English
Related papers

Related papers: When Drafts Evolve: Speculative Decoding Meets Onl…

200 papers

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by using a smaller draft model to speculate tokens that a larger target model verifies. Verification is often the bottleneck (e.g. verification is $4\times$ slower than token generation when a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Avinash Kumar , Sujay Sanghavi , Poulami Das

Speculative decoding reduces the inference latency of a target large language model via utilizing a smaller and faster draft model. Its performance depends on a hyperparameter K -- the candidate length, i.e., the number of candidate tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Kaixuan Huang , Xudong Guo , Mengdi Wang

LLMs have low GPU efficiency and high latency due to autoregressive decoding. Speculative decoding (SD) mitigates this using a small draft model to speculatively generate multiple tokens, which are then verified in parallel by a target…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Sungkyun Kim , Jaemin Kim , Dogyung Yoon , Jiho Shin , Junyeol Lee , Jiwon Seo

Reasoning language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on challenging tasks by generating elaborate chain-of-thought (CoT) solutions. However, such lengthy generation shifts the inference bottleneck from compute-bound to…

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

While speculative decoding has recently appeared as a promising direction for accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs), the speedup and scalability are strongly bounded by the token acceptance rate. Prevalent methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Yunfan Xiong , Ruoyu Zhang , Yanzeng Li , Tianhao Wu , Lei Zou

Large language models incur high inference latency due to sequential autoregressive decoding. Speculative decoding alleviates this bottleneck by using a lightweight draft model to propose multiple tokens for batched verification. However,…

Deploying large language models (LLMs) in mobile and edge computing environments is constrained by limited on-device resources, scarce wireless bandwidth, and frequent model evolution. Although edge-cloud collaborative inference with…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Yuchen Li , Rui Kong , Zhonghao Lyu , Qiyang Li , Xinran Chen , Hengyi Cai , Lingyong Yan , Shuaiqiang Wang , Jiashu Zhao , Guangxu Zhu , Linghe Kong , Guihai Chen , Haoyi Xiong , Dawei Yin

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 accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose tokens that are later verified by a stronger target model. While effective in centralized systems, its behavior in…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Jingwei Song , Wanyi Chen , Xinyuan Song , Max , Chris Tong , Gufeng Chen , Tianyi Zhao , Eric Yang , Bill Shi , Lynn Ai

Speculative decoding is a widely used technique for accelerating inference in large language models (LLMs), but its performance degrades as input length grows, with significant drops even at moderate lengths. Yet, this early degradation has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Jungyoub Cha , Hyunjong Kim , Sungzoon Cho

As Large Language Models (LLMs) can now process extremely long contexts, efficient inference over these extended inputs has become increasingly important, especially for emerging applications like LLM agents that highly depend on this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Penghui Yang , Cunxiao Du , Fengzhuo Zhang , Haonan Wang , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Bo An

Speculative decoding is an effective technique for accelerating large language model inference by drafting multiple tokens in parallel. In practice, its speedup is often bottlenecked by a rigid verification step that strictly enforces the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Ziyi Wang , Siva Rajesh Kasa , Ankith M S , Santhosh Kumar Kasa , Jiaru Zou , Sumit Negi , Ruqi Zhang , Nan Jiang , Qifan Song

Speculative decoding is an effective and lossless method for Large Language Model (LLM) inference acceleration. It employs a smaller model to generate a draft token sequence, which is then verified by the original base model. In multi-GPU…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Yize Wu , Ke Gao , Ling Li , Yanjun Wu

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 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

This paper introduces Multimodal Speculative Decoding (MSD) to accelerate Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) inference. Speculative decoding has been shown to accelerate Large Language Models (LLMs) without sacrificing accuracy.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Luxi Lin , Zhihang Lin , Zhanpeng Zeng , Rongrong Ji

Large language models typically employ vocabularies of over 100k tokens, which creates a major computational bottleneck at the final linear projection layer when performing speculative decoding. Current methods for vocabulary pruning depend…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Zhiyang Chen , Daliang Xu , Yinyuan Zhang , Chenghua Wang , Mengwei Xu , Yun Ma

We present a novel inference scheme, self-speculative decoding, for accelerating Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for an auxiliary model. This approach is characterized by a two-stage process: drafting and verification. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Jun Zhang , Jue Wang , Huan Li , Lidan Shou , Ke Chen , Gang Chen , Sharad Mehrotra

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