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Speculative decoding (SD) has been demonstrated as an effective technique for lossless LLM inference acceleration. Retrieval-based SD methods, one kind of model-free method, have yielded promising speedup, but they often rely on incomplete…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Yuxuan Hu , Ke Wang , Xiaokang Zhang , Fanjin Zhang , Cuiping Li , Hong Chen , Jing Zhang

We present speculative sampling, an algorithm for accelerating transformer decoding by enabling the generation of multiple tokens from each transformer call. Our algorithm relies on the observation that the latency of parallel scoring of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Charlie Chen , Sebastian Borgeaud , Geoffrey Irving , Jean-Baptiste Lespiau , Laurent Sifre , John Jumper

Despite the remarkable strides made by autoregressive language models, their potential is often hampered by the slow inference speeds inherent in sequential token generation. Blockwise parallel decoding (BPD) was proposed by Stern et al. as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Taehyeon Kim , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Kishore Papineni , Michael Riley , Sanjiv Kumar , Adrian Benton

Large Language Models (LLMs), constrained by their auto-regressive nature, suffer from slow decoding. Speculative decoding methods have emerged as a promising solution to accelerate LLM decoding, attracting attention from both systems and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Xuliang Wang , Yuetao Chen , Maochan Zhen , Fang Liu , Xinzhou Zheng , Xingwu Liu , Hong Xu , Ming Li

The emergence of long-context large language models (LLMs) offers a promising alternative to traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for processing extensive documents. However, the computational overhead of long-context inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Guanzheng Chen , Qilong Feng , Jinjie Ni , Xin Li , Michael Qizhe Shieh

Speculative decoding (SD), where a small draft model is employed to propose draft tokens in advance and then the target model validates them in parallel, has emerged as a promising technique for LLM inference acceleration. Many endeavors to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Tianyu Liu , Qitan Lv , Hao Li , Xing Gao , Xiao Sun , Xiaoyan Sun

This tutorial presents a comprehensive introduction to Speculative Decoding (SD), an advanced technique for LLM inference acceleration that has garnered significant research interest in recent years. SD is introduced as an innovative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Heming Xia , Cunxiao Du , Yongqi Li , Qian Liu , Wenjie Li

Speculative Decoding (SD) has emerged as a premier technique for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference by decoupling token generation into rapid drafting and parallel verification. While recent advancements in self-speculation…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Guang Huang , Zeyi Wen

Speculative decoding accelerates Large Language Model inference via a draft-then-verify paradigm, yet the output projection layer becomes a bottleneck as vocabulary sizes scale. While existing static pruning methods effectively reduce this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Shuyu Zhang , Lingfeng Pan , Qicheng Wang , Yaqi Shi , Yueyang Tan , Ruyu Yan , Jiaqi Chen , Lixing Du , Lu Wang

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

Inference with modern Large Language Models (LLMs) is expensive and slow, and speculative sampling has emerged as an effective solution to this problem, however, the number of the calls to the draft model for generating candidate tokens in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Junjie Ma , Jinlong Li

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by drafting future tokens with a small model, but drafter models degrade sharply under template perturbation and long-context inputs. We identify a previously-unreported phenomenon we call…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Doğaç Eldenk , Payal Mohapatra , Yigitcan Comlek , Kaan Oktay , Hongyang Zhang , Stephen Xia

The autoregressive nature of large language models (LLMs) fundamentally limits inference speed, as each forward pass generates only a single token and is often bottlenecked by memory bandwidth. Speculative decoding has emerged as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Zihao An , Huajun Bai , Ziqiong Liu , Dong Li , Emad Barsoum

Speculative decoding is widely adopted to reduce latency in large language model (LLM) inference by leveraging smaller draft models capable of handling diverse user tasks. However, emerging AI applications, such as LLM-based agents, present…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Gabriele Oliaro , Zhihao Jia , Daniel Campos , Aurick Qiao

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by letting a small drafter propose multiple tokens which a large target model verifies once per speculation step. As vocabularies scale past 10e5 tokens,verification cost in the target model is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Jinbin Zhang , Nasib Ullah , Erik Schultheis , Rohit Babbar

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by letting draft tokens bypass full verification, but conventional frameworks suffer from frequent false rejections, particularly when draft models produce semantically correct but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Xuwen Zhou , Fangxin Liu , Chao Wang , Xiao Zheng , Hao Zheng , Min He , Li Jiang , Haibing Guan

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by leveraging a draft-then-verify paradigm. To maximize the acceptance rate, recent methods construct expansive draft trees, which unfortunately incur severe VRAM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yuhao Shen , Tianyu Liu , Xinyi Hu , Quan Kong , Baolin Zhang , Jun Dai , Jun Zhang , Shuang Ge , Lei Chen , Yue Li , Mingcheng Wan , Cong Wang

Inference with modern Large Language Models (LLMs) is expensive and time-consuming, and speculative sampling has proven to be an effective solution. Most speculative sampling methods such as EAGLE use a static draft tree, implicitly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Yuhui Li , Fangyun Wei , Chao Zhang , Hongyang Zhang

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by the target model. The speedup is significantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Alexander Samarin , Sergei Krutikov , Anton Shevtsov , Sergei Skvortsov , Filipp Fisin , Alexander Golubev

Diffusion-based Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive models, offering unique advantages through bidirectional attention and parallel generation paradigms. However, the generation results…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Yifeng Gao , Ziang Ji , Yuxuan Wang , Biqing Qi , Hanlin Xu , Linfeng Zhang