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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

This technical report describes the design and training of novel speculative decoding draft models, for accelerating the inference speeds of large language models in a production environment. By conditioning draft predictions on both…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Davis Wertheimer , Joshua Rosenkranz , Thomas Parnell , Sahil Suneja , Pavithra Ranganathan , Raghu Ganti , Mudhakar Srivatsa

Speculative decoding has emerged as a widely adopted paradigm for accelerating large language model inference, where a lightweight draft model rapidly generates candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by a larger target model.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yu-Yang Qian , Hao-Cong Wu , Yichao Fu , Hao Zhang , Peng Zhao

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

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer fast, parallel token generation, but their standalone use is plagued by an inherent efficiency-quality tradeoff. We show that, if carefully applied, the attributes of dLLMs can actually be a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Rui Pan , Zhuofu Chen , Hongyi Liu , Arvind Krishnamurthy , Ravi Netravali

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 aims to speed up autoregressive generation of a language model by verifying in parallel the tokens generated by a smaller draft model.In this work, we explore the effectiveness of learning-free, negligible-cost draft…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Lawrence Stewart , Matthew Trager , Sujan Kumar Gonugondla , Stefano Soatto

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

Diffusion-based Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive models, offering unique advantages through bidirectional attention and parallel generation paradigms. However, the generation results…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Yifeng Gao , Ziang Ji , Yuxuan Wang , Biqing Qi , Hanlin Xu , Linfeng Zhang

Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate inference in vision-language models (VLMs) by enabling parallel verification of multiple draft tokens. However, existing methods rely on static tree structures that…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yujia Tong , Tian Zhang , Yunyang Wan , Kaiwei Lin , Jingling Yuan , Chuang Hu

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 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

We propose Speculative Decoding (SpecDec), for the first time ever, to formally study exploiting the idea of speculative execution to accelerate autoregressive (AR) decoding. Speculative Decoding has two innovations: Spec-Drafter -- an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Heming Xia , Tao Ge , Peiyi Wang , Si-Qing Chen , Furu Wei , Zhifang Sui

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

Inference latency stands as a critical bottleneck in the large-scale deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Speculative decoding methods have recently shown promise in accelerating inference without compromising the output…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Ruilin Wang , Huixia Li , Yuexiao Ma , Xiawu Zheng , Fei Chao , Xuefeng Xiao , Rongrong Ji

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), 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 Large Language Model inference via a draft-then-verify paradigm, yet the output projection layer becomes a bottleneck as vocabulary sizes scale. While existing static pruning methods effectively reduce this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Shuyu Zhang , Lingfeng Pan , Qicheng Wang , Yaqi Shi , Yueyang Tan , Ruyu Yan , Jiaqi Chen , Lixing Du , Lu Wang

Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive language models by enabling parallel token generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, their inference speed is significantly limited by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Satyam Goyal , Kushal Patel , Tanush Mittal , Arjun Laxman

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