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Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a small draft model to propose candidate tokens that a larger target model verifies. A critical hyperparameter in this process is the speculation length…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Shikhar Shukla

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 widely used in accelerating large language model (LLM) inference. In this work, we focus on the online draft model selection problem in speculative decoding. We design an algorithm that provably competes with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Hongyi Liu , Jiaji Huang , Zhen Jia , Youngsuk Park , Yu-Xiang Wang

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer fast, parallel token generation, but their standalone use is plagued by an inherent efficiency-quality tradeoff. We show that, if carefully applied, the attributes of dLLMs can actually be a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Rui Pan , Zhuofu Chen , Hongyi Liu , Arvind Krishnamurthy , Ravi Netravali

Speculative decoding has emerged as an effective approach for accelerating autoregressive inference by parallelizing token generation through a draft-then-verify paradigm. However, existing methods rely on static drafting lengths and rigid…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jaydip Sen , Subhasis Dasgupta , Hetvi Waghela

We propose TETRIS, a novel method that optimizes the total throughput of batch speculative decoding in multi-request settings. Unlike existing methods that optimize for a single request or a group of requests as a whole, TETRIS actively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Zhaoxuan Wu , Zijian Zhou , Arun Verma , Alok Prakash , Daniela Rus , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates inference in large language models by using a smaller draft model to propose tokens, which are then verified by a larger target model. However, the throughput gains of SD are fundamentally limited by a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Sanghyun Byun , Mohanad Odema , Jung Ick Guack , Baisub Lee , Jacob Song , Woo Seong Chung

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a smaller draft model to propose multiple tokens that are verified by a larger target model in parallel. While prior work demonstrates substantial speedups…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Linghao Kong , Megan Flynn , Michael Peng , Nir Shavit , Mark Kurtz , Alexandre Marques

Speculative decoding has rapidly emerged as a leading approach for accelerating language model (LM) inference, as it offers substantial speedups while yielding identical outputs. This relies upon a small draft model, tasked with predicting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Miles Williams , Young D. Kwon , Rui Li , Alexandros Kouris , Stylianos I. Venieris

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

Speculative decoding (SD) has become a standard technique for accelerating LLM inference without sacrificing output quality. Recent advances in speculative decoding have shifted from sequential chain-based drafting to tree-structured…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Tianyu Liu , Qitan Lv , Yuhao Shen , Xiao Sun , Xiaoyan Sun

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 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 is a powerful technique that attempts to circumvent the autoregressive constraint of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). The aim of speculative decoding techniques is to improve the average inference time of a large,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Sudhanshu Agrawal , Wonseok Jeon , Mingu Lee

Large language models have shown impressive capabilities across a variety of NLP tasks, yet their generating text autoregressively is time-consuming. One way to speed them up is speculative decoding, which generates candidate segments (a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Sen Yang , Shujian Huang , Xinyu Dai , Jiajun Chen

Speculative decoding is a prominent technique to speed up the inference of a large target language model based on predictions of an auxiliary draft model. While effective, in application-specific settings, it often involves fine-tuning both…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Nikhil Bhendawade , Irina Belousova , Qichen Fu , Henry Mason , Mohammad Rastegari , Mahyar Najibi

Transformer language models generate text autoregressively, making inference latency proportional to the number of tokens generated. Speculative decoding reduces this latency without sacrificing output quality, by leveraging a small draft…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Clara Mohri , Haim Kaplan , Tal Schuster , Yishay Mansour , Amir Globerson

Test-time scaling (TTS) -- the dynamic allocation of compute during inference -- is a promising direction for improving reasoning in large language models (LLMs). However, a systematic comparison of well-known TTS strategies under identical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Aradhye Agarwal , Ayan Sengupta , Tanmoy Chakraborty

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a technique to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) by using a lower complexity draft model to propose candidate tokens verified by a larger target model. To further improve efficiency,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Xiaofan Lu , Yixiao Zeng , Feiyang Ma , Zixu Yu , Marco Levorato

Speculative decoding accelerates inference in large language models (LLMs) by generating draft tokens for target model verification. Current approaches for obtaining draft tokens rely on lightweight draft models or additional model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Guofeng Quan , Wenfeng Feng , Chuzhan Hao , Guochao Jiang , Yuewei Zhang , Hao Wang