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Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by pairing a target model with a lightweight draft model whose proposed tokens are verified in parallel. A common way to build draft models, like EAGLE3 or DFlash is supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Haodi Lei , Yafy Li , Haoran Zhang , Shunkai Zhang , Qianjia Cheng , Xiaoye Qu , Ganqu Cui , Bowen Zhou , Ning Ding , Yun Luo , Yu Cheng

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

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

Adapting large language models (LLMs) via reinforcement learning (RL) is often bottlenecked by the generation stage, which can consume over 75\% of the training time. Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive generation in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Qiaoling Chen , Zijun Liu , Peng Sun , Shenggui Li , Guoteng Wang , Ziming Liu , Yonggang Wen , Siyuan Feng , Tianwei Zhang

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

The autoregressive nature of large language models (LLMs) fundamentally limits inference speed, as each forward pass generates only a single token and is often bottlenecked by memory bandwidth. Speculative decoding has emerged as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Zihao An , Huajun Bai , Ziqiong Liu , Dong Li , Emad Barsoum

Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a powerful method for accelerating autoregressive generation in large language models (LLMs), yet its integration into vision-language models (VLMs) remains underexplored. We introduce DREAM, a novel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Yunhai Hu , Tianhua Xia , Zining Liu , Rahul Raman , Xingyu Liu , Bo Bao , Eric Sather , Vithursan Thangarasa , Sai Qian Zhang

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

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) 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 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 accelerates LLM inference by verifying candidate tokens from a draft model against a larger target model. Recent judge decoding boosts this process by relaxing verification criteria by accepting draft tokens that may…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Kanghoon Yoon , Minsub Kim , Sungjae Lee , Joonhyung Lee , Sunghyeon Woo , Yeonjun In , Se Jung Kwon , Chanyoung Park , Dongsoo Lee

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

The emergence of long-context large language models (LLMs) offers a promising alternative to traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for processing extensive documents. However, the computational overhead of long-context inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Guanzheng Chen , Qilong Feng , Jinjie Ni , Xin Li , Michael Qizhe Shieh

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) generation by using an efficient draft model to propose the next few tokens, which are verified by the LLM in a single forward call, reducing latency while preserving its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Milan Gritta , Huiyin Xue , Gerasimos Lampouras

Speculative Decoding has gained popularity as an effective technique for accelerating the auto-regressive inference process of Large Language Models. However, Speculative Decoding entirely relies on the availability of efficient draft…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Ofir Zafrir , Igor Margulis , Dorin Shteyman , Shira Guskin , Guy Boudoukh

Decoding from large language models (LLMs) typically relies on fixed sampling hyperparameters (e.g., temperature, top-p), despite substantial variation in task difficulty and uncertainty across prompts and individual decoding steps. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Chloe H. Su , Zhe Ye , Samuel Tenka , Aidan Yang , Soonho Kong , Udaya Ghai

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 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

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference but suffers from performance degradation when target models are fine-tuned for specific domains. A naive solution is to retrain draft models for every target model, which is costly and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Luxi Lin , Zhihang Lin , Zhanpeng Zeng , Yuhao Chen , Qingyu Zhang , Jixiang Luo , Xuelong Li , Rongrong Ji