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Related papers: The Disparate Impacts of Speculative Decoding

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Speculative decoding (SD) has become a popular technique to accelerate Large Language Model (LLM) inference, yet its real-world effectiveness remains unclear as prior evaluations rely on research prototypes and unrealistically small batch…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Xiaoxuan Liu , Jiaxiang Yu , Jongseok Park , Ion Stoica , Alvin Cheung

Modern web applications--from real-time content recommendation and dynamic pricing to CDN optimization--increasingly rely on time-series forecasting to deliver personalized experiences to billions of users. Large-scale Transformer-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Pranav Subbaraman , Fang Sun , Yue Yao , Huacong Tang , Xiao Luo , Yizhou Sun

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

Scaling test-time compute has driven the recent advances in the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), typically by allocating additional computation for more thorough exploration. However, increased compute often comes at…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Mert Cemri , Nived Rajaraman , Rishabh Tiwari , Xiaoxuan Liu , Kurt Keutzer , Ion Stoica , Kannan Ramchandran , Ahmad Beirami , Ziteng Sun

Speculative Decoding has emerged as a popular technique for accelerating inference in Large Language Models. However, most existing approaches yield only modest improvements in production serving systems. Methods that achieve substantial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Michele Marzollo , Jiawei Zhuang , Niklas Roemer , Niklas Zwingenberger , Lorenz K. Müller , Lukas Cavigelli

Speculative decoding has become the standard approach for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference. It exploits a lossless draft-then-verify procedure to circumvent the latency of autoregressive decoding, achieving impressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Jameson Sandler , Jacob K. Christopher , Thomas Hartvigsen , Ferdinando Fioretto

Decoding strategies manipulate the probability distribution underlying the output of a language model and can therefore affect both generation quality and its uncertainty. In this study, we investigate the impact of decoding strategies on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Wataru Hashimoto , Hidetaka Kamigaito , Taro Watanabe

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

Large language models~(LLMs) exhibit exceptional performance in language tasks, yet their auto-regressive inference is limited due to high computational requirements and is sub-optimal due to the exposure bias. Inspired by speculative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Hongyi Yuan , Keming Lu , Fei Huang , Zheng Yuan , Chang Zhou

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive language model inference by verifying multiple draft tokens in parallel. However, the verification stage often becomes the dominant computational bottleneck, especially for long-context inputs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Jikai Wang , Jianchao Tan , Yuxuan Hu , Jiayu Qin , Yerui Sun , Yuchen Xie , Xunliang Cai , Juntao Li , Min Zhang

Speculative decoding is an effective technique for accelerating large language model inference by drafting multiple tokens in parallel. In practice, its speedup is often bottlenecked by a rigid verification step that strictly enforces the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Ziyi Wang , Siva Rajesh Kasa , Ankith M S , Santhosh Kumar Kasa , Jiaru Zou , Sumit Negi , Ruqi Zhang , Nan Jiang , Qifan Song

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

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

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

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

Speculative decoding is an effective method for lossless acceleration of large language models during inference. It uses a fast model to draft a block of tokens which are then verified in parallel by the target model, and provides a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-14 Ziteng Sun , Uri Mendlovic , Yaniv Leviathan , Asaf Aharoni , Jae Hun Ro , Ahmad Beirami , Ananda Theertha Suresh

Speculative decoding has proven to be an efficient solution to large language model (LLM) inference, where the small drafter predicts future tokens at a low cost, and the target model is leveraged to verify them in parallel. However, most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Zilin Xiao , Hongming Zhang , Tao Ge , Siru Ouyang , Vicente Ordonez , Dong Yu

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by utilizing otherwise idle computational resources during memory-to-chip data transfer. Current speculative decoding methods typically assume a considerable amount of available computing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Luohe Shi , Zuchao Li , Lefei Zhang , Baoyuan Qi , Guoming Liu , Hai Zhao

Inference acceleration of large language models (LLMs) has been put forward in many application scenarios and speculative decoding has shown its advantage in addressing inference acceleration. Speculative decoding usually introduces a draft…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Zhuofan Wen , Shangtong Gui , Yang Feng

Speculative decoding aims to speed up autoregressive generation of a language model by verifying in parallel the tokens generated by a smaller draft model.In this work, we explore the effectiveness of learning-free, negligible-cost draft…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Lawrence Stewart , Matthew Trager , Sujan Kumar Gonugondla , Stefano Soatto