arXiv Computation and Language

Trajectory-Level Speculative Decoding for Diffusion Language Models

The paper introduces a trajectory-level speculative decoding framework for diffusion-based language models (dLLMs), addressing the limitation of existing strategies that revert to single-token generation when confidence is low. By constructing draft denoising trajectories through confidence-stratified tree exploration and verifying them with blockwise parallel evaluation and bidirectional attention masking, the method also incorporates inter-block speculation to exploit the models’ bidirectional structure. Experiments show a 30–40% reduction in denoising iterations, a token-per-step increase from 2.6 to 4.3, and a 7–14× speedup over vanilla dLLMs while maintaining accuracy within 1% on reasoning and code benchmarks.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

SimSD: Simple Speculative Decoding in Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606. 02544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) LLMs, offering faster inference through parallel or blockwise decoding.

By Junxia Cui, Haotian Ye, Runchu Tian, Hongcan Guo, Jinya Jiang, Haoru Li, Chaojie Ren, Yiming Huang, Kaijie Zhu, Zhongkai Yu, Kun Zhou, Jingbo Shang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 22

AdaFlash: Adaptive Speculative Decoding via On-Policy Distilled Diffusion Drafters

arXiv:2607. 19223v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding, in which a lightweight draft model first generates a draft sequence that is then verified in parallel by the target model, has become a prevalent paradigm for accelerating large language model inference.

By Yu-Yang Qian, Hao-Cong Wu, Chen Chen, Jiacheng Sun, Zhenhua Dong, Peng Zhao, Zhi-Hua Zhou
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 21

AdaFlash: Adaptive Speculative Decoding via On-Policy Distilled Diffusion Drafters

Speculative decoding, in which a lightweight draft model first generates a draft sequence that is then verified in parallel by the target model, has become a prevalent paradigm for accelerating large language model inference. Recent work such as DFlash further boosts drafting efficiency by leveraging diffusion drafters, whose parallel denoising mechanism enables draft generation in a single forward pass.

arXiv AI
Jun 15

Residual Context Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2601. 22954v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to purely autoregressive language models because they can decode multiple tokens in parallel.

By Yuezhou Hu, Harman Singh, Monishwaran Maheswaran, Haocheng Xi, Coleman Hooper, Jintao Zhang, Aditya Tomar, Michael W. Mahoney, Sewon Min, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Kurt Keutzer, Amir Gholami, Chenfeng Xu