arXiv Computation and Language

LiLiCorr: Lightweight Likelihood Correlation of Parallel Drafts for Speculative Decoding

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

Contextual Correction of Parallel Draftsfor Speculative Decoding

The paper introduces DCOCO (DFlash Contextual Corrector), a lightweight mechanism that restores intra-block dependencies in speculative decoding by evaluating multiple candidate tokens for contextual compatibility across adjacent draft positions. DCOCO maintains parallel drafting while enabling contextually informed token selection at low additional cost. Across multiple verifier backbones and benchmarks, DCOCO achieves the highest average throughput, delivering speedups of up to 6.6× over vanilla decoding and outperforming competing methods by 6–23% under concurrent serving loads.

By Roy Eisenstadt, Harel Lidar, Tal Gonen, Omer Luxembourg, Itamar Zimerman, Lior Wolf, Eli David, Ilan Naiman
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 7

DLoop: Looped Speculative Decoding

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

Training Parallel Speculative Draft Models by Directly Minimizing Expected Decoding Rounds

The paper introduces the Expected Decoding Rounds (EDR) objective, a theoretical framework that models speculative decoding as a Markov reward process and directly optimizes the number of decoding rounds. EDR weights local rejection costs by state occupancies, eliminating auxiliary hyperparameters and enabling unbiased stochastic optimization via temporal‑difference gradients. Applying EDR to fine‑tune state‑of‑the‑art draft models (DSpark and DFly) improves mean accepted length and outperforms prior training objectives across nine benchmarks in math reasoning, code generation, and chat.

By Yunxiao Zhao, Changxiao Cai
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
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 5

From Positionwise Confidence to Prefix Scheduling: Verifier Skipping in Speculative Decoding

The paper explores a new lossy strategy for speculative decoding called verifier skipping, which allows certain draft prefixes to be committed without invoking the verifier. It investigates which confidence signals—raw token confidence, learned marginal survival, or learned conditional survival—best schedule these skips, finding that raw confidence often performs best despite higher positionwise AUROC for learned signals. Experiments on HumanEval with DiffuCoder-7B-Instruct and Qwen3-32B show that all three signals can reduce verifier calls by 9.6% to 13.5% while maintaining the same pass@1 as Strict SDD.

By Haoxuan Luo, Jameson Sandler, Ferdinando Fioretto
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 1

DEdit: Iterative Draft Editing for Speculative Decoding

arXiv:2609.38510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive LLMs by having a lightweight drafter propose tokens that the target model verifies in parallel. Diffusi...

By Longxuan Yu, Bingsen Chen, Peng Shi, Dongkyu Lee, Yi Xiang, Hideo Kobayashi, Sheng Zhang, Shuaichen Chang, Xing Niu, Zhuoyan Xu, Greg Ver Steeg, Jiarong Jiang