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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

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 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

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

Speculative decoding has emerged as a widely adopted paradigm for accelerating large language model inference, where a lightweight draft model rapidly generates candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by a larger target model.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yu-Yang Qian , Hao-Cong Wu , Yichao Fu , Hao Zhang , Peng Zhao

Speculative sampling is a popular technique for accelerating inference in Large Language Models by generating candidate tokens using a fast draft model and accepting or rejecting them based on the target model's distribution. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Valentin De Bortoli , Alexandre Galashov , Arthur Gretton , Arnaud Doucet

Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates inference in large language models by using a smaller draft model to propose tokens, which are then verified by a larger target model. However, the throughput gains of SD are fundamentally limited by a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Sanghyun Byun , Mohanad Odema , Jung Ick Guack , Baisub Lee , Jacob Song , Woo Seong Chung

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

Speculative decoding is a pivotal technique to accelerate the inference of large language models (LLMs) by employing a smaller draft model to predict the target model's outputs. However, its efficacy can be limited due to the low predictive…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Xiaoxuan Liu , Lanxiang Hu , Peter Bailis , Alvin Cheung , Zhijie Deng , Ion Stoica , Hao 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

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 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

Inference from large autoregressive models like Transformers is slow - decoding K tokens takes K serial runs of the model. In this work we introduce speculative decoding - an algorithm to sample from autoregressive models faster without any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-22 Yaniv Leviathan , Matan Kalman , Yossi Matias

Large language models have shown impressive capabilities across a variety of NLP tasks, yet their generating text autoregressively is time-consuming. One way to speed them up is speculative decoding, which generates candidate segments (a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Sen Yang , Shujian Huang , Xinyu Dai , Jiajun Chen

We propose a novel speculative decoding method tailored for multi-sample reasoning scenarios, such as self-consistency and Best-of-N sampling. Our method exploits the intrinsic consensus of parallel generation paths to synthesize…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Yiwei Li , Jiayi Shi , Shaoxiong Feng , Peiwen Yuan , Xinglin Wang , Yueqi Zhang , Ji Zhang , Chuyi Tan , Boyuan Pan , Yao Hu , Kan Li

We propose Speculative Decoding (SpecDec), for the first time ever, to formally study exploiting the idea of speculative execution to accelerate autoregressive (AR) decoding. Speculative Decoding has two innovations: Spec-Drafter -- an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Heming Xia , Tao Ge , Peiyi Wang , Si-Qing Chen , Furu Wei , Zhifang Sui

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

Speculative decoding accelerates inference in large language models (LLMs) by generating draft tokens for target model verification. Current approaches for obtaining draft tokens rely on lightweight draft models or additional model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Guofeng Quan , Wenfeng Feng , Chuzhan Hao , Guochao Jiang , Yuewei Zhang , Hao Wang

The practice of speculative decoding, whereby inference is probabilistically supported by a smaller, cheaper, ``drafter'' model, has become a standard technique for systematically reducing the decoding time of large language models. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jameson Sandler , Ahmet Üstün , Marco Romanelli , Sara Hooker , Ferdinando Fioretto

Speculative Decoding has emerged as a popular technique for accelerating inference in Large Language Models. However, most existing approaches yield only modest improvements in production serving systems. Methods that achieve substantial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Michele Marzollo , Jiawei Zhuang , Niklas Roemer , Niklas Zwingenberger , Lorenz K. Müller , Lukas Cavigelli
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