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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 prominent technique to speed up the inference of a large target language model based on predictions of an auxiliary draft model. While effective, in application-specific settings, it often involves fine-tuning both…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Nikhil Bhendawade , Irina Belousova , Qichen Fu , Henry Mason , Mohammad Rastegari , Mahyar Najibi

Speculative decoding speeds up autoregressive generation in Large Language Models (LLMs) through a two-step procedure, where a lightweight draft model proposes tokens which the target model then verifies in a single forward pass. Although…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Anton Plaksin , Sergei Krutikov , Sergei Skvortsov , Alexander Samarin

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by the target model. The speedup is significantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Alexander Samarin , Sergei Krutikov , Anton Shevtsov , Sergei Skvortsov , Filipp Fisin , Alexander Golubev

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by using a fast draft model to generate tokens and a more accurate target model to verify them. Its performance depends on the $\textit{acceptance length}$, or number of draft tokens accepted…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Avinash Kumar , Sujay Sanghavi , Poulami Das

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by utilizing otherwise idle computational resources during memory-to-chip data transfer. Current speculative decoding methods typically assume a considerable amount of available computing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Luohe Shi , Zuchao Li , Lefei Zhang , Baoyuan Qi , Guoming Liu , Hai Zhao

Speculative decoding accelerates Large Language Model inference via a draft-then-verify paradigm, yet the output projection layer becomes a bottleneck as vocabulary sizes scale. While existing static pruning methods effectively reduce this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Shuyu Zhang , Lingfeng Pan , Qicheng Wang , Yaqi Shi , Yueyang Tan , Ruyu Yan , Jiaqi Chen , Lixing Du , Lu Wang

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

Autoregressive language models suffer from high inference latency due to their sequential decoding nature. Speculative decoding (SD) mitigates this by employing a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens, which are selectively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Yijun Lin , Jinhao Sheng , Qingyue Cai , Feng Zhou

Recent works have revealed the great potential of speculative decoding in accelerating the autoregressive generation process of large language models. The success of these methods relies on the alignment between draft candidates and the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Jikai Wang , Zhenxu Tian , Juntao Li , Qingrong Xia , Xinyu Duan , Zhefeng Wang , Baoxing Huai , Min Zhang

Speculative decoding relies on fast and accurate drafters. Recent state-of-the-art language models employ larger and larger vocabularies, which significantly slows down drafters. One promising approach to boost the efficiency of speculative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Nadav Timor , Jonathan Mamou , Oren Pereg , Hongyang Zhang , David Harel

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing and broadened their applicability across diverse commercial applications. However, the deployment of these models is constrained by high inference time in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Euiin Yi , Taehyeon Kim , Hongseok Jeung , Du-Seong Chang , Se-Young Yun

We propose Speculative Decoding (SpecDec), for the first time ever, to formally study exploiting the idea of speculative execution to accelerate autoregressive (AR) decoding. Speculative Decoding has two innovations: Spec-Drafter -- an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Heming Xia , Tao Ge , Peiyi Wang , Si-Qing Chen , Furu Wei , Zhifang Sui

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

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) generation by using an efficient draft model to propose the next few tokens, which are verified by the LLM in a single forward call, reducing latency while preserving its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Milan Gritta , Huiyin Xue , Gerasimos Lampouras

Speculative decoding accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) inference by using a small draft model to predict multiple tokens, and a large target model to verify these tokens in parallel. Recent studies leverage the hidden state of the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Langlin Huang , Chengsong Huang , Jixuan Leng , Di Huang , Jiaxin Huang

Recently, speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate LLM inference by employing a small draft model to propose draft tokens in advance, and validating them in parallel with the large target model. However,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yuhao Shen , Junyi Shen , Quan Kong , Tianyu Liu , Yao Lu , Cong Wang

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by drafting a tree of candidate continuations and verifying it in one target forward. Existing drafters fall into two camps with opposite weaknesses. Autoregressive drafters such as EAGLE-3…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Weijie Shi , Qiang Xu , Fan Deng , Yaguang Wu , Jiarun Liu , Yehong Xu , Hao Chen , Jia Zhu , Jiajie Xu , Xiangjun Huang , Jian Yang , Xiaofang Zhou

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 accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a small draft model to propose candidate tokens that a larger target model verifies. A critical hyperparameter in this process is the speculation length…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Shikhar Shukla