English
Related papers

Related papers: Beyond the Target: From Imitation to Collaboration…

200 papers

Introduced to enhance the efficiency of large language model (LLM) inference, speculative decoding operates by having a smaller model generate a draft. A larger target model then reviews this draft to align with its output, and any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Ziyi Chen , Xiaocong Yang , Jiacheng Lin , Chenkai Sun , Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang , Jie Huang

Speculative decoding (SD) has been shown to reduce the latency of autoregressive decoding (AD) by 2-3x for small batch sizes. However, increasing throughput and therefore reducing the cost per token requires decoding with large batch sizes.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-10 Sanjit Neelam , Daniel Heinlein , Vaclav Cvicek , Akshay Mishra , Reiner Pope

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become an indispensable part of natural language processing tasks. However, autoregressive sampling has become an efficiency bottleneck. Multi-Draft Speculative Decoding (MDSD) is a recent approach where,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Zhengmian Hu , Tong Zheng , Vignesh Viswanathan , Ziyi Chen , Ryan A. Rossi , Yihan Wu , Dinesh Manocha , Heng Huang

Speculative decoding has become the standard approach for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference. It exploits a lossless draft-then-verify procedure to circumvent the latency of autoregressive decoding, achieving impressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Jameson Sandler , Jacob K. Christopher , Thomas Hartvigsen , Ferdinando Fioretto

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, yet their high computational demands pose significant challenges for real-time inference, especially in multi-user server speculative decoding and…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Phuong Tran , Tzu-Hao Liu , Long Tan Le , Tung-Anh Nguyen , Van Quan La , Eason Yu , Han Shu , Choong Seon Hong , Nguyen H. Tran

Speculative decoding accelerates memory-bound LLM inference without quality degradation by using a fast drafter to propose multiple candidate tokens and the target model to verify them in parallel. However, conventional sequential…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yaojie Zhang , Jianuo Huang , Junlong Ke , Yuhang Han , Yongji Long , Tianchen Zhao , Biqing Qi , Linfeng Zhang

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by utilizing otherwise idle computational resources during memory-to-chip data transfer. Current speculative decoding methods typically assume a considerable amount of available computing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Luohe Shi , Zuchao Li , Lefei Zhang , Baoyuan Qi , Guoming Liu , Hai Zhao

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by using a fast draft model to generate tokens and a more accurate target model to verify them. Its performance depends on the $\textit{acceptance length}$, or number of draft tokens accepted…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Avinash Kumar , Sujay Sanghavi , Poulami Das

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 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

The growth in the number of parameters of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a significant surge in computational requirements, making them challenging and costly to deploy. Speculative decoding (SD) leverages smaller models to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Matthieu Zimmer , Milan Gritta , Gerasimos Lampouras , Haitham Bou Ammar , Jun Wang

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by using smaller draft models to generate candidate tokens for parallel verification. However, current approaches are limited by sequential stage dependencies that prevent full…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Bradley McDanel , Sai Qian Zhang , Yunhai Hu , Zining Liu

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by drafting future tokens with a small model, but drafter models degrade sharply under template perturbation and long-context inputs. We identify a previously-unreported phenomenon we call…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Doğaç Eldenk , Payal Mohapatra , Yigitcan Comlek , Kaan Oktay , Hongyang Zhang , Stephen Xia

Reasoning models excel by generating long chain-of-thoughts, but decoding the resulting thousands of tokens is slow. Token-level speculative decoding (SD) helps, but its benefit is capped, because the chance that an entire $\gamma$-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Yichao Fu , Rui Ge , Zelei Shao , Zhijie Deng , Hao Zhang

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become widely used for Software Engineering (SE) tasks, spanning from function-level code generation to complex repository-level workflows. However, the high latency of autoregressive inference remains a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Yijia Li , Junkai Chen , Xing Hu , Xin Xia

Autoregressive decoding inherently limits the inference throughput of Large Language Model (LLM) due to its sequential dependency. Speculative decoding mitigates this by verifying multiple predicted tokens in parallel, but its efficiency…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Siran Liu , Yang Ye , Qianchao Zhu , Zane Cao , Yongchao He

Speculative decoding is a powerful technique that accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) inference by leveraging a lightweight speculative draft model. However, existing designs suffers in performance due to misalignment between training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yepeng Weng , Dianwen Mei , Huishi Qiu , Xujie Chen , Li Liu , Jiang Tian , Zhongchao Shi

Speculative decoding emerges as a pivotal technique for enhancing the inference speed of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite recent research aiming to improve prediction efficiency, multi-sample speculative decoding has been overlooked…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Yunsheng Ni , Chuanjian Liu , Yehui Tang , Kai Han , Yunhe Wang

Speculative decoding reduces the inference latency of a target large language model via utilizing a smaller and faster draft model. Its performance depends on a hyperparameter K -- the candidate length, i.e., the number of candidate tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Kaixuan Huang , Xudong Guo , Mengdi Wang