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Related papers: The Disparate Impacts of Speculative Decoding

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Inference latency stands as a critical bottleneck in the large-scale deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Speculative decoding methods have recently shown promise in accelerating inference without compromising the output…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Ruilin Wang , Huixia Li , Yuexiao Ma , Xiawu Zheng , Fei Chao , Xuefeng Xiao , Rongrong Ji

Speculative decoding accelerates inference for Large Language Models by using a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens that are verified in parallel by a larger target model. Prior work shows that the draft model often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Ofir Ben Shoham

Large language models have shown impressive capabilities across a variety of NLP tasks, yet their generating text autoregressively is time-consuming. One way to speed them up is speculative decoding, which generates candidate segments (a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Sen Yang , Shujian Huang , Xinyu Dai , Jiajun Chen

Speculative decoding reduces the inference latency of a target large language model via utilizing a smaller and faster draft model. Its performance depends on a hyperparameter K -- the candidate length, i.e., the number of candidate tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Kaixuan Huang , Xudong Guo , Mengdi Wang

Speculative decoding (SD) has been shown to reduce the latency of autoregressive decoding (AD) by 2-3x for small batch sizes. However, increasing throughput and therefore reducing the cost per token requires decoding with large batch sizes.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-10 Sanjit Neelam , Daniel Heinlein , Vaclav Cvicek , Akshay Mishra , Reiner Pope

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a smaller draft model to propose tokens, which are then verified by a larger target model. However, selecting an optimal speculation length is critical for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Aayush Gautam , Susav Shrestha , Narasimha Reddy

Speculative sampling is a popular technique for accelerating inference in Large Language Models by generating candidate tokens using a fast draft model and accepting or rejecting them based on the target model's distribution. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Valentin De Bortoli , Alexandre Galashov , Arthur Gretton , Arnaud Doucet

Introduced to enhance the efficiency of large language model (LLM) inference, speculative decoding operates by having a smaller model generate a draft. A larger target model then reviews this draft to align with its output, and any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Ziyi Chen , Xiaocong Yang , Jiacheng Lin , Chenkai Sun , Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang , Jie Huang

Autoregressive sampling from large language models has led to state-of-the-art results in several natural language tasks. However, autoregressive sampling generates tokens one at a time making it slow, and even prohibitive in certain tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-19 Ziteng Sun , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Jae Hun Ro , Ahmad Beirami , Himanshu Jain , Felix Yu

We propose a novel speculative decoding method tailored for multi-sample reasoning scenarios, such as self-consistency and Best-of-N sampling. Our method exploits the intrinsic consensus of parallel generation paths to synthesize…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Yiwei Li , Jiayi Shi , Shaoxiong Feng , Peiwen Yuan , Xinglin Wang , Yueqi Zhang , Ji Zhang , Chuyi Tan , Boyuan Pan , Yao Hu , Kan Li

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…

Speculative decoding is a widely used technique for accelerating inference in large language models (LLMs), but its performance degrades as input length grows, with significant drops even at moderate lengths. Yet, this early degradation has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Jungyoub Cha , Hyunjong Kim , Sungzoon Cho

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

Group relative policy optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated significant potential in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) via reinforcement learning. However, its practical deployment is impeded by an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Yizhou Zhang , Ning Lv , Teng Wang , Jisheng Dang

Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as an effective technique to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference without compromising output quality. However, the achievable speedup largely depends on the effectiveness of the drafting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Min Fang , Zhihui Fu , Qibin Zhao , Jun Wang

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a smaller model to draft future tokens, which are then verified by the target LLM. This preserves generation quality by accepting only aligned tokens.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Taehyeon Kim , Hojung Jung , Se-Young Yun

Large language models (LLMs) have shown outstanding performance across numerous real-world tasks. However, the autoregressive nature of these models makes the inference process slow and costly. Speculative decoding has emerged as a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Zongyue Qin , Zifan He , Neha Prakriya , Jason Cong , Yizhou Sun

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by allowing a lightweight draft model to propose outputs that a stronger target model verifies. However, its token-centric nature allows erroneous steps to propagate.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Kiran Purohit , Ramasuri Narayanam , Soumyabrata Pal

Speculative decoding is a widely used method that accelerates the generation process of large language models (LLMs) with no compromise in model performance. It achieves this goal by using an existing smaller model for drafting and then…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Weilin Zhao , Yuxiang Huang , Xu Han , Wang Xu , Chaojun Xiao , Xinrong Zhang , Yewei Fang , Kaihuo Zhang , Zhiyuan Liu , Maosong Sun

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