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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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing by understanding and generating human-like text. However, the increasing demand for more sophisticated LLMs presents significant computational challenges due to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Ze Yang , Yihong Jin , Xinhe Xu

Autoregressive language models demonstrate excellent performance in various scenarios. However, the inference efficiency is limited by its one-step-one-word generation mode, which has become a pressing problem recently as the models become…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Jikai Wang , Yi Su , Juntao Li , Qingrong Xia , Zi Ye , Xinyu Duan , Zhefeng Wang , Min Zhang

This technical report describes the design and training of novel speculative decoding draft models, for accelerating the inference speeds of large language models in a production environment. By conditioning draft predictions on both…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Davis Wertheimer , Joshua Rosenkranz , Thomas Parnell , Sahil Suneja , Pavithra Ranganathan , Raghu Ganti , Mudhakar Srivatsa

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

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

Autoregressive Language Models instantiate a factorized likelihood over token sequences, yet their strictly sequential decoding process imposes an intrinsic lower bound on inference latency. This bottleneck has emerged as a central obstacle…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Maxim Divilkovskiy , Vitaly Malygin , Sergey Zlobin , Stanislav Ilyushin , Sultan Isali , Vasily Kalugin , Nuriza Aitassova , Fei Yi , Weidi Zeng

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 (SD) is a powerful technique for accelerating the inference process of large language models (LLMs) without sacrificing accuracy. Typically, SD employs a small draft model to generate a fixed number of draft tokens,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Situo Zhang , Yifan Zhang , Zichen Zhu , Hankun Wang , Da Ma , Danyang Zhang , Lu Chen , Kai Yu

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

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks but suffer from high inference latency due to their autoregressive generation. Speculative Decoding (SPD) mitigates this issue by verifying candidate tokens in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Jinze Li , Yixing Xu , Guanchen Li , Shuo Yang , Jinfeng Xu , Xuanwu Yin , Dong Li , Edith C. H. Ngai , Emad Barsoum

Despite the remarkable strides made by autoregressive language models, their potential is often hampered by the slow inference speeds inherent in sequential token generation. Blockwise parallel decoding (BPD) was proposed by Stern et al. as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Taehyeon Kim , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Kishore Papineni , Michael Riley , Sanjiv Kumar , Adrian Benton

Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by employing a small draft model to generate predictions, which are then verified by a larger target model. The effectiveness of SD hinges on the alignment between these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Yuezhou Hu , Jiaxin Guo , Xinyu Feng , Tuo Zhao

Speculative decoding is a powerful technique for reducing the latency of Large Language Models (LLMs), offering a fault-tolerant framework that enables the use of highly compressed draft models. In this work, we introduce Self-Distilled…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Mike Lasby , Nish Sinnadurai , Valavan Manohararajah , Sean Lie , Yani Ioannou , Vithursan Thangarasa

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 autoregressive generation by letting a lightweight draft model propose future tokens that a larger target model then verifies in parallel. In practice, however, draft models are usually trained on broad…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Mohamad Zbib , Mohamad Bazzi , Ammar Mohanna , Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud , Bernard Ghanem

Speculative decoding is a powerful technique that attempts to circumvent the autoregressive constraint of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). The aim of speculative decoding techniques is to improve the average inference time of a large,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Sudhanshu Agrawal , Wonseok Jeon , Mingu Lee

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

Striking an optimal balance between minimal drafting latency and high speculation accuracy to enhance the inference speed of Large Language Models remains a significant challenge in speculative decoding. In this paper, we introduce Falcon,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Xiangxiang Gao , Weisheng Xie , Yiwei Xiang , Feng Ji

As large language models (LLMs) scale up, accuracy improves, but the autoregressive (AR) nature of decoding increases latency since each token requires a serial forward pass. Speculative decoding addresses this by employing a fast drafter…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Guanghao Li , Zhihui Fu , Min Fang , Qibin Zhao , Ming Tang , Chun Yuan , Jun Wang