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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

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

Speculative decoding speeds up autoregressive generation in Large Language Models (LLMs) through a two-step procedure, where a lightweight draft model proposes tokens which the target model then verifies in a single forward pass. Although…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Anton Plaksin , Sergei Krutikov , Sergei Skvortsov , Alexander Samarin

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 (SD), where an extra draft model is employed to provide multiple draft tokens first, and then the original target model verifies these tokens in parallel, has shown great power for LLM inference acceleration. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Tianyu Liu , Yun Li , Qitan Lv , Kai Liu , Jianchen Zhu , Winston Hu , Xiao Sun

Speculative decoding has proven to be an efficient solution to large language model (LLM) inference, where the small drafter predicts future tokens at a low cost, and the target model is leveraged to verify them in parallel. However, most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Zilin Xiao , Hongming Zhang , Tao Ge , Siru Ouyang , Vicente Ordonez , Dong Yu

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by drafting multiple tokens and verifying them in parallel with the target model. However, its practical speedup is constrained by the trade-off between draft quality and drafting cost:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jianuo Huang , Yaojie Zhang , Qituan Zhang , Hao Lin , Hanlin Xu , Linfeng Zhang

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

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable powerful multimodal reasoning but suffer from slow autoregressive inference, limiting their deployment in real-time applications. We introduce Spec-LLaVA, a system that applies speculative decoding to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Mingxiao Huo , Jiayi Zhang , Hewei Wang , Jinfeng Xu , Zheyu Chen , Huilin Tai , Yijun Chen

Autoregressive language models demonstrate excellent performance in various scenarios. However, the inference efficiency is limited by its one-step-one-word generation mode, which has become a pressing problem recently as the models become…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Jikai Wang , Yi Su , Juntao Li , Qingrong Xia , Zi Ye , Xinyu Duan , Zhefeng Wang , Min Zhang

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 (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 (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

LLM serving platforms are increasingly deployed as multi-model cloud systems, where user demand is often long-tailed: a few popular large models receive most requests, while many smaller tail models remain underutilized. We propose…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Jincheng Xie , Yawen Ling , Qi Xiao , Feiyu Zhang , Zhongyi Huang , Wen Hu , Yu Zheng

Speculative decoding accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) inference by verifying multiple drafted tokens in parallel. However, for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, this parallelism introduces a severe bottleneck: large draft trees…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Bradley McDanel , Steven Li , Sruthikesh Surineni , Harshit Khaitan

Speculative decoding, which combines a draft model with a target model, has emerged as an effective approach to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference. However, existing methods often face a trade-off between the acceptance rate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Danying Ge , Jianhua Gao , Qizhi Jiang , Yifei Feng , Weixing Ji

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

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

Tree-based speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by verifying multiple draft candidates in parallel, but this advantage weakens for sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. As the draft tree grows, different branches…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Lehan Pan , Ziyang Tao , Ruoyu Pang , Xiao Wang , Jianjun Zhao , Yanyong Zhang

The autoregressive nature of large language models (LLMs) fundamentally limits inference speed, as each forward pass generates only a single token and is often bottlenecked by memory bandwidth. Speculative decoding has emerged as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Zihao An , Huajun Bai , Ziqiong Liu , Dong Li , Emad Barsoum