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Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by verifying candidate tokens from a draft model against a larger target model. Recent judge decoding boosts this process by relaxing verification criteria by accepting draft tokens that may…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Kanghoon Yoon , Minsub Kim , Sungjae Lee , Joonhyung Lee , Sunghyeon Woo , Yeonjun In , Se Jung Kwon , Chanyoung Park , Dongsoo Lee

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by letting draft tokens bypass full verification, but conventional frameworks suffer from frequent false rejections, particularly when draft models produce semantically correct but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Xuwen Zhou , Fangxin Liu , Chao Wang , Xiao Zheng , Hao Zheng , Min He , Li Jiang , Haibing Guan

Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a powerful method for accelerating autoregressive generation in large language models (LLMs), yet its integration into vision-language models (VLMs) remains underexplored. We introduce DREAM, a novel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Yunhai Hu , Tianhua Xia , Zining Liu , Rahul Raman , Xingyu Liu , Bo Bao , Eric Sather , Vithursan Thangarasa , Sai Qian 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) 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…

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

Speculative Decoding (SD) has emerged as a widely used paradigm to accelerate the inference of large language models (LLMs) without compromising generation quality. It works by efficiently drafting multiple tokens using a compact model and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Mingbo Song , Heming Xia , Jun Zhang , Chak Tou Leong , Qiancheng Xu , Wenjie Li , Sujian Li

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 (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

Speculative decoding is an inference-acceleration method for large language models (LLMs) where a small language model generates a draft-token sequence which is further verified by the target LLM in parallel. Recent works have advanced this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Wonseok Jeon , Mukul Gagrani , Raghavv Goel , Junyoung Park , Mingu Lee , Christopher Lott

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential in advancing natural language processing (NLP) tasks, but their sequential token generation limits inference speed. Multi-Draft Speculative Decoding (MDSD) offers a promising solution by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Ryan Sun , Tianyi Zhou , Xun Chen , Lichao Sun

Large Language Model (LLM) collaborative decoding techniques improve output quality by combining the outputs of multiple models at each generation step, but they incur high computational costs. In this paper, we introduce Collaborative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Jiale Fu , Yuchu Jiang , Junkai Chen , Jiaming Fan , Xin Geng , Xu Yang

While speculative decoding has recently appeared as a promising direction for accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs), the speedup and scalability are strongly bounded by the token acceptance rate. Prevalent methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Yunfan Xiong , Ruoyu Zhang , Yanzeng Li , Tianhao Wu , Lei Zou

Cloud-based Large Language Model (LLM) services often face challenges in achieving low inference latency and meeting Service Level Objectives (SLOs) under dynamic request patterns. Speculative decoding, which exploits lightweight models for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Kaiyu Huang , Hao Wu , Zhubo Shi , Han Zou , Minchen Yu , Qingjiang Shi

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

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by using a smaller draft model to propose draft tokens that are subsequently verified by a larger target model. However, the performance of standard SD is often limited by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zhenwei Tang , Arun Verma , Zijian Zhou , Zhaoxuan Wu , Alok Prakash , Daniela Rus , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Autoregressive decoding is bottlenecked by its sequential nature. Speculative decoding has become a standard way to accelerate inference by using a fast draft model to predict upcoming tokens from a slower target model, and then verifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Tanishq Kumar , Tri Dao , Avner May

Speculative decoding is a technique that uses multiple language models to accelerate infer- ence. Previous works have used an experi- mental approach to optimize the throughput of the inference pipeline, which involves LLM training and can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Amirhossein Bozorgkhoo , Igor Molybog

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

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