The paper introduces TVP, a loss family that improves speculative decoding for large language models by focusing on expected acceptance length. It shows that TV, the total variation distance, can match or surpass traditional draft-training objectives when properly tuned, and that TVP’s power parameter balances coverage and acceptance. Experiments across multiple drafter architectures and target models demonstrate that TVP yields higher acceptance lengths, outperforming cross‑entropy and existing training recipes by significant margins.
arXiv:2609.24150v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to generate multiple candidate tokens that are...
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.
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.
The paper introduces AdaptiveSpec, a training‑free speculative decoding method that simultaneously adapts the per‑step verification rule and the draft‑tree shape using signals generated during decoding. It replaces the fixed token‑match rule with a margin‑based threshold and adjusts tree depth, width, and node count based on draft confidence and recent acceptance history, allowing the total draft count to vary. Experiments on SGLang show up to 56% throughput gains over EAGLE‑3 while maintaining 93% of lossless task accuracy on GSM8K, MATH‑500, and HumanEval across three models.
arXiv:2610. 28355v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In speculative decoding, a lightweight draft model proposes tokens that the target model verifies in parallel, speeding up generation without changing the target distribution.
In speculative decoding, a lightweight draft model proposes tokens that the target model verifies in parallel, speeding up generation without changing the target distribution. D-PACE (Wu et al., 2026)...
arXiv:2609.14717v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by verifying multiple drafted tokens in parallel, allowing a single target forward pass to accept seve...
arXiv:2610.24993v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The throughput gains of speculative decoding depend on the trade-off between acceptance length and execution latency. We ask when additional accept...
arXiv:2610.07822v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by using a lightweight draft model to propose multiple tokens that are verified by a target...
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.
arXiv:2607. 08690v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates sampling from an autoregressive LLM by using a faster auxiliary model to draft tokens which are then verified in parallel by the LLM.
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.