English
Related papers

Related papers: SpecKV: Adaptive Speculative Decoding with Compres…

200 papers

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

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 accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by the target model. The speedup is significantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Alexander Samarin , Sergei Krutikov , Anton Shevtsov , Sergei Skvortsov , Filipp Fisin , Alexander Golubev

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 has emerged as a popular technique for accelerating inference in Large Language Models. However, most existing approaches yield only modest improvements in production serving systems. Methods that achieve substantial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Michele Marzollo , Jiawei Zhuang , Niklas Roemer , Niklas Zwingenberger , Lorenz K. Müller , Lukas Cavigelli

Speculative decoding significantly accelerates language model inference by enabling a lightweight draft model to propose multiple tokens that a larger target model verifies simultaneously. However, applying this technique to vision-language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Mugilan Ganesan , Shane Segal , Ankur Aggarwal , Nish Sinnadurai , Sean Lie , Vithursan Thangarasa

We present speculative sampling, an algorithm for accelerating transformer decoding by enabling the generation of multiple tokens from each transformer call. Our algorithm relies on the observation that the latency of parallel scoring of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Charlie Chen , Sebastian Borgeaud , Geoffrey Irving , Jean-Baptiste Lespiau , Laurent Sifre , John Jumper

Conventional speculative decoding (SD) methods utilize a predefined length policy for proposing drafts, which implies the premise that the target model smoothly accepts the proposed draft tokens. However, reality deviates from this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Ziyin Zhang , Jiahao Xu , Tian Liang , Xingyu Chen , Zhiwei He , Rui Wang , Zhaopeng Tu

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a widely used approach to accelerate the inference of large language models (LLMs) without reducing generation quality. It operates by first using a compact model to draft multiple tokens efficiently, followed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Hossein Entezari Zarch , Lei Gao , Chaoyi Jiang , Murali Annavaram

Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT are state-of-the-art text generation models that provide significant assistance in daily routines. However, LLM execution is inherently sequential, since they only produce one token at a time, thus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Qidong Su , Christina Giannoula , Gennady Pekhimenko

Self-speculative decoding is an inference technique for large language models designed to speed up generation without sacrificing output quality. It combines fast, approximate decoding using a compact version of the model as a draft model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Walaa Amer , Uday das , Fadi Kurdahi

In this paper, we introduce a simple training-free technique to improve the performance of drafter-based speculative decoding (SpD) methods that incorporates language modeling head (LM head) during drafting process. A drafter-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Raghavv Goel , Sudhanshu Agrawal , Mukul Gagrani , Junyoung Park , Yifan Zao , He Zhang , Tian Liu , Yiping Yang , Xin Yuan , Jiuyan Lu , Chris Lott , Mingu Lee

Decoding from large language models (LLMs) typically relies on fixed sampling hyperparameters (e.g., temperature, top-p), despite substantial variation in task difficulty and uncertainty across prompts and individual decoding steps. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Chloe H. Su , Zhe Ye , Samuel Tenka , Aidan Yang , Soonho Kong , Udaya Ghai

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by having a lightweight draft model propose speculative windows of candidate tokens for parallel verification by a larger target model. In practice, speculative efficiency is often bottlenecked…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Jie Jiang , Xing Sun , Ruotian Chen , Jianan Su , Kaixin Shen

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

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

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by proposing tokens with a lightweight draft model and selectively accepting them using a target model. This work introduces DropMatch, a novel approach that matches draft…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Jeongtae Lee , Minjung Jo , Hyunjoon Jeong , Gunho Park , Sunghyeon Woo , Joonghoon Kim , Se Jung Kwon , Dongsoo Lee

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

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 accelerates inference in large language models (LLMs) by generating multiple draft tokens simultaneously. However, existing methods often struggle with token misalignment between the training and decoding phases,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Shijing Hu , Jingyang Li , Xingyu Xie , Zhihui Lu , Kim-Chuan Toh , Pan Zhou