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Speculative sampling reduces the latency of autoregressive decoding for target model LLMs without sacrificing inference quality, by using a cheap draft model to suggest a candidate token and a verification criterion to accept or resample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Rahul Krishna Thomas , Arka Pal

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) reasoning by using a small draft model to generate candidate tokens, which the target LLM either accepts directly or regenerates upon rejection. However, excessive alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Tiancheng Su , Meicong Zhang , Guoxiu He

Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by employing a small draft model to generate predictions, which are then verified by a larger target model. The effectiveness of SD hinges on the alignment between these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Yuezhou Hu , Jiaxin Guo , Xinyu Feng , Tuo Zhao

Speculative Decoding is a widely used technique to speed up inference for Large Language Models (LLMs) without sacrificing quality. When performing inference, speculative decoding uses a smaller draft model to generate speculative tokens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Minghao Yan , Saurabh Agarwal , Shivaram Venkataraman

On-policy distillation (OPD) leverages dense teacher rewards to enhance reasoning models. However, scaling OPD to long-horizon tasks exposes a critical flaw: as the student's generated prefix inevitably diverges from the teacher's thought…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zhicheng Yang , Zhijiang Guo , Yifan Song , Minrui Xu , Yongxin Wang , Yiwei Wang , Xiaodan Liang , Jing Tang

Speculative decoding (SPD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by letting a smaller draft model propose multiple future tokens that are verified in parallel by a larger target model. The dominant SPD paradigm treats the target…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jinze Li , Yixing Xu , Guanchen Li , Jinfeng Xu , Shuo Yang , Yang Zhang , Xuanwu Yin , Dong Li , Edith C. H. Ngai , Emad Barsoum

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

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 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

On-policy distillation (OPD), which samples trajectories from the student model and supervises them with a teacher at the token level, avoids relying solely on verifiable terminal rewards and can yield better generalization than off-policy…

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a key technique for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference, but it typically requires training a draft model on a large dataset. We approach this problem from a data-centric perspective, finding that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jiaming Fan , Daming Cao , Xiangzhong Luo , Jiale Fu , Chonghan Liu , Xu Yang

Speculative decoding is a powerful technique for reducing the latency of Large Language Models (LLMs), offering a fault-tolerant framework that enables the use of highly compressed draft models. In this work, we introduce Self-Distilled…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Mike Lasby , Nish Sinnadurai , Valavan Manohararajah , Sean Lie , Yani Ioannou , Vithursan Thangarasa

Scaling on-policy distillation (OPD) for large language models (LLMs) confronts a fundamental tension: asynchronous execution is necessary for system efficiency, but structurally deviates from the ideal on-policy objective. To address this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xianwei Chen , Shimin Zhang , Jibin Wu

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

Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but require inherently sequential decoding, leading to high inference latency and poor GPU utilization. Speculative decoding mitigates this bottleneck by using a fast…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jian Chen , Yesheng Liang , Zhijian Liu

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive language models by using a lightweight drafter to propose multiple future tokens, which the target model then verifies in parallel. DFlash shows that a block diffusion drafter can generate an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Liran Ringel , Yaniv Romano

Speculative decoding is a widely used method that accelerates the generation process of large language models (LLMs) with no compromise in model performance. It achieves this goal by using an existing smaller model for drafting and then…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Weilin Zhao , Yuxiang Huang , Xu Han , Wang Xu , Chaojun Xiao , Xinrong Zhang , Yewei Fang , Kaihuo Zhang , Zhiyuan Liu , Maosong Sun

Group relative policy optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated significant potential in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) via reinforcement learning. However, its practical deployment is impeded by an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Yizhou Zhang , Ning Lv , Teng Wang , Jisheng Dang

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 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