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Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional performance across a wide range of tasks; however, their token-by-token autoregressive generation process significantly hinders inference speed. Speculative decoding presents a promising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Kai Lv , Honglin Guo , Qipeng Guo , Xipeng Qiu

Deployed large language models (LLMs) often rely on speculative decoding, a technique that generates and verifies multiple candidate tokens in parallel, to improve throughput and latency. In this work, we reveal a new side-channel whereby…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Jiankun Wei , Abdulrahman Abdulrazzag , Tianchen Zhang , Adel Muursepp , Gururaj Saileshwar

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

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) process millions of queries daily, making efficient response caching a compelling optimization for reducing cost and latency. However, preserving relevance to user queries using this approach proves difficult…

As the usage of large language models (LLMs) grows, performing efficient inference with these models becomes increasingly important. While speculative decoding has recently emerged as a promising direction for speeding up inference,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Zhuoming Chen , Avner May , Ruslan Svirschevski , Yuhsun Huang , Max Ryabinin , Zhihao Jia , Beidi Chen

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by using a smaller draft model to speculate tokens that a larger target model verifies. Verification is often the bottleneck (e.g. verification is $4\times$ slower than token generation when a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Avinash Kumar , Sujay Sanghavi , Poulami Das

KV caches, typically used only to speed up autoregressive decoding, encode contextual information that can be reused for downstream tasks at no extra cost. We propose treating the KV cache as a lightweight representation, eliminating the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zeyu Xing , Xing Li , Hui-Ling Zhen , Mingxuan Yuan , Sinno Jialin Pan

Early exiting has recently emerged as a promising technique for accelerating large language models (LLMs) by effectively reducing the hardware computation and memory access. In this paper, we present SpecEE, a fast LLM inference engine with…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Jiaming Xu , Jiayi Pan , Yongkang Zhou , Siming Chen , Jinhao Li , Yaoxiu Lian , Junyi Wu , Guohao Dai

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive language models by enabling parallel token generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, their inference speed is significantly limited by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Satyam Goyal , Kushal Patel , Tanush Mittal , Arjun Laxman

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer fast, parallel token generation, but their standalone use is plagued by an inherent efficiency-quality tradeoff. We show that, if carefully applied, the attributes of dLLMs can actually be a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Rui Pan , Zhuofu Chen , Hongyi Liu , Arvind Krishnamurthy , Ravi Netravali

Speculative decoding (SD) has become a popular technique to accelerate Large Language Model (LLM) inference, yet its real-world effectiveness remains unclear as prior evaluations rely on research prototypes and unrealistically small batch…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Xiaoxuan Liu , Jiaxiang Yu , Jongseok Park , Ion Stoica , Alvin Cheung

We present CREST (Compact Retrieval-Based Speculative Decoding), a redesign of REST that allows it to be effectively "compacted". REST is a drafting technique for speculative decoding based on retrieving exact n-gram matches of the most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Sophia Ho , Jinsol Park , Patrick Wang

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

This paper introduces Multimodal Speculative Decoding (MSD) to accelerate Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) inference. Speculative decoding has been shown to accelerate Large Language Models (LLMs) without sacrificing accuracy.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Luxi Lin , Zhihang Lin , Zhanpeng Zeng , Rongrong Ji

Scaling test-time compute has driven the recent advances in the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), typically by allocating additional computation for more thorough exploration. However, increased compute often comes at…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Mert Cemri , Nived Rajaraman , Rishabh Tiwari , Xiaoxuan Liu , Kurt Keutzer , Ion Stoica , Kannan Ramchandran , Ahmad Beirami , Ziteng 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

Tool calling has greatly expanded the practical utility of large language models (LLMs) by enabling them to interact with external applications. As LLM capabilities advance, effective tool use increasingly involves multi-step, multi-turn…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Heming Xia , Yongqi Li , Cunxiao Du , Mingbo Song , Wenjie Li

To reduce the latency associated with autoretrogressive LLM inference, speculative decoding has emerged as a novel decoding paradigm, where future tokens are drafted and verified in parallel. However, the practical deployment of speculative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Shwetha Somasundaram , Anirudh Phukan , Apoorv Saxena

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates language model inference by drafting tokens from a cheap proposal model and verifying them against an expensive target model via rejection sampling. Because rejection truncates the draft block at the…