English
Related papers

Related papers: Speculative Safety-Aware Decoding

200 papers

We introduce Reward-Guided Speculative Decoding (RSD), a novel framework aimed at improving the efficiency of inference in large language models (LLMs). RSD synergistically combines a lightweight draft model with a more powerful target…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Baohao Liao , Yuhui Xu , Hanze Dong , Junnan Li , Christof Monz , Silvio Savarese , Doyen Sahoo , Caiming Xiong

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

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates language model inference by drafting tokens from a cheap proposal model and verifying them against an expensive target model via rejection sampling. Because rejection truncates the draft block at the…

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, where adversarially crafted prompts induce policy-violating responses despite safety alignment. Existing defenses typically improve safety through external filtering,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yulong Chen , Qi Zhang , Jiawen Zhang , Yadong Liu , Mu Li , Jie Wen , Yong Xu

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

LLM deployment on resource-constrained edge devices faces severe latency constraints, particularly in real-time applications where delayed responses can compromise safety or usability. Among many approaches to mitigate the inefficiencies of…

Large language models and large multimodal models (LLMs and LMMs) deliver strong generative performance but suffer from slow decoding, a problem that becomes more severe when handling visual inputs, whose sequences typically contain many…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Zihua Wang , Ruibo Li , Haozhe Du , Joey Tianyi Zhou , Yu Zhang , Xu Yang

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) by employing a small language model to draft a hypothesis sequence, which is then validated by the LLM. The effectiveness…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Zhuocheng Gong , Jiahao Liu , Ziyue Wang , Pengfei Wu , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai , Dongyan Zhao , Rui Yan

Recent advances with large language models (LLM) illustrate their diverse capabilities. We propose a novel algorithm, staged speculative decoding, to accelerate LLM inference in small-batch, on-device scenarios. We address the low…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Benjamin Spector , Chris Re

Accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs) has been a critical challenge in generative AI. Speculative decoding (SD) substantially improves LLM inference efficiency. However, its utility is limited by a fundamental…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Sibo Xiao , Jinyuan Fu , Zhongle Xie , Lidan Shou

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

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

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 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

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results on multi-step mathematical reasoning, yet at the cost of high computational overhead. This challenge is particularly acute for test-time scaling methods such as parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yuanlin Chu , Bo Wang , Xiang Liu , Hong Chen , Aiwei Liu , Xuming Hu

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 (SD) ensures that the output matches the target model's distribution exactly. However, we argue that this distribution matching requirement is too stringent and results in unnecessarily low acceptance rates, limiting…

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 accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) inference by employing a small speculative model (SSM) to generate multiple candidate tokens and verify them using the LLM in parallel. This technique has been widely integrated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Ruixiao Li , Fahao Chen , Peng Li