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Inference acceleration of large language models (LLMs) has been put forward in many application scenarios and speculative decoding has shown its advantage in addressing inference acceleration. Speculative decoding usually introduces a draft…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Zhuofan Wen , Shangtong Gui , Yang Feng

Speculative decoding aims to speed up autoregressive generation of a language model by verifying in parallel the tokens generated by a smaller draft model.In this work, we explore the effectiveness of learning-free, negligible-cost draft…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Lawrence Stewart , Matthew Trager , Sujan Kumar Gonugondla , Stefano Soatto

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose tokens that are later verified by a stronger target model. While effective in centralized systems, its behavior in…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Jingwei Song , Wanyi Chen , Xinyuan Song , Max , Chris Tong , Gufeng Chen , Tianyi Zhao , Eric Yang , Bill Shi , Lynn Ai

Transformer-based autoregressive sampling has been the major bottleneck for slowing down large language model inferences. One effective way to accelerate inference is \emph{Speculative Decoding}, which employs a small model to sample a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Ming Yin , Minshuo Chen , Kaixuan Huang , Mengdi Wang

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

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

This technical report describes the design and training of novel speculative decoding draft models, for accelerating the inference speeds of large language models in a production environment. By conditioning draft predictions on both…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Davis Wertheimer , Joshua Rosenkranz , Thomas Parnell , Sahil Suneja , Pavithra Ranganathan , Raghu Ganti , Mudhakar Srivatsa

The recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have been extraordinary, yet the escalating inference costs associated with them present challenges in real-world applications. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Jiahao Liu , Qifan Wang , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) based on the Transformer architecture have recently emerged as a dominant foundation model for a wide range of Natural Language Processing tasks. Nevertheless, their application in real-time scenarios…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-04 Coleman Hooper , Sehoon Kim , Hiva Mohammadzadeh , Hasan Genc , Kurt Keutzer , Amir Gholami , Sophia Shao

Scaling the size of language models to tens of billions of parameters has led to impressive performance on a wide range of tasks. At generation, these models are used auto-regressively, requiring a forward pass for each generated token, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Giovanni Monea , Armand Joulin , Edouard Grave

Speculative decoding is an inference-acceleration method for large language models (LLMs) where a small language model generates a draft-token sequence which is further verified by the target LLM in parallel. Recent works have advanced this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Wonseok Jeon , Mukul Gagrani , Raghavv Goel , Junyoung Park , Mingu Lee , Christopher Lott

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 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

We propose TPP-SD, a novel approach that accelerates Transformer temporal point process (TPP) sampling by adapting speculative decoding (SD) techniques from language models. By identifying the structural similarities between thinning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Shukai Gong , Yiyang Fu , Fengyuan Ran , Quyu Kong , Feng Zhou

Speculative decoding has proven to be an efficient solution to large language model (LLM) inference, where the small drafter predicts future tokens at a low cost, and the target model is leveraged to verify them in parallel. However, most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Zilin Xiao , Hongming Zhang , Tao Ge , Siru Ouyang , Vicente Ordonez , Dong Yu

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

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) is a technique to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) by using a lower complexity draft model to propose candidate tokens verified by a larger target model. To further improve efficiency,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Xiaofan Lu , Yixiao Zeng , Feiyang Ma , Zixu Yu , Marco Levorato

Speculative decoding has emerged as a pivotal technique to accelerate LLM inference by employing a lightweight draft model to generate candidate tokens that are subsequently verified by the target model in parallel. However, while this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Yuetao Chen , Xuliang Wang , Xinzhou Zheng , Ming Li , Peng Wang , Hong Xu

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