arXiv AI

Hybrid Verified Decoding: Learning to Allocate Verification in Speculative Decoding

arXiv:2606. 01019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) generation remains expensive because autoregressive decoding calls the model once for each new token.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

DSpark: Confidence-Scheduled Speculative Decoding with Semi-Autoregressive Generation

arXiv:2607. 05147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) inference by decoupling draft generation from target verification.

By Xin Cheng, Xingkai Yu, Chenze Shao, Jiashi Li, Yunfan Xiong, Yi Qian, Jiaqi Zhu, Shirong Ma, Xiaokang Zhang, Jiasheng Ye, Qinyu Chen, Chengqi Deng, Jiping Yu, Damai Dai, Zhengyan Zhang, Yixuan Wei, Yixuan Tan, Wenkai Yang, Runxin Xu, Yu Wu, Zhean Xu, Xuanyu Wang, Muyang Chen, Rui Tian, Xiao Bi, Zhewen Hao, Shaoyuan Chen, Huanqi Cao, Wentao Zhang, Anyi Xu, Huishuai Zhang, Dongyan Zhao, Wenfeng Liang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

ASPIRE: Asynchronous Batched Self-Speculative Decoding for Long-Context LLM Inference

ASPIRE introduces a non‑synchronized batched self‑speculative decoding framework for long‑context LLM inference, addressing the memory bottleneck of attention by drafting tokens with sparse attention and verifying them with full attention. It combines a unified mixed forward pass, a lightweight online speculation scheduler that lets each request independently decide when to verify, and an intra‑draft refresh layer that updates the sparse context at every draft step. Experiments on three models and five benchmarks show 1.70–4.58× speedup over autoregressive baselines and a 27% average improvement over the strongest prior self‑speculative methods.

By Amir Ziashahabi, Hossein Entezari Zarch, Lei Gao, Murali Annavaram, Salman Avestimehr
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

TSS: Target-Side Sparsification for Speculative Decoding in Domain-Specific Large Language Models

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

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.

By Geonmo Gu, Byeongho Heo, HeeJae Jun, Yoohoon Kang, Sangmin Lee, Sangdoo Yun, Dongyoon Han