arXiv Computation and Language

Verification-Aware Training for Speculative Decoding

Verification-Aware Training (VAT) is a plug‑in framework that improves speculative decoding for large language models by simulating verification during training and using the resulting accept/reject patterns as supervision. VAT adds a lightweight binary verification head to predict whether each draft token will survive sequential verification, and replaces the fixed per‑position weighting with a verification‑adaptive schedule that keeps full weight up to the first rejection point. When applied to EAGLE‑3 and DFlash on Qwen3‑4B, Qwen3‑8B, and LLaMA‑3.1‑8B, VAT increases average acceptance length by up to 11.4% and wall‑clock speedup by up to 8.7%, yielding consistent gains across math, code, and chat benchmarks.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 27

DraftExpert: Expansion-Aware Self-Speculative Decoding for End-Device MoE Inference

Large Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models are attractive for end-device deployment because only a small subset of experts is active per token, but their routed expert weights often exceed accelerator memory. We target latency-critical single-user settings where routed experts are staged on demand from CPU memory to a GPU or from Flash to a mobile NPU.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

Teaching Diffusion to Speculate Left-to-Right

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their autoregressive decoding process incurs substantial inference costs due to inherently sequential token generation. Speculative decoding addresses this bottleneck by employing a lightweight draft model to propose multiple future tokens that are subsequently verified in parallel by a larger target model.