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Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive language model inference by verifying multiple draft tokens in parallel. However, the verification stage often becomes the dominant computational bottleneck, especially for long-context inputs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Jikai Wang , Jianchao Tan , Yuxuan Hu , Jiayu Qin , Yerui Sun , Yuchen Xie , Xunliang Cai , Juntao Li , Min Zhang

This technical report describes the design and training of novel speculative decoding draft models, for accelerating the inference speeds of large language models in a production environment. By conditioning draft predictions on both…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Davis Wertheimer , Joshua Rosenkranz , Thomas Parnell , Sahil Suneja , Pavithra Ranganathan , Raghu Ganti , Mudhakar Srivatsa

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

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

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a smaller draft model to propose multiple tokens that are verified by a larger target model in parallel. While prior work demonstrates substantial speedups…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Linghao Kong , Megan Flynn , Michael Peng , Nir Shavit , Mark Kurtz , Alexandre Marques

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a smaller model to draft future tokens, which are then verified by the target LLM. This preserves generation quality by accepting only aligned tokens.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Taehyeon Kim , Hojung Jung , Se-Young Yun

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by allowing a lightweight draft model to propose outputs that a stronger target model verifies. However, its token-centric nature allows erroneous steps to propagate.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Kiran Purohit , Ramasuri Narayanam , Soumyabrata Pal

Transformer-based autoregressive sampling has been the major bottleneck for slowing down large language model inferences. One effective way to accelerate inference is \emph{Speculative Decoding}, which employs a small model to sample a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Ming Yin , Minshuo Chen , Kaixuan Huang , Mengdi Wang

Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a method to accelerate LLM inference without sacrificing any accuracy over the 16-bit model inference. In a typical SD setup, the idea is to use a full-precision, small, fast model as "draft" to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Evangelos Georganas , Dhiraj Kalamkar , Alexander Kozlov , Alexander Heinecke

Introduced to enhance the efficiency of large language model (LLM) inference, speculative decoding operates by having a smaller model generate a draft. A larger target model then reviews this draft to align with its output, and any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Ziyi Chen , Xiaocong Yang , Jiacheng Lin , Chenkai Sun , Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang , Jie Huang

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

Reinforcement learning(RL) post-training has become essential for aligning large language models (LLMs), yet its efficiency is increasingly constrained by the rollout phase, where long trajectories are generated token by token. We identify…

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

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer fast, parallel token generation, but their standalone use is plagued by an inherent efficiency-quality tradeoff. We show that, if carefully applied, the attributes of dLLMs can actually be a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Rui Pan , Zhuofu Chen , Hongyi Liu , Arvind Krishnamurthy , Ravi Netravali

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

Reasoning models excel by generating long chain-of-thoughts, but decoding the resulting thousands of tokens is slow. Token-level speculative decoding (SD) helps, but its benefit is capped, because the chance that an entire $\gamma$-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Yichao Fu , Rui Ge , Zelei Shao , Zhijie Deng , Hao Zhang

We present a simple on the fly method for faster inference of large language models. Unlike other (self-)speculative decoding techniques, our method does not require fine-tuning or black-box optimization to generate a fixed draft model,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Michael R. Metel , Peng Lu , Boxing Chen , Mehdi Rezagholizadeh , Ivan Kobyzev

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable reasoning capabilities across diverse downstream tasks. However, their autoregressive nature leads to substantial inference latency, posing challenges for real-time applications. Speculative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Tao He , Guang Huang , Yu Yang , Tianshi Xu , Sicheng Zhao , Guiguang Ding , Pengyang Wang , Feng Tian

Speculative decoding promises faster inference for large language models (LLMs), yet existing methods fail to generalize to real-world settings. Benchmarks typically assume short contexts (e.g., 2K tokens), whereas practical workloads…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Jaeseong Lee , seung-won hwang , Aurick Qiao , Gabriele Oliaro , Ye Wang , Samyam Rajbhandari

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by having a small drafter propose tokens that a larger target model verifies in parallel. Recent diffusion-based parallel drafters such as DFlash predict the full B-token block in one forward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Tianyu Wu , Yu Yao , Zhenting Qi , Han Zheng , Zhuohan Wang , Haoran Ma , Lawrence Liao , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Ju Li , Yilun Du