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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

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

Speculative decoding is a standard method for accelerating the inference speed of large language models. However, scaling it for production environments poses several engineering challenges, including efficiently implementing different…

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

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across many tasks but suffer from high inference latency due to autoregressive decoding. The issue is exacerbated in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), which generate lengthy chains of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Ximing Dong , Shaowei Wang , Dayi Lin , Boyuan Chen , Ahmed E. Hassan

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) 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

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

Inference with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is slow due to their large-language-model backbone which suffers from memory bandwidth bottleneck and generates tokens auto-regressively. In this paper, we explore the application of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Mukul Gagrani , Raghavv Goel , Wonseok Jeon , Junyoung Park , Mingu Lee , Christopher Lott

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

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) based on the Transformer architecture have recently emerged as a dominant foundation model for a wide range of Natural Language Processing tasks. Nevertheless, their application in real-time scenarios…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-04 Coleman Hooper , Sehoon Kim , Hiva Mohammadzadeh , Hasan Genc , Kurt Keutzer , Amir Gholami , Sophia Shao

Inference from large autoregressive models like Transformers is slow - decoding K tokens takes K serial runs of the model. In this work we introduce speculative decoding - an algorithm to sample from autoregressive models faster without any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-22 Yaniv Leviathan , Matan Kalman , Yossi Matias

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

Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but require inherently sequential decoding, leading to high inference latency and poor GPU utilization. Speculative decoding mitigates this bottleneck by using a fast…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jian Chen , Yesheng Liang , Zhijian Liu

Speculative decoding has rapidly emerged as a leading approach for accelerating language model (LM) inference, as it offers substantial speedups while yielding identical outputs. This relies upon a small draft model, tasked with predicting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Miles Williams , Young D. Kwon , Rui Li , Alexandros Kouris , Stylianos I. Venieris

The practice of speculative decoding, whereby inference is probabilistically supported by a smaller, cheaper, ``drafter'' model, has become a standard technique for systematically reducing the decoding time of large language models. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jameson Sandler , Ahmet Üstün , Marco Romanelli , Sara Hooker , Ferdinando Fioretto

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

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

Autoregressive sampling from large language models has led to state-of-the-art results in several natural language tasks. However, autoregressive sampling generates tokens one at a time making it slow, and even prohibitive in certain tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-19 Ziteng Sun , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Jae Hun Ro , Ahmad Beirami , Himanshu Jain , Felix Yu