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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 (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

Autoregressive (AR) decoding is a major latency bottleneck for large language models. Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates AR by letting a drafter propose multi-token blocks that a verifier accepts or rejects. However, many SD systems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Shrenik Bhansali , Larry Heck

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

We propose Speculative Decoding (SpecDec), for the first time ever, to formally study exploiting the idea of speculative execution to accelerate autoregressive (AR) decoding. Speculative Decoding has two innovations: Spec-Drafter -- an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Heming Xia , Tao Ge , Peiyi Wang , Si-Qing Chen , Furu Wei , Zhifang Sui

Speculative decoding has emerged as a pivotal technique to accelerate LLM inference by employing a lightweight draft model to generate candidate tokens that are subsequently verified by the target model in parallel. However, while this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Yuetao Chen , Xuliang Wang , Xinzhou Zheng , Ming Li , Peng Wang , Hong Xu

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

Diffusion-based Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive models, offering unique advantages through bidirectional attention and parallel generation paradigms. However, the generation results…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Yifeng Gao , Ziang Ji , Yuxuan Wang , Biqing Qi , Hanlin Xu , Linfeng Zhang

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

Recent advances in inference-time compute have significantly improved performance on complex tasks by generating long chains of thought (CoTs) using Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). However, this improved accuracy comes at the cost of high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Rui Pan , Yinwei Dai , Zhihao Zhang , Gabriele Oliaro , Zhihao Jia , Ravi Netravali

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across many tasks but suffer from high inference latency due to autoregressive decoding. The issue is exacerbated in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), which generate lengthy chains of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Ximing Dong , Shaowei Wang , Dayi Lin , Boyuan Chen , Ahmed E. Hassan

Recently, speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate LLM inference by employing a small draft model to propose draft tokens in advance, and validating them in parallel with the large target model. However,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yuhao Shen , Junyi Shen , Quan Kong , Tianyu Liu , Yao Lu , Cong Wang

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 aims to speed up autoregressive generation of a language model by verifying in parallel the tokens generated by a smaller draft model.In this work, we explore the effectiveness of learning-free, negligible-cost draft…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Lawrence Stewart , Matthew Trager , Sujan Kumar Gonugondla , Stefano Soatto

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their increasing parameter sizes significantly slow down inference. Speculative decoding mitigates this issue by leveraging a smaller draft…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Kuan-Wei Lu , Ding-Yong Hong , Pangfeng Liu , Jan-Jan Wu

Large language models typically generate tokens autoregressively, using each token as input for the next. Recent work on Speculative Decoding has sought to accelerate this process by employing a smaller, faster draft model to more quickly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Bradley McDanel

Large language model (LLM)-based generative list-wise recommendation has advanced rapidly, but decoding remains sequential and thus latency-prone. To accelerate inference without changing the target distribution, speculative decoding (SD)…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Jiaju Chen , Chongming Gao , Chenxiao Fan , Haoyan Liu , Qingpeng Cai , Peng Jiang , Xiangnan He

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

Efficient inference in large language models (LLMs) has become a critical focus as their scale and complexity grow. Traditional autoregressive decoding, while effective, suffers from computational inefficiencies due to its sequential token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Hyun Ryu , Eric Kim