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Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by employing a faster draft model for generating multiple tokens, which are then verified in parallel by the larger target model, resulting in the text generated according…

Tree-based speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by verifying multiple draft candidates in parallel, but this advantage weakens for sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. As the draft tree grows, different branches…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Lehan Pan , Ziyang Tao , Ruoyu Pang , Xiao Wang , Jianjun Zhao , Yanyong Zhang

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 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

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

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a popular lossless technique for accelerating the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs). We show that the decoding speed of SD frameworks with static draft structures can be significantly improved by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Situo Zhang , Hankun Wang , Da Ma , Zichen Zhu , Lu Chen , Kunyao Lan , Kai Yu

Speculative decoding accelerates language model inference by separating generation into fast drafting and parallel verification. Its main limitation is drafter-verifier misalignment, which limits token acceptance and reduces overall…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Frédéric Berdoz , Peer Rheinboldt , Roger Wattenhofer

Speculative decoding is an effective method for accelerating inference of large language models (LLMs) by employing a small draft model to predict the output of a target model. However, when adapting speculative decoding to domain-specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Fenglu Hong , Ravi Raju , Jonathan Lingjie Li , Bo Li , Urmish Thakker , Avinash Ravichandran , Swayambhoo Jain , Changran Hu

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

Speculative decoding is a promising approach for accelerating large language models. The primary idea is to use a lightweight draft model to speculate the output of the target model for multiple subsequent timesteps, and then verify them in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Yepeng Weng , Qiao Hu , Xujie Chen , Li Liu , Dianwen Mei , Huishi Qiu , Jiang Tian , Zhongchao Shi

To mitigate the high inference latency stemming from autoregressive decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs), Speculative Decoding has emerged as a novel decoding paradigm for LLM inference. In each decoding step, this method first drafts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Heming Xia , Zhe Yang , Qingxiu Dong , Peiyi Wang , Yongqi Li , Tao Ge , Tianyu Liu , Wenjie Li , Zhifang Sui

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 (SD) has emerged as an effective technique to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference without compromising output quality. However, the achievable speedup largely depends on the effectiveness of the drafting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Min Fang , Zhihui Fu , Qibin Zhao , Jun Wang

We introduce a principled probabilistic framework for reward-guided decoding in large language models, addressing the limitations of standard decoding methods that optimize token-level likelihood rather than sequence-level quality. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Jelena Markovic-Voronov , Wenhui Zhu , Bo Long , Zhipeng Wang , Suyash Gupta , Kayhan Behdin , Bee-Chung Chen , Deepak Agarwal

Accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs) is a critical challenge in generative AI. Speculative decoding (SD) methods offer substantial efficiency gains by generating multiple tokens using a single target forward pass.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Nadav Timor , Jonathan Mamou , Daniel Korat , Moshe Berchansky , Gaurav Jain , Oren Pereg , Moshe Wasserblat , David Harel

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

We consider multi-draft speculative sampling, where the proposal sequences are sampled independently from different draft models. At each step, a token-level draft selection scheme takes a list of valid tokens as input and produces an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Ashish Khisti , M. Reza Ebrahimi , Hassan Dbouk , Arash Behboodi , Roland Memisevic , Christos Louizos

Speculative decoding has emerged as a powerful approach to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference by employing lightweight draft models to propose candidate tokens that are subsequently verified by the target model. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Zongyue Qin , Raghavv Goel , Mukul Gagrani , Risheek Garrepalli , Mingu Lee , Yizhou Sun

Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but require inherently sequential decoding, leading to high inference latency and poor GPU utilization. Speculative decoding mitigates this bottleneck by using a fast…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jian Chen , Yesheng Liang , Zhijian Liu

As large language models (LLMs) scale up, accuracy improves, but the autoregressive (AR) nature of decoding increases latency since each token requires a serial forward pass. Speculative decoding addresses this by employing a fast drafter…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Guanghao Li , Zhihui Fu , Min Fang , Qibin Zhao , Ming Tang , Chun Yuan , Jun Wang