arXiv Machine Learning

LK Losses: Direct Acceptance Rate Optimization for Speculative Decoding

arXiv:2602. 23881v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by the target model.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

ResiSpec: Enhancing Multi-Candidate Speculative Sampling via Residual Distribution Shaping

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

TSS: Target-Side Sparsification for Speculative Decoding in Domain-Specific Large Language Models

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 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