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Related papers: Batch Speculative Decoding Done Right

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Speculative Decoding (SD) has emerged as a critical technique for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference. Unlike deterministic system optimizations, SD performance is inherently data-dependent, meaning that diverse and…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Talor Abramovich , Maor Ashkenazi , Izzy Putterman , Benjamin Chislett , Tiyasa Mitra , Bita Darvish Rouhani , Ran Zilberstein , Yonatan Geifman

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate autoregressive inference in large language models (LLMs). Self-draft methods, which leverage the base LLM itself for speculation, avoid the overhead of auxiliary draft…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Zhuofan Wen , Yang Feng

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 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

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

We present PrecisionBatching, a quantized inference algorithm for speeding up neural network execution on traditional hardware platforms at low bitwidths without the need for retraining or recalibration. PrecisionBatching decomposes a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Maximilian Lam , Zachary Yedidia , Colby Banbury , Vijay Janapa Reddi

Speculative decoding is a standard method for accelerating the inference speed of large language models. However, scaling it for production environments poses several engineering challenges, including efficiently implementing different…

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…

Efficient inference in large language models (LLMs) has become a critical focus as their scale and complexity grow. Traditional autoregressive decoding, while effective, suffers from computational inefficiencies due to its sequential token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Hyun Ryu , Eric Kim

Speculative Decoding promises to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models, yet its efficacy often degrades in production-grade serving. Existing evaluations typically overlook the compute-bound nature of high-concurrency regimes,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Xinyi Hu , Yuhao Shen , Baolin Zhang , Hengxin Zhang , Jun Dai , Shuang Ge , Lei Chen , Yue Li , Mingcheng Wan

Speculative decoding has emerged as a widely adopted paradigm for accelerating large language model inference, where a lightweight draft model rapidly generates candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by a larger target model.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yu-Yang Qian , Hao-Cong Wu , Yichao Fu , Hao Zhang , Peng Zhao

The practice of speculative decoding, whereby inference is probabilistically supported by a smaller, cheaper, ``drafter'' model, has become a standard technique for systematically reducing the decoding time of large language models. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jameson Sandler , Ahmet Üstün , Marco Romanelli , Sara Hooker , Ferdinando Fioretto

The goal of $L$-step speculative decoding is to accelerate autoregressive decoding of a target model by using a cheaper draft model to generate a candidate path of $L$ tokens. Based on a verification algorithm involving target and draft…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Rahul Thomas , Arka Pal

Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but require inherently sequential decoding, leading to high inference latency and poor GPU utilization. Speculative decoding mitigates this bottleneck by using a fast…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jian Chen , Yesheng Liang , Zhijian Liu

Reasoning language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on challenging tasks by generating elaborate chain-of-thought (CoT) solutions. However, such lengthy generation shifts the inference bottleneck from compute-bound to…

Test-time scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by allocating additional computational resources during inference. However, this paradigm is inherently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Shengyin Sun , Yiming Li , Xing Li , Yingzhao Lian , Weizhe Lin , Hui-Ling Zhen , Zhiyuan Yang , Chen Chen , Xianzhi Yu , Mingxuan Yuan , Chen Ma

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 in inference-time compute have significantly improved performance on complex tasks by generating long chains of thought (CoTs) using Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). However, this improved accuracy comes at the cost of high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Rui Pan , Yinwei Dai , Zhihao Zhang , Gabriele Oliaro , Zhihao Jia , Ravi Netravali

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by using a draft model to look ahead, but gains are capped by the cost of autoregressive draft generation: increasing draft size elevates acceptance rates but introduces additional latency…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Nikhil Bhendawade , Kumari Nishu , Arnav Kundu , Chris Bartels , Minsik Cho , Irina Belousova

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by using smaller draft models to generate candidate tokens for parallel verification. However, current approaches are limited by sequential stage dependencies that prevent full…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Bradley McDanel , Sai Qian Zhang , Yunhai Hu , Zining Liu