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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 large language model (LLM) inference by using a small draft model to propose candidate tokens that a larger target model verifies. A critical hyperparameter in this process is the speculation length…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Shikhar Shukla

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates language model inference by drafting tokens from a cheap proposal model and verifying them against an expensive target model via rejection sampling. Because rejection truncates the draft block at the…

This technical report describes the design and training of novel speculative decoding draft models, for accelerating the inference speeds of large language models in a production environment. By conditioning draft predictions on both…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Davis Wertheimer , Joshua Rosenkranz , Thomas Parnell , Sahil Suneja , Pavithra Ranganathan , Raghu Ganti , Mudhakar Srivatsa

Speculative decoding is a promising approach for accelerating large language models. The primary idea is to use a lightweight draft model to speculate the output of the target model for multiple subsequent timesteps, and then verify them in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Yepeng Weng , Qiao Hu , Xujie Chen , Li Liu , Dianwen Mei , Huishi Qiu , Jiang Tian , Zhongchao Shi

We propose a new model for multi-token prediction in transformers, aiming to enhance sampling efficiency without compromising accuracy. Motivated by recent work that predicts the probabilities of subsequent tokens using multiple heads, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Artem Basharin , Andrei Chertkov , Ivan Oseledets

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by letting a lightweight draft model propose future tokens that a larger target model then verifies in parallel. In practice, however, draft models are usually trained on broad…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Mohamad Zbib , Mohamad Bazzi , Ammar Mohanna , Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud , Bernard Ghanem

The recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have been extraordinary, yet the escalating inference costs associated with them present challenges in real-world applications. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Jiahao Liu , Qifan Wang , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai

Speculative decoding is an effective method for lossless acceleration of large language models during inference. It uses a fast model to draft a block of tokens which are then verified in parallel by the target model, and provides a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-14 Ziteng Sun , Uri Mendlovic , Yaniv Leviathan , Asaf Aharoni , Jae Hun Ro , Ahmad Beirami , Ananda Theertha Suresh

Importance Sampling methods are broadly used to approximate posterior distributions or some of their moments. In its standard approach, samples are drawn from a single proposal distribution and weighted properly. However, since the…

Computation · Statistics 2019-11-05 Víctor Elvira , Luca Martino , David Luengo , Mónica F. Bugallo

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 has emerged as a widely adopted method to accelerate large language model inference without sacrificing the quality of the model outputs. While this technique has facilitated notable speed improvements by enabling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Jacob K Christopher , Brian R Bartoldson , Tal Ben-Nun , Michael Cardei , Bhavya Kailkhura , Ferdinando Fioretto

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

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

In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2017-11-15 Matthias Morzfeld , Marcus S. Day , Ray W. Grout , George Shu Heng Pau , Stefan A. Finsterle , John B. Bell

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

We propose a new sampling algorithm combining two quite powerful ideas in the Markov chain Monte Carlo literature -- adaptive Metropolis sampler and two-stage Metropolis-Hastings sampler. The proposed sampling method will be particularly…

Computation · Statistics 2021-01-05 Anirban Mondal , Kai Yin , Abhijit Mandal

Speculative Decoding is a widely used technique to speed up inference for Large Language Models (LLMs) without sacrificing quality. When performing inference, speculative decoding uses a smaller draft model to generate speculative tokens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Minghao Yan , Saurabh Agarwal , Shivaram Venkataraman

We consider selecting the top-$m$ alternatives from a finite number of alternatives via Monte Carlo simulation. Under a Bayesian framework, we formulate the sampling decision as a stochastic dynamic programming problem, and develop a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-22 Gongbo Zhang , Yijie Peng , Jianghua Zhang , Enlu Zhou

Transformer language models generate text autoregressively, making inference latency proportional to the number of tokens generated. Speculative decoding reduces this latency without sacrificing output quality, by leveraging a small draft…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Clara Mohri , Haim Kaplan , Tal Schuster , Yishay Mansour , Amir Globerson