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Related papers: Fast Best-of-N Decoding via Speculative Rejection

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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…

Recent advances in test-time alignment methods, such as Best-of-N sampling, offer a simple and effective way to steer language models (LMs) toward preferred behaviors using reward models (RM). However, these approaches can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Vinod Raman , Hilal Asi , Satyen Kale

Rollout dominates the training time in large language model (LLM) post-training, where the trained model is used to generate tokens given a batch of prompts. This work, SpecActor, achieves fast rollout with speculative decoding that deploys…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Rongxin Cheng , Kai Zhou , Xingda Wei , Siyuan Liu , Mingcong Han , Mingjing Ai , Yeju Zhou , Baoquan Zhong , Wencong Xiao , Rong Chen , Haibo Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in ranking systems such as information retrieval (IR) systems and recommender systems (RSs). To alleviate the latency of auto-regressive decoding, some studies explore the single (first)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Yingpeng Du , Tianjun Wei , Zhu Sun , Jie Zhang

Inference-time computation offers a powerful axis for scaling the performance of language models. However, naively increasing computation in techniques like Best-of-N sampling can lead to performance degradation due to reward hacking.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Audrey Huang , Adam Block , Qinghua Liu , Nan Jiang , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Dylan J. Foster

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 accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a small draft model to generate candidate tokens for a larger target model to verify. The efficacy of this technique hinges on the trade-off between the time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jiebin Zhang , Zhenghan Yu , Liang Wang , Nan Yang , Eugene J. Yu , Zheng Li , Yifan Song , Dawei Zhu , Xingxing Zhang , Furu Wei , Sujian Li

Best-of-N (BoN) is a popular and effective algorithm for aligning language models to human preferences. The algorithm works as follows: at inference time, N samples are drawn from the language model, and the sample with the highest reward,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Afra Amini , Tim Vieira , Elliott Ash , Ryan Cotterell

Test-time scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by allocating additional computational resources during inference. However, this paradigm is inherently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Shengyin Sun , Yiming Li , Xing Li , Yingzhao Lian , Weizhe Lin , Hui-Ling Zhen , Zhiyuan Yang , Chen Chen , Xianzhi Yu , Mingxuan Yuan , Chen Ma

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

Efficient inference in large language models (LLMs) has become a critical focus as their scale and complexity grow. Traditional autoregressive decoding, while effective, suffers from computational inefficiencies due to its sequential token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Hyun Ryu , Eric Kim

Post-training alignment of large language models (LLMs) is a critical challenge, as not all tokens contribute equally to model performance. This paper introduces a selective alignment strategy that prioritizes high-impact tokens within…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Zhijin Dong

Inference acceleration of large language models (LLMs) has been put forward in many application scenarios and speculative decoding has shown its advantage in addressing inference acceleration. Speculative decoding usually introduces a draft…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Zhuofan Wen , Shangtong Gui , Yang Feng

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 has been shown as an effective way to accelerate Large Language Model (LLM) inference by using a Small Speculative Model (SSM) to generate candidate tokens in a so-called speculation phase, which are subsequently…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Fahao Chen , Peng Li , Tom H. Luan , Zhou Su , Jing Deng

Best-of-N selection is a key technique for improving the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) through increased test-time computation. Current state-of-the-art methods often employ computationally intensive reward models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Zhewei Kang , Xuandong Zhao , Dawn Song

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

This paper concerns the problem of aligning samples from large language models to human preferences using best-of-$n$ sampling, where we draw $n$ samples, rank them, and return the best one. We consider two fundamental problems. First: what…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Lin Gui , Cristina Gârbacea , Victor Veitch

We propose Guided Speculative Inference (GSI), a novel algorithm for efficient reward-guided decoding in large language models. GSI combines soft best-of-$n$ test-time scaling with a reward model $r(x,y)$ and speculative samples from a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Jonathan Geuter , Youssef Mroueh , David Alvarez-Melis

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly relied upon for solving complex reasoning tasks in domains such as mathematics, logic, and multi-step question answering. A growing line of work seeks to improve reasoning quality by scaling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Seyyed Saeid Cheshmi , Azal Ahmad Khan , Xinran Wang , Zirui Liu , Ali Anwar
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