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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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential in advancing natural language processing (NLP) tasks, but their sequential token generation limits inference speed. Multi-Draft Speculative Decoding (MDSD) offers a promising solution by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Ryan Sun , Tianyi Zhou , Xun Chen , Lichao Sun

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

The emergence of long-context large language models (LLMs) offers a promising alternative to traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for processing extensive documents. However, the computational overhead of long-context inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Guanzheng Chen , Qilong Feng , Jinjie Ni , Xin Li , Michael Qizhe Shieh

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

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…

The attention mechanism is becoming increasingly popular in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, showing superior performance than convolutional and recurrent architectures. However, attention becomes the compution bottleneck…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-07-22 Hanrui Wang , Zhekai Zhang , Song Han

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

Long-context LLMs increasingly rely on extended, reusable prefill prompts for agents and domain Q&A, pushing attention and KV-cache to become the dominant decode-time bottlenecks. While sparse attention reduces computation and transfer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Chuxu Song , Zhencan Peng , Jiuqi Wei , Chuanhui Yang

State-of-the-art sparse attention methods for reducing decoding latency fall into two main categories: approximate top-$k$ (and its extension, top-$p$) and recently introduced sampling-based estimation. However, these approaches are…

Speculative decoding is a widely adopted technique for accelerating inference in large language models (LLMs), yet its application to vision-language models (VLMs) remains underexplored, with existing methods achieving only modest speedups…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Jialiang Kang , Han Shu , Wenshuo Li , Yingjie Zhai , Xinghao Chen

Self-attention based Transformer has demonstrated the state-of-the-art performances in a number of natural language processing tasks. Self-attention is able to model long-term dependencies, but it may suffer from the extraction of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Guangxiang Zhao , Junyang Lin , Zhiyuan Zhang , Xuancheng Ren , Qi Su , Xu Sun

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) based on the Transformer architecture have recently emerged as a dominant foundation model for a wide range of Natural Language Processing tasks. Nevertheless, their application in real-time scenarios…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-04 Coleman Hooper , Sehoon Kim , Hiva Mohammadzadeh , Hasan Genc , Kurt Keutzer , Amir Gholami , Sophia Shao

Inference with Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) on long sequences is both costly and slow due to the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism. We introduce Star Attention, a two-phase block-sparse approximation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Shantanu Acharya , Fei Jia , Boris Ginsburg

Speculative Decoding has gained popularity as an effective technique for accelerating the auto-regressive inference process of Large Language Models. However, Speculative Decoding entirely relies on the availability of efficient draft…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Ofir Zafrir , Igor Margulis , Dorin Shteyman , Shira Guskin , Guy Boudoukh

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

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a smaller draft model to propose multiple tokens that are verified by a larger target model in parallel. While prior work demonstrates substantial speedups…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Linghao Kong , Megan Flynn , Michael Peng , Nir Shavit , Mark Kurtz , Alexandre Marques

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a recently proposed technique for faster inference using Large Language Models (LLMs). SD operates by using a smaller draft LLM for autoregressively generating a sequence of tokens and a larger target LLM for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Meiyu Zhong , Noel Teku , Ravi Tandon

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in multi-modal reasoning, but their inference time efficiency remains a significant challenge due to the memory overhead during decoding, especially when the query and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Fatih Ilhan , Gaowen Liu , Ramana Rao Kompella , Selim Furkan Tekin , Tiansheng Huang , Zachary Yahn , Yichang Xu , Ling Liu

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) enable globally coherent, bidirectional, and controllable text generation, offering advantages over traditional autoregressive LLMs, while scaling to ultra-long sequences remains costly. Many existing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Wenhu Zhang , Yiming Wu , Huanyu Wang , Yaoyang Liu , Huanzhang Dou , Senqiao Yang , Sitong Wu , Hanbin Zhao , Jiaya Jia