm to accelerate LLM inference without compromising quality. It works by first employing a compact model to draft multiple tokens efficiently and then using the target LLM to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Heming Xia , Yongqi Li , Jun Zhang , Cunxiao Du , Wenjie Li

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive language model inference by verifying multiple draft tokens in parallel. However, the verification stage often becomes the dominant computational bottleneck, especially for long-context inputs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Jikai Wang , Jianchao Tan , Yuxuan Hu , Jiayu Qin , Yerui Sun , Yuchen Xie , Xunliang Cai , Juntao Li , Min Zhang

Speculative decoding has emerged as a widely adopted paradigm for accelerating large language model inference, where a lightweight draft model rapidly generates candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by a larger target model.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yu-Yang Qian , Hao-Cong Wu , Yichao Fu , Hao Zhang , Peng Zhao

Reasoning models excel by generating long chain-of-thoughts, but decoding the resulting thousands of tokens is slow. Token-level speculative decoding (SD) helps, but its benefit is capped, because the chance that an entire $\gamma$-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Yichao Fu , Rui Ge , Zelei Shao , Zhijie Deng , Hao Zhang

Speculative Decoding has gained popularity as an effective technique for accelerating the auto-regressive inference process of Large Language Models. However, Speculative Decoding entirely relies on the availability of efficient draft…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Ofir Zafrir , Igor Margulis , Dorin Shteyman , Shira Guskin , Guy Boudoukh

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

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 is an effective and lossless method for Large Language Model (LLM) inference acceleration. It employs a smaller model to generate a draft token sequence, which is then verified by the original base model. In multi-GPU…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Yize Wu , Ke Gao , Ling Li , Yanjun Wu

Despite the remarkable strides made by autoregressive language models, their potential is often hampered by the slow inference speeds inherent in sequential token generation. Blockwise parallel decoding (BPD) was proposed by Stern et al. as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Taehyeon Kim , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Kishore Papineni , Michael Riley , Sanjiv Kumar , Adrian Benton

Speculative decoding has emerged as a powerful approach to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference by employing lightweight draft models to propose candidate tokens that are subsequently verified by the target model. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Zongyue Qin , Raghavv Goel , Mukul Gagrani , Risheek Garrepalli , Mingu Lee , Yizhou Sun

Speculative decoding is a widely used method that accelerates the generation process of large language models (LLMs) with no compromise in model performance. It achieves this goal by using an existing smaller model for drafting and then…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Weilin Zhao , Yuxiang Huang , Xu Han , Wang Xu , Chaojun Xiao , Xinrong Zhang , Yewei Fang , Kaihuo Zhang , Zhiyuan Liu , Maosong Sun