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Speculative decoding has emerged as a widely adopted paradigm for accelerating large language model inference, where a lightweight draft model rapidly generates candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by a larger target model.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yu-Yang Qian , Hao-Cong Wu , Yichao Fu , Hao Zhang , Peng Zhao

Speculative decoding (SD) has been demonstrated as an effective technique for lossless LLM inference acceleration. Retrieval-based SD methods, one kind of model-free method, have yielded promising speedup, but they often rely on incomplete…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Yuxuan Hu , Ke Wang , Xiaokang Zhang , Fanjin Zhang , Cuiping Li , Hong Chen , Jing Zhang

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising technique for large language model (LLM) inference by accelerating autoregressive decoding via draft-then-verify. This paper studies a new edge scenario with multi-user inference, where draft…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Yaodan Xu , Sheng Zhou , Zhisheng Niu

Long-context large language model (LLM) inference has become the norm for today's AI applications. However, it is severely bottlenecked by the increasing memory demands of its KV cache. Previous works have shown that self-speculative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yikang Yue , Yuqi Xue , Jian Huang

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

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

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

In edge-cloud speculative decoding (SD), edge devices equipped with small language models (SLMs) generate draft tokens that are verified by large language models (LLMs) in the cloud. A key bottleneck in such systems is the limited…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-13 Guangyi Zhang , Yunlong Cai , Guanding Yu , Petar Popovski , Osvaldo Simeone

Massive parameters of LLMs have made inference latency a fundamental bottleneck. Speculative decoding represents a lossless approach to accelerate inference through a guess-and-verify paradigm. Some methods rely on additional architectures…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Xianzhen Luo , Yixuan Wang , Qingfu Zhu , Zhiming Zhang , Xuanyu Zhang , Qing Yang , Dongliang Xu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become more prevalent in long-context applications such as interactive chatbots, document analysis, and agent workflows, but it is challenging to serve long-context requests with low latency and high…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Ranajoy Sadhukhan , Jian Chen , Zhuoming Chen , Vashisth Tiwari , Ruihang Lai , Jinyuan Shi , Ian En-Hsu Yen , Avner May , Tianqi Chen , Beidi Chen

Large language model (LLM)-based generative list-wise recommendation has advanced rapidly, but decoding remains sequential and thus latency-prone. To accelerate inference without changing the target distribution, speculative decoding (SD)…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Jiaju Chen , Chongming Gao , Chenxiao Fan , Haoyan Liu , Qingpeng Cai , Peng Jiang , Xiangnan He

Large language models (LLMs) have shown outstanding performance across numerous real-world tasks. However, the autoregressive nature of these models makes the inference process slow and costly. Speculative decoding has emerged as a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Zongyue Qin , Zifan He , Neha Prakriya , Jason Cong , Yizhou Sun

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

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a critical role for pretrained large language models (LLMs), notably enhancing their capacity to acquire domain-specific knowledge while preserving or potentially augmenting their general-purpose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Ali Taheri , Alireza Taban , Qizhou Wang , Shanshan Ye , Abdolreza Mirzaei , Tongliang Liu , Bo Han

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, yet their high computational demands pose significant challenges for real-time inference, especially in multi-user server speculative decoding and…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Phuong Tran , Tzu-Hao Liu , Long Tan Le , Tung-Anh Nguyen , Van Quan La , Eason Yu , Han Shu , Choong Seon Hong , Nguyen H. Tran

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

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

Speculative sampling is a popular technique for accelerating inference in Large Language Models by generating candidate tokens using a fast draft model and accepting or rejecting them based on the target model's distribution. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Valentin De Bortoli , Alexandre Galashov , Arthur Gretton , Arnaud Doucet

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by drafting future tokens with a small model, but drafter models degrade sharply under template perturbation and long-context inputs. We identify a previously-unreported phenomenon we call…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Doğaç Eldenk , Payal Mohapatra , Yigitcan Comlek , Kaan Oktay , Hongyang Zhang , Stephen Xia

Large language model (LLM) decoding involves generating a sequence of tokens based on a given context, where each token is predicted one at a time using the model's learned probabilities. The typical autoregressive decoding method requires…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Xukun Liu , Bowen Lei , Ruqi Zhang , Dongkuan Xu