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
The paper introduces DLoop, a looped speculative decoding technique that adaptively performs multiple drafting stages before verification, allowing a draft model to continue generating tokens while confident. By verifying all accumulated draft tokens together and training the draft model to handle its own hidden states for unverified tokens, DLoop reduces the number of target‑model forward passes needed. Experiments across several speculative decoding methods show wall‑clock speedups of 5–41 % without sacrificing lossless decoding.
By Geonmo Gu, Byeongho Heo, HeeJae Jun, Yoohoon Kang, Sangmin Lee, Sangdoo Yun, Dongyoon Han
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: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
The paper introduces Packed-SS, a self‑speculative decoding schedule that combines drafting and verification into a single model call, reducing input size to linear in speculative width. By running the diffusion drafter one step ahead, the method keeps an unresolved suffix for the next iteration, avoiding the sequential wait of standard two‑call decoding. Experiments on Nemotron 3B/8B and SetDLM 1.7B demonstrate higher throughput and lower mean wall time under greedy decoding.
By Yuxiao Chen, Changxiao Cai
arXiv:2606. 03819v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One-shot block drafters for speculative decoding generate the full draft in a single forward pass, achieving strong throughput by eliminating sequential token generation.
By Peer Rheinboldt, Fr\'ed\'eric Berdoz, Roger Wattenhofer
WaveFront Decoding (WFD) is a training‑free, self‑speculative decoding framework for looped language models that reduces decoding latency by batching draft and verification steps within the same recurrent‑block calls. By exploiting intermediate recurrence outputs as draft predictions and weight sharing to process token states at different depths together, WFD arranges mixed‑depth states into a diagonal wavefront, allowing shallow‑depth drafting while deeper‑depth verification proceeds concurrently. Experiments on six Spec‑Bench task categories show WFD achieving up to 4.81× speedup on Huginn‑3.5B compared to autoregressive decoding, outperforming traditional draft‑then‑verify approaches.
By Hyeongju Ha, Jae-Joon Kim
The paper introduces APEX, a learned controller that improves speculative decoding for large language models by dynamically selecting the best speculation strategy and adjusting draft depth during generation. APEX uses request‑level routing among EAGLE‑3, n‑gram, and draft‑model speculation, and block‑level depth adaptation based on causal decoding signals and verifier feedback. Integrated into vLLM and tested with Qwen3‑8B, APEX achieves up to 5.24× speedup over autoregressive decoding while reducing wasted tokens by 41% compared to fixed‑depth n‑gram speculation.
By Manvi Jha, Zach Zhang, Zhichao Xu, Linbo Liu, Sai Muralidhar Jayanthi, Vinayak Arannil
arXiv:2610.27815v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive (AR) language models by letting a small model draft tokens serially and a large model verify them in...
By Ziqi Jin, Weiwen Xu, Jiaxi Li, Yujie Zhong, Qi She, Aixin Sun
arXiv:2608. 10362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to speculate multiple tokens, reducing expensive target model decoding steps.
By Eunjeong Kim, Yeong Jun Jeon, Myeonggyun Han
arXiv:2602. 20217v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-speculative decoding (SSD) accelerates LLM inference by skipping layers to create an efficient draft model, yet existing methods often rely on static heuristics that ignore the dynamic computational overhead of attention in long-context scenarios.
By Seongjin Cha, Gyuwan Kim, Dongsu Han, Tao Yang, Insu Han
The paper introduces D3D, a decoupled diffusion drafting method that eliminates the need for target-model hidden states during speculative decoding. By combining blockwise denoising with auxiliary autoregressive supervision, D3D can draft successor blocks asynchronously, achieving significant speedups—up to 7.48× on GSM8K with Qwen3-32B. The authors also prune layers to maintain performance while reducing computational cost, demonstrating over 99% of mean acceptance length after removing five of 36 layers.
By Baoyou Chen, Ruiqiao Mei, Guancong Lin, Tao Song, Weihao Yuan, Qun Liu, Siyu Zhu