English
Related papers

Related papers: Speculative Sampling with Reinforcement Learning

200 papers

This study proposes a safe and sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) framework to address two major challenges in developing applicable RL algorithms: satisfying safety constraints and efficiently learning with limited samples. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Hongyi Chen , Changliu Liu

This paper proposes a novel formulation for reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models, explaining why and under what conditions the true sequence-level reward can be optimized via a surrogate token-level objective in policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Chujie Zheng , Kai Dang , Bowen Yu , Mingze Li , Huiqiang Jiang , Junrong Lin , Yuqiong Liu , Hao Lin , Chencan Wu , Feng Hu , An Yang , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

Tree-based speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by verifying a branching tree of draft tokens in a single target-model forward pass. However, existing methods prioritize maximizing token-level likelihood or the number…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Lifu Wang , Pan Zhou

Applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to sequence generation models enables the direct optimization of long-term rewards (\textit{e.g.,} BLEU and human feedback), but typically requires large-scale sampling over a space of action sequences.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-07 Chenglong Wang , Hang Zhou , Yimin Hu , Yifu Huo , Bei Li , Tongran Liu , Tong Xiao , Jingbo Zhu

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

Reinforcement Learning (RL) traditionally relies on scalar reward signals, limiting its ability to leverage the rich semantic knowledge often available in real-world tasks. In contrast, humans learn efficiently by combining numerical…

A big challenge in branch and bound lies in identifying the optimal node within the search tree from which to proceed. Current state-of-the-art selectors utilize either hand-crafted ensembles that automatically switch between naive sub-node…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Alexander Mattick , Christopher Mutschler

Sampling-based motion planning is a well-established approach in autonomous driving, valued for its modularity and analytical tractability. In complex urban scenarios, however, uniform or heuristic sampling often produces many infeasible or…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Korbinian Moller , Roland Stroop , Mattia Piccinini , Alexander Langmann , Johannes Betz

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

We seek to understand what facilitates sample-efficient learning from historical datasets for sequential decision-making, a problem that is popularly known as offline reinforcement learning (RL). Further, we are interested in algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Raman Arora

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate autoregressive inference in large language models (LLMs). Self-draft methods, which leverage the base LLM itself for speculation, avoid the overhead of auxiliary draft…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Zhuofan Wen , Yang Feng

Speculative decoding is an emerging technique that accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by allowing a smaller draft model to predict multiple tokens in advance, which are then verified or corrected by a larger target model. In…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-10 Ce Zheng , Tingting Yang

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

Efficient inference in large language models (LLMs) has become a critical focus as their scale and complexity grow. Traditional autoregressive decoding, while effective, suffers from computational inefficiencies due to its sequential token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Hyun Ryu , Eric Kim

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 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

Most provably-efficient learning algorithms introduce optimism about poorly-understood states and actions to encourage exploration. We study an alternative approach for efficient exploration, posterior sampling for reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-12-30 Ian Osband , Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Lianghuan Huang , Sagnik Anupam , Insup Lee , Shuo Li , Osbert Bastani

With the rising number of machine learning competitions, the world has witnessed an exciting race for the best algorithms. However, the involved data selection process may fundamentally suffer from evidence ambiguity and concept drift…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Hoang D. Nguyen , Xuan-Son Vu , Quoc-Tuan Truong , Duc-Trong Le

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…