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:2608.30427v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Speculative decoding speeds up generation with an efficient draft model (drafter) that proposes tokens for a target model to verify in one pass, pres...
By Ephrem Wu
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...
By Jahyun Koo, Sunghyeon Woo, Jaeeun Kil, Jeongtae Lee, Sungjae Lee, Kyomin Jung, Minsub Kim
arXiv:2608.20530v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates language-model inference by drafting future tokens that the target model verifies in parallel. A diffusion-style block...
By Matan Rusanovsky, Yoav Miron, Roy Uziel, Omer Belhasin, Ran Zilberstein, Maor Ashkenazi, Michael Elad
arXiv:2608. 03447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by verifying a draft block with a target model in parallel.
By Yuannuo Feng, Zegang Peng, Yuxin Xie, Yubing Ye, Yizhe Chen, Wenshuai Yao, Wenyong Zhou, Wang Kang
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...
By Yongchao Long, Chunrui Zheng, Yuxuan Zhou, Guangkun Nie, Tian-Chi Ma, Chao Pang, Shuohuan Wang, Yuchen Ding, Xianbin Wen, Dianhai Yu, Junyuan Shang, Yuxi Zhou, Shenda Hong
The paper investigates how target model probability distributions can be reused during speculative decoding to improve token selection. It shows that exact reuse requires a distribution computed with the full next-round context, and that retaining this distribution can force the rejection of accepted tokens. Experiments across six target models demonstrate that reranking first-token branches with a separately computed distribution at the current context boosts expected acceptance, especially with small tree budgets, and that drawing the first token from this distribution before tree allocation further improves acceptance and decoding speed.
By Jungseob Lee, Giyoon Jang, Chailin Nam, Jiwoo Kum, Sihyeon Lee, Kyojun Choo, Jihun Song, Eunseo Song, Chanjun Park
arXiv:2607. 01893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by drafting a block of tokens that the target model verifies left-to-right, committing only the longest accepted prefix.
By Tianjian Yang, Meng Li
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...
By Tianhua Xia, Mugilan Ganesan, Yifei Feng, Haiyu Wang, Maximilian Egger, Sai Qian Zhang
arXiv:2607. 21535v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by having a cheap draft propose tokens that a target verifies in parallel.
By Alagappan Valliappan
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
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