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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

Recently, speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate LLM inference by employing a small draft model to propose draft tokens in advance, and validating them in parallel with the large target model. However,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yuhao Shen , Junyi Shen , Quan Kong , Tianyu Liu , Yao Lu , Cong Wang

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by proposing tokens with a lightweight draft model and selectively accepting them using a target model. This work introduces DropMatch, a novel approach that matches draft…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Jeongtae Lee , Minjung Jo , Hyunjoon Jeong , Gunho Park , Sunghyeon Woo , Joonghoon Kim , Se Jung Kwon , Dongsoo Lee

The growing scale of Large Language Models (LLMs) has exacerbated inference latency and computational costs. Speculative decoding methods, which aim to mitigate these issues, often face inefficiencies in the construction of token trees and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Feiye Huo , Jianchao Tan , Kefeng Zhang , Xunliang Cai , Shengli Sun

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

Speculative decoding is widely used in accelerating large language model (LLM) inference. In this work, we focus on the online draft model selection problem in speculative decoding. We design an algorithm that provably competes with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Hongyi Liu , Jiaji Huang , Zhen Jia , Youngsuk Park , Yu-Xiang Wang

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

We introduce PARSE (PArallel pRefix Speculative Engine), a speculative generation framework that accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by parallelizing prefix verification on a semantic level. Existing speculative decoding…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Yuncheng Yao , Yuxuan Xia , Shengjie Wang , Danyang Zhuo

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

Modern Large Language Models achieve impressive reasoning capabilities with long Chain of Thoughts, but they incur substantial computational cost during inference, and this motivates techniques to improve the performance-cost ratio. Among…

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 autoregressive speech generation by letting a fast draft model propose tokens that a larger target model verifies. However, for speech LLMs that generate acoustic tokens, exact token matching is overly…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-23 Moran Yanuka , Paul Dixon , Eyal Finkelshtein , Daniel Rotman , Raja Giryes

Cascades and speculative decoding are two common approaches to improving language models' inference efficiency. Both approaches involve interleaving models of different sizes, but via fundamentally distinct mechanisms: cascades employ a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Harikrishna Narasimhan , Wittawat Jitkrittum , Ankit Singh Rawat , Seungyeon Kim , Neha Gupta , Aditya Krishna Menon , Sanjiv Kumar

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference. It uses a small draft model to propose a tree of future tokens. A larger target model then verifies these tokens in a single batched forward pass. Despite the growing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Saif Mahmoud

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become an indispensable part of natural language processing tasks. However, autoregressive sampling has become an efficiency bottleneck. Multi-Draft Speculative Decoding (MDSD) is a recent approach where,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Zhengmian Hu , Tong Zheng , Vignesh Viswanathan , Ziyi Chen , Ryan A. Rossi , Yihan Wu , Dinesh Manocha , Heng Huang

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 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

Speculative decoding (SPD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by letting a smaller draft model propose multiple future tokens that are verified in parallel by a larger target model. The dominant SPD paradigm treats the target…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jinze Li , Yixing Xu , Guanchen Li , Jinfeng Xu , Shuo Yang , Yang Zhang , Xuanwu Yin , Dong Li , Edith C. H. Ngai , Emad Barsoum

Autoregressive decoding inherently limits the inference throughput of Large Language Model (LLM) due to its sequential dependency. Speculative decoding mitigates this by verifying multiple predicted tokens in parallel, but its efficiency…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Siran Liu , Yang Ye , Qianchao Zhu , Zane Cao , Yongchao He

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