English
Related papers

Related papers: Draft-OPD: On-Policy Distillation for Speculative …

200 papers

Large language models (LLMs) underpin interactive multimedia applications such as captioning, retrieval, recommendation, and creative content generation, yet their autoregressive decoding incurs substantial latency. Speculative decoding…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Hanyu Wei , Zunhai Su , Peng Lu , Chao Li , Spandan Tiwari , Ashish Sirasao , Yuhan Dong

Speculative decoding has become a widely adopted technique for accelerating large language model (LLM) inference by drafting multiple candidate tokens and verifying them with a target model in parallel. Its efficiency, however, critically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Shuoyang Sun , Chang Dai , Hao Fang , Kuofeng Gao , Xinhao Zhong , Yi Sun , Fan Mo , Shu-Tao Xia , Bin Chen

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by drafting a tree of candidate continuations and verifying it in one target forward. Existing drafters fall into two camps with opposite weaknesses. Autoregressive drafters such as EAGLE-3…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Weijie Shi , Qiang Xu , Fan Deng , Yaguang Wu , Jiarun Liu , Yehong Xu , Hao Chen , Jia Zhu , Jiajie Xu , Xiangjun Huang , Jian Yang , Xiaofang Zhou

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 accelerates Large Language Models (LLMs) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens that are verified in parallel by the target model. However, existing draft model training objectives are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Zihao An , Taichi Liu , Ziqiong Liu , Dong Li , Ruofeng Liu , Emad Barsoum

Large language models incur high inference latency due to sequential autoregressive decoding. Speculative decoding alleviates this bottleneck by using a lightweight draft model to propose multiple tokens for batched verification. However,…

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) by employing a small language model to draft a hypothesis sequence, which is then validated by the LLM. The effectiveness…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Zhuocheng Gong , Jiahao Liu , Ziyue Wang , Pengfei Wu , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai , Dongyan Zhao , Rui Yan

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional performance across a wide range of tasks; however, their token-by-token autoregressive generation process significantly hinders inference speed. Speculative decoding presents a promising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Kai Lv , Honglin Guo , Qipeng Guo , Xipeng Qiu

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

Recently, speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a promising technique to accelerate LLM inference by employing a small draft model to propose draft tokens in advance, and validating them in parallel with the large target model. However,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yuhao Shen , Junyi Shen , Quan Kong , Tianyu Liu , Yao Lu , Cong Wang

Speculative decoding (SD), where an extra draft model is employed to provide multiple draft tokens first, and then the original target model verifies these tokens in parallel, has shown great power for LLM inference acceleration. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Tianyu Liu , Yun Li , Qitan Lv , Kai Liu , Jianchen Zhu , Winston Hu , Xiao Sun

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by using a draft model to look ahead, but gains are capped by the cost of autoregressive draft generation: increasing draft size elevates acceptance rates but introduces additional latency…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Nikhil Bhendawade , Kumari Nishu , Arnav Kundu , Chris Bartels , Minsik Cho , Irina Belousova

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference but suffers from performance degradation when target models are fine-tuned for specific domains. A naive solution is to retrain draft models for every target model, which is costly and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Luxi Lin , Zhihang Lin , Zhanpeng Zeng , Yuhao Chen , Qingyu Zhang , Jixiang Luo , Xuelong Li , Rongrong Ji

On-policy distillation (OPD) is increasingly used in LLM post-training because it can leverage a teacher model to provide dense supervision on student rollouts. The standard implementation, however, usually reduces distribution matching to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yuqian Fu , Haohuan Huang , Kaiwen Jiang , Jiacai Liu , Zhuo Jiang , Yuanheng Zhu , Dongbin Zhao

Speculative decoding (SD) has become a popular technique to accelerate Large Language Model (LLM) inference, yet its real-world effectiveness remains unclear as prior evaluations rely on research prototypes and unrealistically small batch…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Xiaoxuan Liu , Jiaxiang Yu , Jongseok Park , Ion Stoica , Alvin Cheung

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose tokens that are later verified by a stronger target model. While effective in centralized systems, its behavior in…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Jingwei Song , Wanyi Chen , Xinyuan Song , Max , Chris Tong , Gufeng Chen , Tianyi Zhao , Eric Yang , Bill Shi , Lynn Ai

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become a central engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains the dominant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Mingyang Song , Mao Zheng

On-policy reinforcement learning has become the dominant paradigm for reasoning alignment in large language models, yet its sparse, outcome-level rewards make token-level credit assignment notoriously difficult. On-Policy Distillation (OPD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Binbin Zheng , Xing Ma , Yiheng Liang , Jingqing Ruan , Xiaoliang Fu , Kepeng Lin , Benchang Zhu , Ke Zeng , Xunliang Cai

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 accelerates autoregressive generation by separating token proposal from verification, but most existing approaches are designed for single-node execution and do not scale well to multi-accelerator clusters used for…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-30 Junhao He , Feiran You , Hongyang Du