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Related papers: SD$^2$: Self-Distilled Sparse Drafters

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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

Speculative decoding accelerates language model inference by separating generation into fast drafting and parallel verification. Its main limitation is drafter-verifier misalignment, which limits token acceptance and reduces overall…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Frédéric Berdoz , Peer Rheinboldt , Roger Wattenhofer

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

Speculative decoding is a prominent technique to speed up the inference of a large target language model based on predictions of an auxiliary draft model. While effective, in application-specific settings, it often involves fine-tuning both…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Nikhil Bhendawade , Irina Belousova , Qichen Fu , Henry Mason , Mohammad Rastegari , Mahyar Najibi

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) accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by decoupling generation and verification. While recent methods improve draft quality by tightly coupling the drafter with the target model, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jingwei Song , Xinyu Wang , Hanbin Wang , Xiaoxuan Lei , Bill Shi , Shixin Han , Eric Yang , Xiao-Wen Chang , Lynn Ai

This paper introduces Multimodal Speculative Decoding (MSD) to accelerate Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) inference. Speculative decoding has been shown to accelerate Large Language Models (LLMs) without sacrificing accuracy.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Luxi Lin , Zhihang Lin , Zhanpeng Zeng , Rongrong Ji

In spite of strong performance achieved by LLMs, the costs of their deployment are unaffordable. For the compression of LLMs, gradient-based pruning methods present promising effectiveness. However, in these methods, the gradient…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Hourun Zhu , Chengchao Shen

Speculative decoding significantly accelerates language model inference by enabling a lightweight draft model to propose multiple tokens that a larger target model verifies simultaneously. However, applying this technique to vision-language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Mugilan Ganesan , Shane Segal , Ankur Aggarwal , Nish Sinnadurai , Sean Lie , Vithursan Thangarasa

Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a powerful method for accelerating autoregressive generation in large language models (LLMs), yet its integration into vision-language models (VLMs) remains underexplored. We introduce DREAM, a novel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Yunhai Hu , Tianhua Xia , Zining Liu , Rahul Raman , Xingyu Liu , Bo Bao , Eric Sather , Vithursan Thangarasa , Sai Qian Zhang

Accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs) has been a critical challenge in generative AI. Speculative decoding (SD) substantially improves LLM inference efficiency. However, its utility is limited by a fundamental…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Sibo Xiao , Jinyuan Fu , Zhongle Xie , Lidan Shou

LLMs have low GPU efficiency and high latency due to autoregressive decoding. Speculative decoding (SD) mitigates this using a small draft model to speculatively generate multiple tokens, which are then verified in parallel by a target…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Sungkyun Kim , Jaemin Kim , Dogyung Yoon , Jiho Shin , Junyeol Lee , Jiwon Seo

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

Large language model (LLM)-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) has recently attracted a lot of attention due to its high recognition accuracy and enhanced multi-dialect support. However, the high decoding latency of LLMs challenges the…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-29 Linye Wei , Shuzhang Zhong , Songqiang Xu , Runsheng Wang , Ru Huang , Meng Li

Edge-cloud speculative decoding (SD) accelerates inference by having a cloud-based large language model (LLM) that verifies draft tokens generated by a resource-constrained small language model (SLM) at the edge. A central bottleneck is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Payel Bhattacharjee , Fengwei Tian , Meiyu Zhong , Guangyi Zhang , Osvaldo Simeone , Ravi Tandon

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

Striking an optimal balance between minimal drafting latency and high speculation accuracy to enhance the inference speed of Large Language Models remains a significant challenge in speculative decoding. In this paper, we introduce Falcon,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Xiangxiang Gao , Weisheng Xie , Yiwei Xiang , Feng Ji

Speculative decoding accelerates Large Language Models (LLMs) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens that are verified in parallel by the target model. However, existing draft model training objectives are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Zihao An , Taichi Liu , Ziqiong Liu , Dong Li , Ruofeng Liu , Emad Barsoum

Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as an effective technique to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference without compromising output quality. However, the achievable speedup largely depends on the effectiveness of the drafting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Min Fang , Zhihui Fu , Qibin Zhao , Jun Wang

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a recently proposed technique for faster inference using Large Language Models (LLMs). SD operates by using a smaller draft LLM for autoregressively generating a sequence of tokens and a larger target LLM for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Meiyu Zhong , Noel Teku , Ravi Tandon