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Self-speculative decoding is an inference technique for large language models designed to speed up generation without sacrificing output quality. It combines fast, approximate decoding using a compact version of the model as a draft model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Walaa Amer , Uday das , Fadi Kurdahi

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

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

Inference efficiency in Large Language Models (LLMs) is fundamentally limited by their serial, autoregressive generation, especially as reasoning becomes a key capability and response sequences grow longer. Speculative decoding (SD) offers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Haoyun Jiang , Junqi He , Feng Hong , Xinlong Yang , Jianwei Zhang , Zheng Li , Zhengyang Zhuge , Zhiyong Chen , Bo Han , Junyang Lin , Jiangchao Yao

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

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 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

Cloud-based Large Language Model (LLM) services often face challenges in achieving low inference latency and meeting Service Level Objectives (SLOs) under dynamic request patterns. Speculative decoding, which exploits lightweight models for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Kaiyu Huang , Hao Wu , Zhubo Shi , Han Zou , Minchen Yu , Qingjiang Shi

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by using smaller draft models to generate candidate tokens for parallel verification. However, current approaches are limited by sequential stage dependencies that prevent full…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Bradley McDanel , Sai Qian Zhang , Yunhai Hu , Zining Liu

To mitigate the high inference latency stemming from autoregressive decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs), Speculative Decoding has emerged as a novel decoding paradigm for LLM inference. In each decoding step, this method first drafts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Heming Xia , Zhe Yang , Qingxiu Dong , Peiyi Wang , Yongqi Li , Tao Ge , Tianyu Liu , Wenjie Li , Zhifang Sui

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by using a draft model to look ahead, but gains are capped by the cost of autoregressive draft generation: increasing draft size elevates acceptance rates but introduces additional latency…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Nikhil Bhendawade , Kumari Nishu , Arnav Kundu , Chris Bartels , Minsik Cho , Irina Belousova

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a widely used approach to accelerate the inference of large language models (LLMs) without reducing generation quality. It operates by first using a compact model to draft multiple tokens efficiently, followed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Hossein Entezari Zarch , Lei Gao , Chaoyi Jiang , Murali Annavaram

Autoregressive decoding inherently limits the inference throughput of Large Language Model (LLM) due to its sequential dependency. Speculative decoding mitigates this by verifying multiple predicted tokens in parallel, but its efficiency…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Siran Liu , Yang Ye , Qianchao Zhu , Zane Cao , Yongchao He

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 Large Language Model (LLM) inference by verifying multiple drafted tokens in parallel. However, for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, this parallelism introduces a severe bottleneck: large draft trees…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Bradley McDanel , Steven Li , Sruthikesh Surineni , Harshit Khaitan

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 enables collaborative Large Language Model (LLM) inference across cloud and edge by separating lightweight token drafting from heavyweight verification. While prior systems show performance and cost benefits, practical…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Xiangchen Li , Saeid Ghafouri , Jiakun Fan , Babar Ali , Hans Vandierendonck , Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos

Large language models typically employ vocabularies of over 100k tokens, which creates a major computational bottleneck at the final linear projection layer when performing speculative decoding. Current methods for vocabulary pruning depend…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Zhiyang Chen , Daliang Xu , Yinyuan Zhang , Chenghua Wang , Mengwei Xu , Yun Ma

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by utilizing otherwise idle computational resources during memory-to-chip data transfer. Current speculative decoding methods typically assume a considerable amount of available computing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Luohe Shi , Zuchao Li , Lefei Zhang , Baoyuan Qi , Guoming Liu , Hai Zhao

Quantization is widely adopted to accelerate inference and reduce memory consumption in large language models (LLMs). While activation-weight joint quantization enables efficient low-precision decoding, it suffers from substantial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Juntao Zhao , Wenhao Lu , Sheng Wang , Lingpeng Kong , Chuan Wu