Large Language Models suffer from high inference latency, especially when generating long chains of thought. Existing speculative decoding methods draft and verify tokens in parallel but ignore semantic equivalence, causing inefficient rejections. The proposed SemanticSpec framework verifies entire semantic sequences by probing internal hidden states, achieving up to 2.7× speedup on DeepSeekR1-32B and 2.1× on QwQ-32B while outperforming token‑level and sequence‑level baselines in both efficiency and effectiveness.
By Ximing Dong, Shaowei Wang, Dayi Lin, Boyuan Chen, Ahmed E. Hassan
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.
By Guoxuan Xia, Luka Ribar, Paul Balanca
arXiv:2411. 05894v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speculative Decoding has emerged as a popular technique for accelerating inference in Large Language Models.
By Michele Marzollo, Jiawei Zhuang, Niklas Roemer, Niklas Zwingenberger, Lorenz K. M\"uller, Lukas Cavigelli
arXiv:2609.00796v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: As one of the most critical challenges in large language models, contextual faithfulness directly determines their reliability in knowledge-intensive a...
By Guanqiao Chen, Di Wang, Lijie Hu
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. Standard speculative decoding is lossless: its rejection and resampling steps exactly preserve the LLM's sampling distribution.
arXiv:2605.15508v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The quadratic complexity of attention imposes severe memory and computational bottlenecks on Large Language Model (LLM) inference. This challenge i...
By Jiangnan Yu, Ceyu Xu, Yongji Wu, Yuan Xie
arXiv:2606. 04446v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive large language model inference by drafting multiple tokens and verifying them in a single target-model forward pass.
By Liyuan Zhang, Jiarui Zhang, Jinwei Yao, Ran Yan, Yuchen Yang, Jiahao Zhang, Tongkai Yang, Yi Wu, Binhang Yuan
Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by allowing a lightweight draft model to propose tokens that are subsequently verified in parallel by a larger target model. Recent approaches introduce lossy verification schemes to further improve efficiency by relaxing strict distributional matching.
The paper examines lossy verification techniques used in speculative decoding for large language models, showing that many methods can be grouped into truncation-based and collaborative verification categories. It analyzes how these approaches alter the decoding distribution, revealing that truncation-based methods can significantly degrade performance due to distributional distortion, while collaborative methods depend more on overshoot suppression and supervision quality than on simple interpolation between draft and target models. A diagnostic evaluation framework is introduced to assess these failure modes across curated benchmarks.
By Tianyu Wang, Yuxuan Zhou, Heng Li, Wenbin Wang, Zikai Xiao, Chunrui Zheng, Junyuan Shang
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
The efficiency of Large Language Model (LLM) serving is fundamentally limited by the sequential nature of autoregressive decoding. Speculative Decoding (SD) mitigates this by using a lightweight draft...
arXiv:2608. 08721v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by drafting multiple tokens for parallel verification, with efficiency critically determined by the speculative length selected at each decoding round.
By Zexun Lin, Yuan Feng, Junlin Lv, Kevin S. Zhou, Xike Xie