English
Related papers

Related papers: Speculative Decoding: Performance or Illusion?

200 papers

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

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

Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) excel in video understanding but suffer from high inference latency during autoregressive generation. Speculative Decoding (SD) mitigates this by applying a draft-and-verify paradigm, yet existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Yicheng Ji , Jun Zhang , Jinpeng Chen , Cong Wang , Lidan Shou , Gang Chen , Huan Li

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks but suffer from high inference latency due to their autoregressive generation. Speculative Decoding (SPD) mitigates this issue by verifying candidate tokens in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Jinze Li , Yixing Xu , Guanchen Li , Shuo Yang , Jinfeng Xu , Xuanwu Yin , Dong Li , Edith C. H. Ngai , Emad Barsoum

Large Language Models (LLMs) present a critical trade-off between inference quality and computational cost: larger models offer superior capabilities but incur significant latency, while smaller models are faster but less powerful. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Hang Wu , Jianian Zhu , Yinghui Li , Haojie Wang , Biao Hou , Jidong Zhai

The performance of large language models (LLMs) is closely linked to their underlying size, leading to ever-growing networks and hence slower inference. Speculative decoding has been proposed as a technique to accelerate autoregressive…

Speculative decoding (SD) has proven effective for accelerating LLM inference by quickly generating draft tokens and verifying them in parallel. However, SD remains largely unexplored for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), which extend…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Minjae Lee , Wonjun Kang , Byeongkeun Ahn , Christian Classen , Kevin Galim , Seunghyuk Oh , Minghao Yan , Hyung Il Koo , Kangwook Lee

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

LLM deployment on resource-constrained edge devices faces severe latency constraints, particularly in real-time applications where delayed responses can compromise safety or usability. Among many approaches to mitigate the inefficiencies of…

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by using a draft model to look ahead, but gains are capped by the cost of autoregressive draft generation: increasing draft size elevates acceptance rates but introduces additional latency…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Nikhil Bhendawade , Kumari Nishu , Arnav Kundu , Chris Bartels , Minsik Cho , Irina Belousova

Speculative decoding accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) inference by employing a small speculative model (SSM) to generate multiple candidate tokens and verify them using the LLM in parallel. This technique has been widely integrated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Ruixiao Li , Fahao Chen , Peng Li

Cloud-based Large Language Model (LLM) services often face challenges in achieving low inference latency and meeting Service Level Objectives (SLOs) under dynamic request patterns. Speculative decoding, which exploits lightweight models for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Kaiyu Huang , Hao Wu , Zhubo Shi , Han Zou , Minchen Yu , Qingjiang Shi

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing but face critical deployment challenges in device-edge systems due to resource limitations and communication overhead. To address these issues, collaborative…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-18 Jiahong Ning , Ce Zheng , Tingting Yang

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by allowing a lightweight draft model to propose outputs that a stronger target model verifies. However, its token-centric nature allows erroneous steps to propagate.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Kiran Purohit , Ramasuri Narayanam , Soumyabrata Pal

Speculative decoding (SPD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by letting a smaller draft model propose multiple future tokens that are verified in parallel by a larger target model. The dominant SPD paradigm treats the target…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jinze Li , Yixing Xu , Guanchen Li , Jinfeng Xu , Shuo Yang , Yang Zhang , Xuanwu Yin , Dong Li , Edith C. H. Ngai , Emad Barsoum

We present a novel inference scheme, self-speculative decoding, for accelerating Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for an auxiliary model. This approach is characterized by a two-stage process: drafting and verification. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Jun Zhang , Jue Wang , Huan Li , Lidan Shou , Ke Chen , Gang Chen , Sharad Mehrotra

Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT are state-of-the-art text generation models that provide significant assistance in daily routines. However, LLM execution is inherently sequential, since they only produce one token at a time, thus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Qidong Su , Christina Giannoula , Gennady Pekhimenko

As Large Language Models (LLMs) can now process extremely long contexts, efficient inference over these extended inputs has become increasingly important, especially for emerging applications like LLM agents that highly depend on this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Penghui Yang , Cunxiao Du , Fengzhuo Zhang , Haonan Wang , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Bo An

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in ranking systems such as information retrieval (IR) systems and recommender systems (RSs). To alleviate the latency of auto-regressive decoding, some studies explore the single (first)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Yingpeng Du , Tianjun Wei , Zhu Sun , Jie Zhang

Speculative decoding is a standard method for accelerating the inference speed of large language models. However, scaling it for production environments poses several engineering challenges, including efficiently implementing different…