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Related papers: Scaling Laws for Speculative Decoding

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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

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

Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but require inherently sequential decoding, leading to high inference latency and poor GPU utilization. Speculative decoding mitigates this bottleneck by using a fast…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jian Chen , Yesheng Liang , Zhijian Liu

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a small draft model to generate candidate tokens for a larger target model to verify. The efficacy of this technique hinges on the trade-off between the time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jiebin Zhang , Zhenghan Yu , Liang Wang , Nan Yang , Eugene J. Yu , Zheng Li , Yifan Song , Dawei Zhu , Xingxing Zhang , Furu Wei , Sujian Li

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

Large Language Models (LLMs), constrained by their auto-regressive nature, suffer from slow decoding. Speculative decoding methods have emerged as a promising solution to accelerate LLM decoding, attracting attention from both systems and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Xuliang Wang , Yuetao Chen , Maochan Zhen , Fang Liu , Xinzhou Zheng , Xingwu Liu , Hong Xu , Ming Li

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 promises faster inference for large language models (LLMs), yet existing methods fail to generalize to real-world settings. Benchmarks typically assume short contexts (e.g., 2K tokens), whereas practical workloads…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Jaeseong Lee , seung-won hwang , Aurick Qiao , Gabriele Oliaro , Ye Wang , Samyam Rajbhandari

Speculative decoding has become a widely adopted technique for accelerating large language model (LLM) inference by drafting multiple candidate tokens and verifying them with a target model in parallel. Its efficiency, however, critically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Shuoyang Sun , Chang Dai , Hao Fang , Kuofeng Gao , Xinhao Zhong , Yi Sun , Fan Mo , Shu-Tao Xia , Bin Chen

Text generation with Large Language Models (LLMs) is known to be memory bound due to the combination of their auto-regressive nature, huge parameter counts, and limited memory bandwidths, often resulting in low token rates. Speculative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Raghavv Goel , Mukul Gagrani , Wonseok Jeon , Junyoung Park , Mingu Lee , Christopher Lott

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

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer fast, parallel token generation, but their standalone use is plagued by an inherent efficiency-quality tradeoff. We show that, if carefully applied, the attributes of dLLMs can actually be a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Rui Pan , Zhuofu Chen , Hongyi Liu , Arvind Krishnamurthy , Ravi Netravali

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks but suffer from high inference latency due to their autoregressive generation. Speculative Decoding (SPD) mitigates this issue by verifying candidate tokens in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Jinze Li , Yixing Xu , Guanchen Li , Shuo Yang , Jinfeng Xu , Xuanwu Yin , Dong Li , Edith C. H. Ngai , Emad Barsoum

As the usage of large language models (LLMs) grows, performing efficient inference with these models becomes increasingly important. While speculative decoding has recently emerged as a promising direction for speeding up inference,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Zhuoming Chen , Avner May , Ruslan Svirschevski , Yuhsun Huang , Max Ryabinin , Zhihao Jia , Beidi Chen

Large language models incur high inference latency due to sequential autoregressive decoding. Speculative decoding alleviates this bottleneck by using a lightweight draft model to propose multiple tokens for batched verification. However,…

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

Inference with modern Large Language Models (LLMs) is expensive and time-consuming, and speculative sampling has proven to be an effective solution. Most speculative sampling methods such as EAGLE use a static draft tree, implicitly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Yuhui Li , Fangyun Wei , Chao Zhang , Hongyang Zhang

Speculative decoding has been shown as an effective way to accelerate Large Language Model (LLM) inference by using a Small Speculative Model (SSM) to generate candidate tokens in a so-called speculation phase, which are subsequently…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Fahao Chen , Peng Li , Tom H. Luan , Zhou Su , Jing Deng

Recent works have revealed the great potential of speculative decoding in accelerating the autoregressive generation process of large language models. The success of these methods relies on the alignment between draft candidates and the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Jikai Wang , Zhenxu Tian , Juntao Li , Qingrong Xia , Xinyu Duan , Zhefeng Wang , Baoxing Huai , Min Zhang

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