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Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) by employing a small language model to draft a hypothesis sequence, which is then validated by the LLM. The effectiveness…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Zhuocheng Gong , Jiahao Liu , Ziyue Wang , Pengfei Wu , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai , Dongyan Zhao , Rui Yan

Speculative decoding has emerged as a pivotal technique to accelerate LLM inference by employing a lightweight draft model to generate candidate tokens that are subsequently verified by the target model in parallel. However, while this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Yuetao Chen , Xuliang Wang , Xinzhou Zheng , Ming Li , Peng Wang , Hong Xu

Speculative decoding is widely used in accelerating large language model (LLM) inference. In this work, we focus on the online draft model selection problem in speculative decoding. We design an algorithm that provably competes with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Hongyi Liu , Jiaji Huang , Zhen Jia , Youngsuk Park , Yu-Xiang Wang

Speculative Decoding has gained popularity as an effective technique for accelerating the auto-regressive inference process of Large Language Models. However, Speculative Decoding entirely relies on the availability of efficient draft…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Ofir Zafrir , Igor Margulis , Dorin Shteyman , Shira Guskin , Guy Boudoukh

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

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

Speculative decoding has emerged as a widely adopted paradigm for accelerating large language model inference, where a lightweight draft model rapidly generates candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by a larger target model.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yu-Yang Qian , Hao-Cong Wu , Yichao Fu , Hao Zhang , Peng Zhao

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

Speculative decoding is an inference-acceleration method for large language models (LLMs) where a small language model generates a draft-token sequence which is further verified by the target LLM in parallel. Recent works have advanced this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Wonseok Jeon , Mukul Gagrani , Raghavv Goel , Junyoung Park , Mingu Lee , Christopher Lott

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

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

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

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 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 is a widely used method that accelerates the generation process of large language models (LLMs) with no compromise in model performance. It achieves this goal by using an existing smaller model for drafting and then…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Weilin Zhao , Yuxiang Huang , Xu Han , Wang Xu , Chaojun Xiao , Xinrong Zhang , Yewei Fang , Kaihuo Zhang , Zhiyuan Liu , Maosong Sun

We propose Speculative Decoding (SpecDec), for the first time ever, to formally study exploiting the idea of speculative execution to accelerate autoregressive (AR) decoding. Speculative Decoding has two innovations: Spec-Drafter -- an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Heming Xia , Tao Ge , Peiyi Wang , Si-Qing Chen , Furu Wei , Zhifang Sui

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

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

Speculative decoding has proven to be an efficient solution to large language model (LLM) inference, where the small drafter predicts future tokens at a low cost, and the target model is leveraged to verify them in parallel. However, most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Zilin Xiao , Hongming Zhang , Tao Ge , Siru Ouyang , Vicente Ordonez , Dong Yu

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