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

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Modern preference alignment techniques, such as Best-of-N (BoN) sampling, rely on reward models trained with pairwise comparison data. While effective at learning relative preferences, this paradigm fails to capture a signal of response…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-14 Hyung Gyu Rho , Sian Lee

Large language models (LLMs) suffer from high inference latency due to the auto-regressive decoding process. Speculative decoding accelerates inference by generating multiple draft tokens using a lightweight model and verifying them in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yixuan Wang , Yijun Liu , Shiyu ji , Yuzhuang Xu , Yang Xu , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che

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

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

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

Language model alignment is a critical step in training modern generative language models. Alignment targets to improve win rate of a sample from the aligned model against the base model. Today, we are increasingly using inference-time…

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

The prevailing approach to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on human or AI feedback and assumes access to specific types of preference datasets. In our work, we question the efficacy of such datasets and explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Hao Sun

Best-of-N (BoN) sampling is a widely used inference-time alignment method for language models, whereby N candidate responses are sampled from a reference model and the one with the highest predicted reward according to a learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Ved Sriraman , Adam Block

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to elicit reliable chain-of-thought reasoning. However, the training process remains bottlenecked by the computationally expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Bingshuai Liu , Ante Wang , Zijun Min , Liang Yao , Haibo Zhang , Yang Liu , Xu Han , Peng Li , Anxiang Zeng , Jinsong Su

Verifiers or reward models are often used to enhance the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs). A common approach is the Best-of-N method, where N candidate solutions generated by the LLM are ranked by a verifier, and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Lunjun Zhang , Arian Hosseini , Hritik Bansal , Mehran Kazemi , Aviral Kumar , Rishabh Agarwal

Speculative decoding is a technique that uses multiple language models to accelerate infer- ence. Previous works have used an experi- mental approach to optimize the throughput of the inference pipeline, which involves LLM training and can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Amirhossein Bozorgkhoo , Igor Molybog

With the advancement of large language models (LLMs), solving complex reasoning tasks has gained increasing attention. Inference-time computation methods (e.g., Best-of-N, beam search, et al.) are particularly valuable as they can enhance…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Fan Liu , Wenshuo Chao , Naiqiang Tan , Hao Liu

Computationally intensive decoding procedures--including search, reranking, and self-critique--can improve the quality of language model (LM) outputs in problems spanning code generation, numerical reasoning, and dialog. Existing work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Mehul Damani , Idan Shenfeld , Andi Peng , Andreea Bobu , Jacob Andreas

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire extensive knowledge and remarkable abilities from extensive text corpora, making them powerful tools for various applications. To make LLMs more usable, aligning them with human preferences is essential.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Mozhi Zhang , Pengyu Wang , Chenkun Tan , Mianqiu Huang , Dong Zhang , Yaqian Zhou , Xipeng Qiu

Existing research on large language models (LLMs) shows that they can solve information extraction tasks through multi-step planning. However, their extraction behavior on complex sentences and tasks is unstable, emerging issues such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Zepeng Ding , Ruiyang Ke , Wenhao Huang , Guochao Jiang , Yanda Li , Deqing Yang , Jiaqing Liang

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 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 accelerates inference in large language models (LLMs) by generating multiple draft tokens simultaneously. However, existing methods often struggle with token misalignment between the training and decoding phases,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Shijing Hu , Jingyang Li , Xingyu Xie , Zhihui Lu , Kim-Chuan Toh , Pan Zhou