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Speculative decoding has become a widely adopted technique for accelerating large language model (LLM) inference by drafting multiple candidate tokens and verifying them with a target model in parallel. Its efficiency, however, critically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Shuoyang Sun , Chang Dai , Hao Fang , Kuofeng Gao , Xinhao Zhong , Yi Sun , Fan Mo , Shu-Tao Xia , Bin Chen

Speculative decoding accelerates LLMs by using a lightweight draft model to generate tokens autoregressively before verifying them in parallel with a larger target model. However, determining the optimal number of tokens to draft remains a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Aditya Sridhar , Nish Sinnadurai , Sean Lie , Vithursan Thangarasa

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) by employing a small language model to draft a hypothesis sequence, which is then validated by the LLM. The effectiveness…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Zhuocheng Gong , Jiahao Liu , Ziyue Wang , Pengfei Wu , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai , Dongyan Zhao , Rui Yan

Accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs) has been a critical challenge in generative AI. Speculative decoding (SD) substantially improves LLM inference efficiency. However, its utility is limited by a fundamental…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Sibo Xiao , Jinyuan Fu , Zhongle Xie , Lidan Shou

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

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) 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

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

We propose an acceleration scheme for large language models (LLMs) through Speculative Decoding with Semantic Adaptive Tokens (SDSAT). The primary objective of this design is to enhance the LLM model's ability to generate draft tokens more…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Chengbo Liu , Yong Zhu

Large language models (LLMs) underpin interactive multimedia applications such as captioning, retrieval, recommendation, and creative content generation, yet their autoregressive decoding incurs substantial latency. Speculative decoding…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Hanyu Wei , Zunhai Su , Peng Lu , Chao Li , Spandan Tiwari , Ashish Sirasao , Yuhan Dong

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

Speculative decoding (SD) is a powerful technique for accelerating the inference process of large language models (LLMs) without sacrificing accuracy. Typically, SD employs a small draft model to generate a fixed number of draft tokens,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Situo Zhang , Yifan Zhang , Zichen Zhu , Hankun Wang , Da Ma , Danyang Zhang , Lu Chen , Kai Yu

Speculative decoding is an emerging technique that accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by allowing a smaller draft model to predict multiple tokens in advance, which are then verified or corrected by a larger target model. In…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-10 Ce Zheng , Tingting Yang

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by leveraging a draft-then-verify paradigm. To maximize the acceptance rate, recent methods construct expansive draft trees, which unfortunately incur severe VRAM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yuhao Shen , Tianyu Liu , Xinyi Hu , Quan Kong , Baolin Zhang , Jun Dai , Jun Zhang , Shuang Ge , Lei Chen , Yue Li , Mingcheng Wan , Cong Wang

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by letting draft tokens bypass full verification, but conventional frameworks suffer from frequent false rejections, particularly when draft models produce semantically correct but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Xuwen Zhou , Fangxin Liu , Chao Wang , Xiao Zheng , Hao Zheng , Min He , Li Jiang , Haibing Guan

Speculative decoding has demonstrated its effectiveness in accelerating the inference of large language models while maintaining a consistent sampling distribution. However, the conventional approach of training a separate draft model to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Fangcheng Liu , Yehui Tang , Zhenhua Liu , Yunsheng Ni , Kai Han , Yunhe Wang

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 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

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a key technique for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference, but it typically requires training a draft model on a large dataset. We approach this problem from a data-centric perspective, finding that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jiaming Fan , Daming Cao , Xiangzhong Luo , Jiale Fu , Chonghan Liu , Xu Yang

Large Language Models (LLMs), constrained by their auto-regressive nature, suffer from slow decoding. Speculative decoding methods have emerged as a promising solution to accelerate LLM decoding, attracting attention from both systems and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Xuliang Wang , Yuetao Chen , Maochan Zhen , Fang Liu , Xinzhou Zheng , Xingwu Liu , Hong Xu , Ming Li