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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

Parallel Speculative Decoding (PSD) accelerates traditional Speculative Decoding (SD) by overlapping draft generation with verification. However, it remains hampered by two fundamental challenges: (1) a theoretical speedup ceiling dictated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yuhao Shen , Tianyu Liu , Junyi Shen , Jinyang Wu , Quan Kong , Li Huan , Cong Wang

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

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

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

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

Reasoning LLMs produce longer outputs, requiring speculative decoding drafters trained on extended sequences. Parallel drafting - predicting multiple tokens per forward pass - offers latency benefits over sequential generation, but training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Mude Hui , Xin Huang , Jaime Campos Salas , Yue Sun , Nathan Pemberton , Xiang Song , Ashish Khetan , George Karypis

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 (SD), where a small draft model is employed to propose draft tokens in advance and then the target model validates them in parallel, has emerged as a promising technique for LLM inference acceleration. Many endeavors to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Tianyu Liu , Qitan Lv , Hao Li , Xing Gao , Xiao Sun , Xiaoyan Sun

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate autoregressive inference in large language models (LLMs). Self-draft methods, which leverage the base LLM itself for speculation, avoid the overhead of auxiliary draft…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Zhuofan Wen , Yang Feng

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

The autoregressive nature of large language models (LLMs) fundamentally limits inference speed, as each forward pass generates only a single token and is often bottlenecked by memory bandwidth. Speculative decoding has emerged as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Zihao An , Huajun Bai , Ziqiong Liu , Dong Li , Emad Barsoum

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising technique for large language model (LLM) inference by accelerating autoregressive decoding via draft-then-verify. This paper studies a new edge scenario with multi-user inference, where draft…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Yaodan Xu , Sheng Zhou , Zhisheng Niu

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 generation has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate inference in large language models (LLMs) by leveraging parallelism to verify multiple draft tokens simultaneously. However, the fundamental limits on the achievable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Sergey Pankratov , Dan Alistarh

We present a novel inference scheme, self-speculative decoding, for accelerating Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for an auxiliary model. This approach is characterized by a two-stage process: drafting and verification. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Jun Zhang , Jue Wang , Huan Li , Lidan Shou , Ke Chen , Gang Chen , Sharad Mehrotra

Accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs) is a critical challenge in generative AI. Speculative decoding (SD) methods offer substantial efficiency gains by generating multiple tokens using a single target forward pass.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Nadav Timor , Jonathan Mamou , Daniel Korat , Moshe Berchansky , Gaurav Jain , Oren Pereg , Moshe Wasserblat , David Harel

Tool calling has greatly expanded the practical utility of large language models (LLMs) by enabling them to interact with external applications. As LLM capabilities advance, effective tool use increasingly involves multi-step, multi-turn…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Heming Xia , Yongqi Li , Cunxiao Du , Mingbo Song , Wenjie Li

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by drafting multiple tokens and verifying them in parallel with the target model. However, its practical speedup is constrained by the trade-off between draft quality and drafting cost:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jianuo Huang , Yaojie Zhang , Qituan Zhang , Hao Lin , Hanlin Xu , Linfeng Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for long-content generation (e.g., long Chain-of-Thought reasoning) where decoding efficiency becomes a critical bottleneck: Autoregressive decoding is inherently limited by its sequential…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Zhepei Wei , Wei-Lin Chen , Xinyu Zhu , Yu Meng