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
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...
By Shuhao Li, Fanghua Ye, Wanyu Lin, Tianyu Yuan, Xiaoyu Shen
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.
By Geonmo Gu, Byeongho Heo, HeeJae Jun, Yoohoon Kang, Sangmin Lee, Sangdoo Yun, Dongyoon Han
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.
arXiv:2609.37029v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive inference by verifying multiple draft tokens in a single target forward pass. However, as the context...
By Hao-Yuan He, Peng-Fei Liu, Si Shen, Ming Li
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
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
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 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:2609.36590v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Self-speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by drafting tokens from the target model itself, but faces a sharp tradeof...
By Hankun Lin, Patrick Pynadath, Ruqi Zhang
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