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Related papers: Scaling Laws for Speculative Decoding

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Scaling laws are useful guides for derisking expensive training runs, as they predict performance of large models using cheaper, small-scale experiments. However, there remain gaps between current scaling studies and how language models are…

Speculative Decoding has gained popularity as an effective technique for accelerating the auto-regressive inference process of Large Language Models. However, Speculative Decoding entirely relies on the availability of efficient draft…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Ofir Zafrir , Igor Margulis , Dorin Shteyman , Shira Guskin , Guy Boudoukh

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

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable powerful multimodal reasoning but suffer from slow autoregressive inference, limiting their deployment in real-time applications. We introduce Spec-LLaVA, a system that applies speculative decoding to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Mingxiao Huo , Jiayi Zhang , Hewei Wang , Jinfeng Xu , Zheyu Chen , Huilin Tai , Yijun Chen

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

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate autoregressive inference in large language models (LLMs). Self-draft methods, which leverage the base LLM itself for speculation, avoid the overhead of auxiliary draft…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Zhuofan Wen , Yang Feng

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

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by using a fast draft model to generate tokens and a more accurate target model to verify them. Its performance depends on the $\textit{acceptance length}$, or number of draft tokens accepted…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Avinash Kumar , Sujay Sanghavi , Poulami Das

Scaling laws for language model training traditionally characterize how performance scales with model size and dataset volume. Prior work has explored architecture variants and data treatments such as dataset filtering and noise injection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Anirudh Subramanyam , Yuxin Chen , Robert L. Grossman

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 is a powerful technique for reducing the latency of Large Language Models (LLMs), offering a fault-tolerant framework that enables the use of highly compressed draft models. In this work, we introduce Self-Distilled…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Mike Lasby , Nish Sinnadurai , Valavan Manohararajah , Sean Lie , Yani Ioannou , Vithursan Thangarasa

Large Language Models (LLMs) present a critical trade-off between inference quality and computational cost: larger models offer superior capabilities but incur significant latency, while smaller models are faster but less powerful. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Hang Wu , Jianian Zhu , Yinghui Li , Haojie Wang , Biao Hou , Jidong Zhai

Speculative decoding is an emerging technique that accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by allowing a smaller draft model to predict multiple tokens in advance, which are then verified or corrected by a larger target model. In…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-10 Ce Zheng , Tingting Yang

Speculative decoding is an effective and lossless approach for accelerating LLM inference. However, existing widely adopted model-based draft designs, such as EAGLE3, improve accuracy at the cost of multi-step autoregressive inference,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Fuliang Liu , Xue Li , Ketai Zhao , Yinxi Gao , Ziyan Zhou , Zhonghui Zhang , Zhibin Wang , Wanchun Dou , Sheng Zhong , Chen Tian

Speculative decoding is widely adopted to reduce latency in large language model (LLM) inference by leveraging smaller draft models capable of handling diverse user tasks. However, emerging AI applications, such as LLM-based agents, present…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Gabriele Oliaro , Zhihao Jia , Daniel Campos , Aurick Qiao

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant inference latency challenges stemming from their autoregressive design and large size. To address this, speculative decoding emerges as a solution, enabling the simultaneous generation and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Yinrong Hong , Zhiquan Tan , Kai Hu

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong reasoning capabilities marks a significant milestone, unlocking new frontiers in complex problem-solving. However, training these reasoning models, typically using Reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Qinghao Hu , Shang Yang , Junxian Guo , Xiaozhe Yao , Yujun Lin , Yuxian Gu , Han Cai , Chuang Gan , Ana Klimovic , Song Han

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 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

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates LLM inference by verifying draft tokens in parallel. However, this method presents a critical trade-off: it improves throughput in low-load, memory-bound systems but degrades performance in high-load,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Rui Li , Zhaoning Zhang , Libo Zhang , Huaimin Wang , Xiang Fu , Zhiquan Lai