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Speculative decoding has emerged as an effective approach for accelerating autoregressive inference by parallelizing token generation through a draft-then-verify paradigm. However, existing methods rely on static drafting lengths and rigid…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jaydip Sen , Subhasis Dasgupta , Hetvi Waghela

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

Speculative decoding must produce outputs distribution identical to standard autoregressive generation-this output equivalence is not an optimization target but the defining criterion of valid speculative decoding. We demonstrate that all…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Ranran Haoran Zhang , Soumik Dey , Ashirbad Mishra , Hansi Wu , Binbin Li , Rui Zhang

Source code plagiarism is a long-standing issue in tertiary computer science education. Many source code plagiarism detection tools have been proposed to aid in the detection of source code plagiarism. However, existing detection tools are…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-04-23 Hayden Cheers , Yuqing Lin , Shamus P. Smith

Large language models incur high inference latency due to sequential autoregressive decoding. Speculative decoding alleviates this bottleneck by using a lightweight draft model to propose multiple tokens for batched verification. However,…

Spectre vulnerabilities violate our fundamental assumptions about architectural abstractions, allowing attackers to steal sensitive data despite previously state-of-the-art countermeasures. To defend against Spectre, developers of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Sunjay Cauligi , Craig Disselkoen , Daniel Moghimi , Gilles Barthe , Deian Stefan

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by using a smaller draft model to speculate tokens that a larger target model verifies. Verification is often the bottleneck (e.g. verification is $4\times$ slower than token generation when a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Avinash Kumar , Sujay Sanghavi , Poulami Das

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant computational bottlenecks during inference due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention mechanisms, particularly as context lengths increase. We introduce SpecAttn, a novel training-free…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Harsh Shah

Authors of cryptographic software are well aware that their code should not leak secrets through its timing behavior, and, until 2018, they believed that following industry-standard constant-time coding guidelines was sufficient. However,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Shixin Song , Tingzhen Dong , Kosi Nwabueze , Julian Zanders , Andres Erbsen , Adam Chlipala , Mengjia Yan

Software obfuscation techniques can prevent binary diffing techniques from locating vulnerable code by obfuscating the third-party code, to achieve the purpose of protecting embedded device software. With the rapid development of binary…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Peihua Zhang , Chenggang Wu , Mingfan Peng , Kai Zeng , Ding Yu , Yuanming Lai , Yan Kang , Wei Wang , Zhe Wang

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

Whenever modern CPUs encounter a conditional branch for which the condition cannot be evaluated yet, they predict the likely branch target and speculatively execute code. Such pipelining is key to optimizing runtime performance and is…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-01-15 Giorgi Maisuradze , Christian Rossow

We present uSpectre, a new class of transient execution attacks that exploit microcode branch mispredictions to transiently leak sensitive data. We find that many long-known and recently-discovered transient execution attacks, which were…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Nicholas Mosier , Hamed Nemati , John C. Mitchell , Caroline Trippel

Autoregressive decoding is bottlenecked by its sequential nature. Speculative decoding has become a standard way to accelerate inference by using a fast draft model to predict upcoming tokens from a slower target model, and then verifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Tanishq Kumar , Tri Dao , Avner May

Spectre v1 attacks, which exploit conditional branch misprediction, are often identified with attacks that bypass array bounds checking to leak data from a victim's memory. Generally, however, Spectre v1 attacks can exploit any conditional…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-07-05 Ofek Kirzner , Adam Morrison

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

Since the advent of Spectre attacks, researchers and practitioners have developed a range of hardware and software measures to counter transient execution attacks. A prime example of such mitigation is speculative load hardening in LLVM,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Tiziano Marinaro , Pablo Buiras , Andreas Lindner , Roberto Guanciale , Hamed Nemati

Existing speculative execution attacks are limited to breaching confidentiality of data beyond privilege boundary, the so-called spectre-type attacks. All of them utilize the changes in microarchitectural buffers made by the speculative…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Zhi Zhang , Yueqiang Cheng , Surya Nepal

Speculative decoding has become the standard approach for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference. It exploits a lossless draft-then-verify procedure to circumvent the latency of autoregressive decoding, achieving impressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Jameson Sandler , Jacob K. Christopher , Thomas Hartvigsen , Ferdinando Fioretto

Speculative decoding accelerates memory-bound LLM inference without quality degradation by using a fast drafter to propose multiple candidate tokens and the target model to verify them in parallel. However, conventional sequential…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yaojie Zhang , Jianuo Huang , Junlong Ke , Yuhang Han , Yongji Long , Tianchen Zhao , Biqing Qi , Linfeng Zhang