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Speculative Decoding (SD) is a technique to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) by using a lower complexity draft model to propose candidate tokens verified by a larger target model. To further improve efficiency,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Xiaofan Lu , Yixiao Zeng , Feiyang Ma , Zixu Yu , Marco Levorato

Speculative decoding (SD), where a draft model provides multiple candidate tokens for the target model to verify in parallel, has demonstrated significant potential for accelerating LLM inference. Yet, existing SD approaches adhere to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Enyu Zhou , Kai Sheng , Hao Chen , Xin He

Parallel Speculative Decoding (PSD) accelerates traditional Speculative Decoding (SD) by overlapping draft generation with verification. However, it remains hampered by two fundamental challenges: (1) a theoretical speedup ceiling dictated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yuhao Shen , Tianyu Liu , Junyi Shen , Jinyang Wu , Quan Kong , Li Huan , Cong Wang

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 drafting a tree of candidate continuations and verifying it in one target forward. Existing drafters fall into two camps with opposite weaknesses. Autoregressive drafters such as EAGLE-3…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Weijie Shi , Qiang Xu , Fan Deng , Yaguang Wu , Jiarun Liu , Yehong Xu , Hao Chen , Jia Zhu , Jiajie Xu , Xiangjun Huang , Jian Yang , Xiaofang Zhou

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

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a widely used approach to accelerate the inference of large language models (LLMs) without reducing generation quality. It operates by first using a compact model to draft multiple tokens efficiently, followed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Hossein Entezari Zarch , Lei Gao , Chaoyi Jiang , Murali Annavaram

Speculative decoding is a widely used method that accelerates the generation process of large language models (LLMs) with no compromise in model performance. It achieves this goal by using an existing smaller model for drafting and then…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Weilin Zhao , Yuxiang Huang , Xu Han , Wang Xu , Chaojun Xiao , Xinrong Zhang , Yewei Fang , Kaihuo Zhang , Zhiyuan Liu , Maosong Sun

Speculative Decoding (SD) has emerged as a premier technique for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference by decoupling token generation into rapid drafting and parallel verification. While recent advancements in self-speculation…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Guang Huang , Zeyi Wen

Speculative decoding accelerates Large Language Models (LLMs) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens that are verified in parallel by the target model. However, existing draft model training objectives are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Zihao An , Taichi Liu , Ziqiong Liu , Dong Li , Ruofeng Liu , Emad Barsoum

Speculative decoding (SD) has been shown to reduce the latency of autoregressive decoding (AD) by 2-3x for small batch sizes. However, increasing throughput and therefore reducing the cost per token requires decoding with large batch sizes.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-10 Sanjit Neelam , Daniel Heinlein , Vaclav Cvicek , Akshay Mishra , Reiner Pope

Deployment of autoregressive large language models (LLMs) is costly, and as these models increase in size, the associated costs will become even more considerable. Consequently, different methods have been proposed to accelerate the token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Parsa Kavehzadeh , Mohammadreza Pourreza , Mojtaba Valipour , Tinashu Zhu , Haoli Bai , Ali Ghodsi , Boxing Chen , Mehdi Rezagholizadeh

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

Conventional speculative decoding (SD) methods utilize a predefined length policy for proposing drafts, which implies the premise that the target model smoothly accepts the proposed draft tokens. However, reality deviates from this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Ziyin Zhang , Jiahao Xu , Tian Liang , Xingyu Chen , Zhiwei He , Rui Wang , Zhaopeng Tu

Speculative decoding has become the standard approach for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference. It exploits a lossless draft-then-verify procedure to circumvent the latency of autoregressive decoding, achieving impressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Jameson Sandler , Jacob K. Christopher , Thomas Hartvigsen , Ferdinando Fioretto

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

This tutorial presents a comprehensive introduction to Speculative Decoding (SD), an advanced technique for LLM inference acceleration that has garnered significant research interest in recent years. SD is introduced as an innovative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Heming Xia , Cunxiao Du , Yongqi Li , Qian Liu , Wenjie Li

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

Despite the remarkable strides made by autoregressive language models, their potential is often hampered by the slow inference speeds inherent in sequential token generation. Blockwise parallel decoding (BPD) was proposed by Stern et al. as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Taehyeon Kim , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Kishore Papineni , Michael Riley , Sanjiv Kumar , Adrian Benton

Autoregressive (AR) decoding is a major latency bottleneck for large language models. Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates AR by letting a drafter propose multi-token blocks that a verifier accepts or rejects. However, many SD systems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Shrenik Bhansali , Larry Heck