Speculative decoding (SD) addresses the high inference costs of LLMs by having lightweight drafters generate candidates for large verifiers to validate in parallel. Existing draft-verify methods use binary decisions: accept or fully recompute.
arXiv:2603. 18016v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by using a smaller draft model to propose draft tokens that are subsequently verified by a larger target model.
By Zhenwei Tang, Arun Verma, Zijian Zhou, Zhaoxuan Wu, Alok Prakash, Daniela Rus, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
The paper introduces TSS, a target-side sparsification framework that selectively skips layers in a target verifier during speculative decoding for domain-specific large language models. By exploring multi-layer skip configurations with an acceptance- and metric-aware breadth search, TSS reduces verification cost, increases draft acceptance, and can even improve downstream task performance without retraining. Experiments on Spec-Bench demonstrate consistent gains across domains and model scales, notably boosting translation throughput by 1.68× and improving BLEU scores significantly.
By Haibo Hu, Lianming Huang, Qiao Li, Nan Guan, Chun Jason Xue
arXiv:2606. 01019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) generation remains expensive because autoregressive decoding calls the model once for each new token.
By Xin Su, Dawid Majchrowski, Fangyuan Yu, Vanshil Atul Shah, Sebastian Rogawski, Pawel Morkisz, Anahita Bhiwandiwalla, Phillip Howard
arXiv:2607. 05147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) inference by decoupling draft generation from target verification.
By Xin Cheng, Xingkai Yu, Chenze Shao, Jiashi Li, Yunfan Xiong, Yi Qian, Jiaqi Zhu, Shirong Ma, Xiaokang Zhang, Jiasheng Ye, Qinyu Chen, Chengqi Deng, Jiping Yu, Damai Dai, Zhengyan Zhang, Yixuan Wei, Yixuan Tan, Wenkai Yang, Runxin Xu, Yu Wu, Zhean Xu, Xuanyu Wang, Muyang Chen, Rui Tian, Xiao Bi, Zhewen Hao, Shaoyuan Chen, Huanqi Cao, Wentao Zhang, Anyi Xu, Huishuai Zhang, Dongyan Zhao, Wenfeng Liang
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
arXiv:2608. 13076v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language understanding and generation, but their deployment is constrained by high computational demands.
By Divya Jyoti Bajpai, Kishan Kumar Upadhyay, Manjesh Kumar Hanawal
arXiv:2609.37029v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive inference by verifying multiple draft tokens in a single target forward pass. However, as the context...
By Hao-Yuan He, Peng-Fei Liu, Si Shen, Ming Li
arXiv:2512. 22420v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates LLM inference by verifying draft tokens in parallel.
By Rui Li, Zhaoning Zhang, Libo Zhang, Huaimin Wang, Xiang Fu, Zhiquan Lai
ResiSpec is a framework that improves speculative decoding for large language models by reshaping the residual distribution during verification. It addresses the problem of residual drift, where rejected candidates cause the target distribution to diverge from the draft model’s predictions, rendering later candidates ineffective. By aligning the verification process with the draft model’s high‑confidence regions, ResiSpec prevents candidate obsolescence and achieves up to 1.92× speedup over existing multi‑candidate methods.
By Zhi-Kai Chen, Jun-Jie Tao, Wei-Xiang Mao, De-Chuan Zhan, Han-Jia Ye
FlexEE is an early‑exiting framework designed for large language model inference that is constrained by computation and memory, particularly in offloading‑based deployments. It uses layer‑wise exit supervision, self‑speculative decoding over a Top‑K local vocabulary, and dynamic hidden‑state management to enable reliable intermediate‑layer predictions and memory‑aware execution. Experiments on Llama2‑7B and Llama3‑8B show that FlexEE achieves significant speedups—up to 1.27×/3.16× and 1.25×/2.83× respectively—while maintaining minimal accuracy loss.
By Qihu Xie, Ziwei Li, Yi Kang
arXiv:2609.24698v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Repeated execution of the target model during autoregressive decoding is a major source of LLM inference latency. Unlike linear speculation, which foll...
By Changxu Liu, Zhaogeng Li