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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 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 accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a small draft model to generate candidate tokens for a larger target model to verify. The efficacy of this technique hinges on the trade-off between the time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jiebin Zhang , Zhenghan Yu , Liang Wang , Nan Yang , Eugene J. Yu , Zheng Li , Yifan Song , Dawei Zhu , Xingxing Zhang , Furu Wei , Sujian Li

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

Speculative decoding accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) inference by using a small draft model to predict multiple tokens, and a large target model to verify these tokens in parallel. Recent studies leverage the hidden state of the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Langlin Huang , Chengsong Huang , Jixuan Leng , Di Huang , Jiaxin Huang

Speculative decoding is an emerging technique that accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by allowing a smaller draft model to predict multiple tokens in advance, which are then verified or corrected by a larger target model. In…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-10 Ce Zheng , Tingting Yang

This tutorial presents a comprehensive introduction to Speculative Decoding (SD), an advanced technique for LLM inference acceleration that has garnered significant research interest in recent years. SD is introduced as an innovative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Heming Xia , Cunxiao Du , Yongqi Li , Qian Liu , Wenjie Li

Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by decoupling generation and verification. While recent methods improve draft quality by tightly coupling the drafter with the target model, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jingwei Song , Xinyu Wang , Hanbin Wang , Xiaoxuan Lei , Bill Shi , Shixin Han , Eric Yang , Xiao-Wen Chang , Lynn Ai

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 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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across many applications, with Mixture of Experts (MoE) models demonstrating great potential. Compared to traditional dense models, MoEs achieve better performance with less…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Zongle Huang , Lei Zhu , Zongyuan Zhan , Ting Hu , Weikai Mao , Xianzhi Yu , Yongpan Liu , Tianyu Zhang

Accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs) is a critical challenge in generative AI. Speculative decoding (SD) methods offer substantial efficiency gains by generating multiple tokens using a single target forward pass.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Nadav Timor , Jonathan Mamou , Daniel Korat , Moshe Berchansky , Gaurav Jain , Oren Pereg , Moshe Wasserblat , David Harel

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a recently proposed technique for faster inference using Large Language Models (LLMs). SD operates by using a smaller draft LLM for autoregressively generating a sequence of tokens and a larger target LLM for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Meiyu Zhong , Noel Teku , Ravi Tandon

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by pairing a target model with a lightweight draft model whose proposed tokens are verified in parallel. A common way to build draft models, like EAGLE3 or DFlash is supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Haodi Lei , Yafy Li , Haoran Zhang , Shunkai Zhang , Qianjia Cheng , Xiaoye Qu , Ganqu Cui , Bowen Zhou , Ning Ding , Yun Luo , Yu Cheng

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing and broadened their applicability across diverse commercial applications. However, the deployment of these models is constrained by high inference time in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Euiin Yi , Taehyeon Kim , Hongseok Jeung , Du-Seong Chang , Se-Young Yun

The performance of large language models (LLMs) is closely linked to their underlying size, leading to ever-growing networks and hence slower inference. Speculative decoding has been proposed as a technique to accelerate autoregressive…

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

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) generation by using an efficient draft model to propose the next few tokens, which are verified by the LLM in a single forward call, reducing latency while preserving its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Milan Gritta , Huiyin Xue , Gerasimos Lampouras

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

Lossless speculative decoding accelerates target large language model (LLM) inference by employing a lightweight draft model for generating tree-structured candidates, which are subsequently verified in parallel by the target LLM.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-29 Lujun Gui , Bin Xiao , Lei Su , Weipeng Chen