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Reasoning models excel by generating long chain-of-thoughts, but decoding the resulting thousands of tokens is slow. Token-level speculative decoding (SD) helps, but its benefit is capped, because the chance that an entire $\gamma$-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Yichao Fu , Rui Ge , Zelei Shao , Zhijie Deng , Hao Zhang

Recent advancements in speculative decoding have demonstrated considerable speedup across a wide array of large language model (LLM) tasks. Speculative decoding inherently relies on sacrificing extra memory allocations to generate several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Selin Yildirim , Deming Chen

Speculative decoding (SD) is a widely adopted approach for accelerating inference in large language models (LLMs), particularly when the draft and target models are well aligned. However, state-of-the-art SD methods typically rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Wei Zhong , Manasa Bharadwaj , Yixiao Wang , Yipeng Ji , Chul Lee

Speculative decoding is a powerful technique that attempts to circumvent the autoregressive constraint of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). The aim of speculative decoding techniques is to improve the average inference time of a large,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Sudhanshu Agrawal , Wonseok Jeon , Mingu Lee

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

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

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

Large language model (LLM) decoding involves generating a sequence of tokens based on a given context, where each token is predicted one at a time using the model's learned probabilities. The typical autoregressive decoding method requires…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Xukun Liu , Bowen Lei , Ruqi Zhang , Dongkuan Xu

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

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

Growing demands from tasks like code generation, deep reasoning, and long-document understanding have made long-context generation a crucial capability for large language models (LLMs). Speculative decoding is one of the most direct and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Zhendong Tan , Xingjun Zhang , Chaoyi Hu , Junjie Peng , Kun Xia

Speculative decoding has emerged as a powerful approach to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference by employing lightweight draft models to propose candidate tokens that are subsequently verified by the target model. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Zongyue Qin , Raghavv Goel , Mukul Gagrani , Risheek Garrepalli , Mingu Lee , Yizhou Sun

Recent advances in inference-time compute have significantly improved performance on complex tasks by generating long chains of thought (CoTs) using Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). However, this improved accuracy comes at the cost of high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Rui Pan , Yinwei Dai , Zhihao Zhang , Gabriele Oliaro , Zhihao Jia , Ravi Netravali

Autoregressive decoding of large language models (LLMs) is memory bandwidth bounded, resulting in high latency and significant wastes of the parallel processing power of modern accelerators. Existing methods for accelerating LLM decoding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Yichao Fu , Peter Bailis , Ion Stoica , Hao Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) deliver impressive generation quality, but incur very high inference cost because each output token is generated auto-regressively through all model layers. Early-exit based self-speculative decoding (EESD) has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Ruanjun Li , Ziheng Liu , Yuanming Shi , Jiawei Shao , Chi Zhang , Xuelong Li

Large language models achieve impressive performance across diverse tasks but exhibit high inference latency due to their large parameter sizes. While quantization reduces model size, it often leads to performance degradation compared to…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Yushu Zhao , Yubin Qin , Yang Wang , Xiaolong Yang , Huiming Han , Shaojun Wei , Yang Hu , Shouyi Yin

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results on multi-step mathematical reasoning, yet at the cost of high computational overhead. This challenge is particularly acute for test-time scaling methods such as parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yuanlin Chu , Bo Wang , Xiang Liu , Hong Chen , Aiwei Liu , Xuming Hu

Video large language models (Vid-LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in understanding video content. However, their reliance on dense video token representations introduces substantial memory and computational overhead in both prefilling…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Yicheng Ji , Jun Zhang , Heming Xia , Jinpeng Chen , Lidan Shou , Gang Chen , Huan Li

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

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