English
Related papers

Related papers: Mistletoe: Stealthy Acceleration-Collapse Attacks …

200 papers

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 (SD), where a small draft model is employed to propose draft tokens in advance and then the target model validates them in parallel, has emerged as a promising technique for LLM inference acceleration. Many endeavors to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Tianyu Liu , Qitan Lv , Hao Li , Xing Gao , Xiao Sun , Xiaoyan Sun

Autoregressive Language Models instantiate a factorized likelihood over token sequences, yet their strictly sequential decoding process imposes an intrinsic lower bound on inference latency. This bottleneck has emerged as a central obstacle…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Maxim Divilkovskiy , Vitaly Malygin , Sergey Zlobin , Stanislav Ilyushin , Sultan Isali , Vasily Kalugin , Nuriza Aitassova , Fei Yi , Weidi Zeng

Reinforcement learning(RL) post-training has become essential for aligning large language models (LLMs), yet its efficiency is increasingly constrained by the rollout phase, where long trajectories are generated token by token. We identify…

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

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

Although speculative decoding is widely used to accelerate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) inference, it faces severe performance collapse when applied to Video Large Language Models (Vid-LLMs). The draft model typically falls into the trap…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Libo Zhang , Zhaoning Zhang , Wangyang Hong , Peng Qiao , Dongsheng Li

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

Long-context large language model (LLM) inference has become the norm for today's AI applications. However, it is severely bottlenecked by the increasing memory demands of its KV cache. Previous works have shown that self-speculative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yikang Yue , Yuqi Xue , Jian Huang

Speculative Decoding (SD) ensures that the output matches the target model's distribution exactly. However, we argue that this distribution matching requirement is too stringent and results in unnecessarily low acceptance rates, limiting…

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

Accelerating inference in Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for real-time interactions, as they have been widely incorporated into real-world services. Speculative decoding, a fully algorithmic solution, has gained attention for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Sukmin Cho , Sangjin Choi , Taeho Hwang , Jeongyeon Seo , Soyeong Jeong , Huije Lee , Hoyun Song , Jong C. Park , Youngjin Kwon

Large language model (LLM) inference often suffers from high decoding latency and limited scalability across heterogeneous edge-cloud environments. Existing speculative decoding (SD) techniques accelerate token generation but remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Fengze Yu , Leshu Li , Brad McDanel , Sai Qian Zhang

Speculative decoding has been shown as an effective way to accelerate Large Language Model (LLM) inference by using a Small Speculative Model (SSM) to generate candidate tokens in a so-called speculation phase, which are subsequently…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Fahao Chen , Peng Li , Tom H. Luan , Zhou Su , Jing Deng

Speculative decoding is an effective method for accelerating inference of large language models (LLMs) by employing a small draft model to predict the output of a target model. However, when adapting speculative decoding to domain-specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Fenglu Hong , Ravi Raju , Jonathan Lingjie Li , Bo Li , Urmish Thakker , Avinash Ravichandran , Swayambhoo Jain , Changran Hu

We propose a novel speculative decoding method tailored for multi-sample reasoning scenarios, such as self-consistency and Best-of-N sampling. Our method exploits the intrinsic consensus of parallel generation paths to synthesize…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Yiwei Li , Jiayi Shi , Shaoxiong Feng , Peiwen Yuan , Xinglin Wang , Yueqi Zhang , Ji Zhang , Chuyi Tan , Boyuan Pan , Yao Hu , Kan Li

Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate LLM inference without sacrificing output quality. Existing SD methods tailored for video-LLMs primarily focus on pruning redundant visual tokens to mitigate the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Qitan Lv , Tianyu Liu , Wen Wu , Xuenan Xu , Bowen Zhou , Feng Wu , Chao Zhang

Inference with modern Large Language Models (LLMs) is expensive and time-consuming, and speculative sampling has proven to be an effective solution. Most speculative sampling methods such as EAGLE use a static draft tree, implicitly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Yuhui Li , Fangyun Wei , Chao Zhang , Hongyang Zhang

Speculative decoding is an effective and lossless approach for accelerating LLM inference. However, existing widely adopted model-based draft designs, such as EAGLE3, improve accuracy at the cost of multi-step autoregressive inference,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Fuliang Liu , Xue Li , Ketai Zhao , Yinxi Gao , Ziyan Zhou , Zhonghui Zhang , Zhibin Wang , Wanchun Dou , Sheng Zhong , Chen Tian

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by letting a lightweight draft model propose future tokens that a larger target model then verifies in parallel. In practice, however, draft models are usually trained on broad…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Mohamad Zbib , Mohamad Bazzi , Ammar Mohanna , Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud , Bernard Ghanem