English
Related papers

Related papers: LogitSpec: Accelerating Retrieval-based Speculativ…

200 papers

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 (SD) is a recently proposed technique for faster inference using Large Language Models (LLMs). SD operates by using a smaller draft LLM for autoregressively generating a sequence of tokens and a larger target LLM for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Meiyu Zhong , Noel Teku , Ravi Tandon

Accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs) is a critical challenge in generative AI. Speculative decoding (SD) methods offer substantial efficiency gains by generating multiple tokens using a single target forward pass.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Nadav Timor , Jonathan Mamou , Daniel Korat , Moshe Berchansky , Gaurav Jain , Oren Pereg , Moshe Wasserblat , David Harel

Autoregressive decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) generates one token per step, causing high inference latency. Speculative decoding (SD) mitigates this through a guess-and-verify strategy, but existing training-free variants face…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Zihong Zhang , Zuchao Li , Lefei Zhang , Ping Wang , Hai Zhao

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

Large language model (LLM)-based generative list-wise recommendation has advanced rapidly, but decoding remains sequential and thus latency-prone. To accelerate inference without changing the target distribution, speculative decoding (SD)…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Jiaju Chen , Chongming Gao , Chenxiao Fan , Haoyan Liu , Qingpeng Cai , Peng Jiang , Xiangnan He

Inference efficiency in Large Language Models (LLMs) is fundamentally limited by their serial, autoregressive generation, especially as reasoning becomes a key capability and response sequences grow longer. Speculative decoding (SD) offers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Haoyun Jiang , Junqi He , Feng Hong , Xinlong Yang , Jianwei Zhang , Zheng Li , Zhengyang Zhuge , Zhiyong Chen , Bo Han , Junyang Lin , Jiangchao Yao

Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a method to accelerate LLM inference without sacrificing any accuracy over the 16-bit model inference. In a typical SD setup, the idea is to use a full-precision, small, fast model as "draft" to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Evangelos Georganas , Dhiraj Kalamkar , Alexander Kozlov , Alexander Heinecke

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

In this paper, we introduce a simple training-free technique to improve the performance of drafter-based speculative decoding (SpD) methods that incorporates language modeling head (LM head) during drafting process. A drafter-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Raghavv Goel , Sudhanshu Agrawal , Mukul Gagrani , Junyoung Park , Yifan Zao , He Zhang , Tian Liu , Yiping Yang , Xin Yuan , Jiuyan Lu , Chris Lott , Mingu Lee

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

Cloud-based Large Language Model (LLM) services often face challenges in achieving low inference latency and meeting Service Level Objectives (SLOs) under dynamic request patterns. Speculative decoding, which exploits lightweight models for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Kaiyu Huang , Hao Wu , Zhubo Shi , Han Zou , Minchen Yu , Qingjiang Shi

While speculative decoding has recently appeared as a promising direction for accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs), the speedup and scalability are strongly bounded by the token acceptance rate. Prevalent methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Yunfan Xiong , Ruoyu Zhang , Yanzeng Li , Tianhao Wu , Lei Zou

Speculative decoding (SD) has been demonstrated as an effective technique for lossless LLM inference acceleration. Retrieval-based SD methods, one kind of model-free method, have yielded promising speedup, but they often rely on incomplete…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Yuxuan Hu , Ke Wang , Xiaokang Zhang , Fanjin Zhang , Cuiping Li , Hong Chen , Jing Zhang

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 (SD) has emerged as a widely used paradigm to accelerate LLM inference without compromising quality. It works by first employing a compact model to draft multiple tokens efficiently and then using the target LLM to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Heming Xia , Yongqi Li , Jun Zhang , Cunxiao Du , Wenjie Li

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 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

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

Low-latency decoding for large language models (LLMs) is crucial for applications like chatbots and code assistants, yet generating long outputs remains slow in single-query settings. Prior work on speculative decoding (which combines a…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Ziyi Zhang , Ziheng Jiang , Chengquan Jiang , Menghan Yu , Size Zheng , Haibin Lin , Henry Hoffmann , Xin Liu