Draft-OPD introduces an on‑policy distillation method for speculative draft models, addressing the mismatch between supervised fine‑tuning and inference by letting the target model supervise the drafter on draft‑induced states. The approach uses target‑assisted rollouts for stable continuations and replays drafting from error positions exposed during verification, enabling the drafter to learn from both accepted and rejected proposals. Experiments demonstrate that Draft‑OPD achieves more than five‑fold lossless acceleration across diverse tasks, outperforming prior draft models such as EAGLE‑3 and DFlash by 23 % and 13 % respectively.
By Haodi Lei, Yafu Li, Haoran Zhang, Shunkai Zhang, Qianjia Cheng, Xiaoye Qu, Ganqu Cui, Bowen Zhou, Ning Ding, Yun Luo, Yu Cheng
arXiv:2608. 08721v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by drafting multiple tokens for parallel verification, with efficiency critically determined by the speculative length selected at each decoding round.
By Zexun Lin, Yuan Feng, Junlin Lv, Kevin S. Zhou, Xike Xie
arXiv:2607. 08690v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates sampling from an autoregressive LLM by using a faster auxiliary model to draft tokens which are then verified in parallel by the LLM.
By Guoxuan Xia, Luka Ribar, Paul Balanca
arXiv:2609.38510v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive LLMs by having a lightweight drafter propose tokens that the target model verifies in parallel. Diffusi...
By Longxuan Yu, Bingsen Chen, Peng Shi, Dongkyu Lee, Yi Xiang, Hideo Kobayashi, Sheng Zhang, Shuaichen Chang, Xing Niu, Zhuoyan Xu, Greg Ver Steeg, Jiarong Jiang
Speculative decoding accelerates sampling from an autoregressive LLM by using a faster auxiliary model to draft tokens which are then verified in parallel by the LLM. Standard speculative decoding is lossless: its rejection and resampling steps exactly preserve the LLM's sampling distribution.
arXiv:2512.23765v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose tokens and a stronge...
By Tiancheng Su, Meicong Zhang, Guoxiu He
arXiv:2606. 18967v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a representative post-training paradigm for LLMs, enabling strong reasoning and agentic capabilities.
By Minseo Kim, Minjae Lee, Seunghyuk Oh, Kevin Galim, Donghoon Kim, Coleman Hooper, Harman Singh, Amir Gholami, Hyung Il Koo, Wonjun Kang
arXiv:2605. 27390v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates Large Language Model inference through draft-then-verify generation, yet lightweight draft models face coupled efficiency and quality limitations: large-vocabulary output projection is costly, while limited draft capacity and static parameters reduce acceptance under specialized or shifting inputs.
By Shuyu Zhang, Lingfeng Pan, Qicheng Wang, Yaqi Shi, Yueyang Tan, Ruyu Yan, Jiaqi Chen, Lixing Du, Lu Wang
arXiv:2607. 19223v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding, in which a lightweight draft model first generates a draft sequence that is then verified in parallel by the target model, has become a prevalent paradigm for accelerating large language model inference.
By Yu-Yang Qian, Hao-Cong Wu, Chen Chen, Jiacheng Sun, Zhenhua Dong, Peng Zhao, Zhi-Hua Zhou
arXiv:2607. 10661v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative decoding has significantly accelerated Large Language Model (LLM) inference by alleviating memory-bound bottlenecks.
By Zipeng Gao, Zhi Zheng, Qingrong Xia, Junda Lin, Ziwei Zhao, Tong Xu, Zhefeng Wang, Enhong Chen
arXiv:2609.36590v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Self-speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by drafting tokens from the target model itself, but faces a sharp tradeof...
By Hankun Lin, Patrick Pynadath, Ruqi Zhang
Speculative decoding accelerates generation by verifying multiple drafted tokens in a single target-model forward pass, reducing sequential decoding iterations. Model-free variants avoid auxiliary draft models by reusing text and model states already available during generation, but their speedup depends on the reliability of the constructed drafts.