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Related papers: DEER: Draft with Diffusion, Verify with Autoregres…

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Diffusion-based decoding has recently emerged as an appealing alternative to autoregressive (AR) generation, offering the potential to update multiple tokens in parallel and reduce latency. However, diffusion vision language models (dVLMs)…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Lunbin Zeng , Jingfeng Yao , Bencheng Liao , Hongyuan Tao , Wenyu Liu , Xinggang Wang

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

Inference efficiency in Large Language Models (LLMs) is fundamentally limited by their serial, autoregressive generation, especially as reasoning becomes a key capability and response sequences grow longer. Speculative decoding (SD) offers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Haoyun Jiang , Junqi He , Feng Hong , Xinlong Yang , Jianwei Zhang , Zheng Li , Zhengyang Zhuge , Zhiyong Chen , Bo Han , Junyang Lin , Jiangchao Yao

Speculative decoding accelerates language model inference by separating generation into fast drafting and parallel verification. Its main limitation is drafter-verifier misalignment, which limits token acceptance and reduces overall…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Frédéric Berdoz , Peer Rheinboldt , Roger Wattenhofer

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) generate text via iterative denoising but consistently underperform on multi-step reasoning. We hypothesize this gap stems from a coordination problem: AR models build coherence token-by-token, while…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Earl J St Sauver

Text generation with Large Language Models (LLMs) is known to be memory bound due to the combination of their auto-regressive nature, huge parameter counts, and limited memory bandwidths, often resulting in low token rates. Speculative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Raghavv Goel , Mukul Gagrani , Wonseok Jeon , Junyoung Park , Mingu Lee , Christopher Lott

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer a compelling paradigm for natural language generation, leveraging parallel decoding and bidirectional attention to achieve superior global coherence compared to autoregressive models. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Zhongyu Xiao , Zhiwei Hao , Jianyuan Guo , Yong Luo , Jia Liu , Jie Xu , Han Hu

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) models for language modeling, allowing flexible generation order and parallel generation of multiple tokens. However, this flexibility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Changxiao Cai , Gen Li

Recent work has shown that directly fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for dense retrieval yields strong performance, but their substantial parameter counts make them computationally inefficient. While prior studies have revealed…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Yibin Lei , Shwai He , Ang Li , Andrew Yates

Autoregressive decoding in large language models (LLMs) requires $\mathcal{O}(n)$ sequential steps for $n$ tokens, fundamentally limiting inference throughput. Recent diffusion-based LLMs (dLLMs) enable parallel token generation through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Wenrui Bao , Zhiben Chen , Dan Xu , Yuzhang Shang

Speculative decoding accelerates memory-bound LLM inference without quality degradation by using a fast drafter to propose multiple candidate tokens and the target model to verify them in parallel. However, conventional sequential…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yaojie Zhang , Jianuo Huang , Junlong Ke , Yuhang Han , Yongji Long , Tianchen Zhao , Biqing Qi , Linfeng Zhang

The generation speed of LLMs are bottlenecked by autoregressive decoding, where tokens are predicted sequentially one by one. Alternatively, diffusion large language models (dLLMs) theoretically allow for parallel token generation, but in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Daniel Israel , Guy Van den Broeck , Aditya Grover

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become an indispensable part of natural language processing tasks. However, autoregressive sampling has become an efficiency bottleneck. Multi-Draft Speculative Decoding (MDSD) is a recent approach where,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Zhengmian Hu , Tong Zheng , Vignesh Viswanathan , Ziyi Chen , Ryan A. Rossi , Yihan Wu , Dinesh Manocha , Heng Huang

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

Speculative decoding (SD) is a widely used approach for accelerating decode-heavy LLM inference workloads. While online inference workloads are highly dynamic, existing SD systems are rigid and take a coarse-grained approach to SD…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Wenyan Chen , Chengzhi Lu , Yanying Lin , Dmitrii Ustiugov

Diffusion-based large language models (Diffusion LLMs) have shown promise for non-autoregressive text generation with parallel decoding capabilities. However, the practical inference speed of open-sourced Diffusion LLMs often lags behind…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Chengyue Wu , Hao Zhang , Shuchen Xue , Zhijian Liu , Shizhe Diao , Ligeng Zhu , Ping Luo , Song Han , Enze Xie

Large Language Models (LLMs), constrained by their auto-regressive nature, suffer from slow decoding. Speculative decoding methods have emerged as a promising solution to accelerate LLM decoding, attracting attention from both systems and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Xuliang Wang , Yuetao Chen , Maochan Zhen , Fang Liu , Xinzhou Zheng , Xingwu Liu , Hong Xu , Ming Li

Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by decoupling generation and verification. While recent methods improve draft quality by tightly coupling the drafter with the target model, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jingwei Song , Xinyu Wang , Hanbin Wang , Xiaoxuan Lei , Bill Shi , Shixin Han , Eric Yang , Xiao-Wen Chang , Lynn Ai

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