arXiv AI

D3D: Decoupled Diffusion Drafting for Asynchronous Speculative Decoding

The paper introduces D3D, a decoupled diffusion drafting method that eliminates the need for target-model hidden states during speculative decoding. By combining blockwise denoising with auxiliary autoregressive supervision, D3D can draft successor blocks asynchronously, achieving significant speedups—up to 7.48× on GSM8K with Qwen3-32B. The authors also prune layers to maintain performance while reducing computational cost, demonstrating over 99% of mean acceptance length after removing five of 36 layers.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

When Parallel Drafter Meets Parallel Speculative Decoding

The paper introduces DPara, a parallel speculative decoding framework that builds on DSpark-style parallel drafters. DPara eliminates the need for probabilistic guesses by precomputing draft representations for every acceptance boundary and using a lightweight autoregressive head to combine verification outcomes with these representations, enabling full parallelization of the backbone forward pass. Experiments on Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B across multiple benchmarks demonstrate average speedups of 3.21× and 3.52× over autoregressive decoding, outperforming existing serial and parallel speculative decoding methods.

By Fuliang Liu, Xue Li, Kun Qian, Zhibin Wang, Wanchun Dou, Wenyuan Yu, Chen Tian
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 28

One Call Ahead: Packed Self-Speculative Decoding with Diffusion Drafting

The paper introduces Packed-SS, a self‑speculative decoding schedule that combines drafting and verification into a single model call, reducing input size to linear in speculative width. By running the diffusion drafter one step ahead, the method keeps an unresolved suffix for the next iteration, avoiding the sequential wait of standard two‑call decoding. Experiments on Nemotron 3B/8B and SetDLM 1.7B demonstrate higher throughput and lower mean wall time under greedy decoding.

By Yuxiao Chen, Changxiao Cai
arXiv AI
Aug 5

Approximate Speculative Decoding

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 Machine Learning
Oct 21

DStill: Trajectory Consistency Distillation for Accelerated One-Step Drafting in Block Diffusion Speculative Decoding

arXiv:2610.27379v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Block-diffusion speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by drafting multiple tokens in parallel. However, one-step drafting i...

By Shreyas Kulkarni, Uttam Gurram, Madhav Kanda, Krishna Teja Chitty Venkata, Shichu Chen, Kartik Balasubramaniam, Supriyo Chakraborty, Sambit Sahu
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 15

JetSpec++: Foresight Parallel Drafting with Self Refinements

arXiv:2610.19792v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding's effectiveness is governed by two quantities: the acceptance rate of drafted tokens and the cost of producing them. We show the t...

By Zhaoxiang Feng (UC San Diego), Lanxiang Hu (UC San Diego), Haoran Yuan (UIUC), Yu-Yang Qian (Nanjing University), Jihui Yang (Meta), Peng Zhao (Nanjing University), Yibo Zhu (StepFun), Tajana Rosing (UC San Diego), Hao Zhang (UC San Diego)