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We propose an acceleration scheme for large language models (LLMs) through Speculative Decoding with Semantic Adaptive Tokens (SDSAT). The primary objective of this design is to enhance the LLM model's ability to generate draft tokens more…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Chengbo Liu , Yong Zhu

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

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a widely used approach to accelerate the inference of large language models (LLMs) without reducing generation quality. It operates by first using a compact model to draft multiple tokens efficiently, followed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Hossein Entezari Zarch , Lei Gao , Chaoyi Jiang , Murali Annavaram

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates LLM inference by verifying draft tokens in parallel. However, this method presents a critical trade-off: it improves throughput in low-load, memory-bound systems but degrades performance in high-load,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Rui Li , Zhaoning Zhang , Libo Zhang , Huaimin Wang , Xiang Fu , Zhiquan Lai

Speculative Decoding is a widely used technique to speed up inference for Large Language Models (LLMs) without sacrificing quality. When performing inference, speculative decoding uses a smaller draft model to generate speculative tokens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Minghao Yan , Saurabh Agarwal , Shivaram Venkataraman

To mitigate the high inference latency stemming from autoregressive decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs), Speculative Decoding has emerged as a novel decoding paradigm for LLM inference. In each decoding step, this method first drafts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Heming Xia , Zhe Yang , Qingxiu Dong , Peiyi Wang , Yongqi Li , Tao Ge , Tianyu Liu , Wenjie Li , Zhifang Sui

Large language models (LLMs) suffer from high inference latency due to the auto-regressive decoding process. Speculative decoding accelerates inference by generating multiple draft tokens using a lightweight model and verifying them in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yixuan Wang , Yijun Liu , Shiyu ji , Yuzhuang Xu , Yang Xu , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che

Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a widely used paradigm to accelerate LLM inference without compromising quality. It works by first employing a compact model to draft multiple tokens efficiently and then using the target LLM to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Heming Xia , Yongqi Li , Jun Zhang , Cunxiao Du , Wenjie Li

Speculative decoding has emerged as a widely adopted method to accelerate large language model inference without sacrificing the quality of the model outputs. While this technique has facilitated notable speed improvements by enabling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Jacob K Christopher , Brian R Bartoldson , Tal Ben-Nun , Michael Cardei , Bhavya Kailkhura , Ferdinando Fioretto

Verification is a key bottleneck in improving inference speed while maintaining distribution fidelity in Speculative Decoding. Recent work has shown that sequence-level verification leads to a higher number of accepted tokens compared to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yuxuan Zhou , Fei Huang , Heng Li , Fengyi Wu , Tianyu Wang , Jianwei Zhang , Junyang Lin , Zhi-Qi Cheng

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant computational bottlenecks during inference due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention mechanisms, particularly as context lengths increase. We introduce SpecAttn, a novel training-free…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Harsh Shah

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a technique to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) by using a lower complexity draft model to propose candidate tokens verified by a larger target model. To further improve efficiency,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Xiaofan Lu , Yixiao Zeng , Feiyang Ma , Zixu Yu , Marco Levorato

Autoregressive decoding is bottlenecked by its sequential nature. Speculative decoding has become a standard way to accelerate inference by using a fast draft model to predict upcoming tokens from a slower target model, and then verifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Tanishq Kumar , Tri Dao , Avner May

Speculative decoding (SD), where a small draft model is employed to propose draft tokens in advance and then the target model validates them in parallel, has emerged as a promising technique for LLM inference acceleration. Many endeavors to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Tianyu Liu , Qitan Lv , Hao Li , Xing Gao , Xiao Sun , Xiaoyan Sun

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

The growing gap between the increasing complexity of large language models (LLMs) and the limited computational budgets of edge devices poses a key challenge for efficient on-device inference, despite gradual improvements in hardware…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Xiangchen Li , Dimitrios Spatharakis , Saeid Ghafouri , Jiakun Fan , Hans Vandierendonck , Deepu John , Bo Ji , Dimitrios Nikolopoulos

Speculative decoding (SD), where an extra draft model is employed to provide multiple draft tokens first, and then the original target model verifies these tokens in parallel, has shown great power for LLM inference acceleration. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Tianyu Liu , Yun Li , Qitan Lv , Kai Liu , Jianchen Zhu , Winston Hu , Xiao Sun

Speculative decoding is an inference-acceleration method for large language models (LLMs) where a small language model generates a draft-token sequence which is further verified by the target LLM in parallel. Recent works have advanced this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Wonseok Jeon , Mukul Gagrani , Raghavv Goel , Junyoung Park , Mingu Lee , Christopher Lott

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

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a small draft model to generate candidate tokens for a larger target model to verify. The efficacy of this technique hinges on the trade-off between the time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jiebin Zhang , Zhenghan Yu , Liang Wang , Nan Yang , Eugene J. Yu , Zheng Li , Yifan Song , Dawei Zhu , Xingxing Zhang , Furu Wei , Sujian Li