arXiv AI

Structuring The Future: Diffusion LLM Speculative Decoding via Calibrated Draft Graphs

arXiv:2509. 18085v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful alternative to autoregressive LLMs (AR-LLMs) with the potential to operate at significantly higher token-generation rates.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

SimSD: Simple Speculative Decoding in Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606. 02544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs, offering faster inference through parallel or blockwise decoding.

By Junxia Cui, Haotian Ye, Runchu Tian, Hongcan Guo, Jinya Jiang, Haoru Li, Chaojie Ren, Yiming Huang, Kaijie Zhu, Zhongkai Yu, Kun Zhou, Jingbo Shang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

Unlocking Lossless Speedups in LLMs via Discrete Diffusion

arXiv:2609. 04010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) owe much of their success to next-token prediction (NTP), but their autoregressive (AR) structure requires slow, sequential token generation.

By Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Lingjie Chen, Khiem Pham, Jonathan Geuter, Chaitanya Dwivedi, Varad Pimpalkhute, Yash Akhauri, Alexander Moreno, Mikhail Yurochkin, Zhenting Wang, Mostafa Elhoushi, Nolan Dey, Shane Bergsma, Joel Hestness, John Thickstun, Eric Xing, Zhengzhong Liu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Trajectory-Level Speculative Decoding for Diffusion Language Models

The paper introduces a trajectory-level speculative decoding framework for diffusion-based language models (dLLMs), addressing the limitation of existing strategies that revert to single-token generation when confidence is low. By constructing draft denoising trajectories through confidence-stratified tree exploration and verifying them with blockwise parallel evaluation and bidirectional attention masking, the method also incorporates inter-block speculation to exploit the models’ bidirectional structure. Experiments show a 30–40% reduction in denoising iterations, a token-per-step increase from 2.6 to 4.3, and a 7–14× speedup over vanilla dLLMs while maintaining accuracy within 1% on reasoning and code benchmarks.

By Tianxiang Pan, Baitao Gong, Mo Guang, Hongwei Yong, Tianpeng Jiang, Yaqian Li, Zheng Cao, Kaiwen Long
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 22

AdaFlash: Adaptive Speculative Decoding via On-Policy Distilled Diffusion Drafters

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 Computation and Language
Sep 24

When Parallel Drafter Meets Parallel Speculative Decoding

The paper introduces DPara, a parallel speculative decoding framework that builds on DSpark-style parallel drafters. DPara eliminates the need for probabilistic guesses by precomputing draft representations for every acceptance boundary and using a lightweight autoregressive head to combine verification outcomes with these representations, enabling full parallelization of the backbone forward pass. Experiments on Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B across multiple benchmarks demonstrate average speedups of 3.21× and 3.52× over autoregressive decoding, outperforming existing serial and parallel speculative decoding methods.

By Fuliang Liu, Xue Li, Kun Qian, Zhibin Wang, Wanchun Dou, Wenyuan Yu, Chen Tian