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. Block (DLM-style) drafters predict the whole block in parallel, which is fast but trained with a full-block cross-entropy that supervises every position against the gold continuation -- even though inference discards every token after the first rejection.
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: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: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
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
arXiv:2609.36173v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Parallel speculative drafting generates multiple candidates in one backbone pass, but independent token selection can produce inconsistent continuati...
By Haohui Zhang, Keyu Chen, Haocheng Sun, Weibo Gu, Ruizhi Qiao, Xing Sun, Bo Jiang
arXiv:2609.38510v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive LLMs by having a lightweight drafter propose tokens that the target model verifies in parallel. Diffusi...
By Longxuan Yu, Bingsen Chen, Peng Shi, Dongkyu Lee, Yi Xiang, Hideo Kobayashi, Sheng Zhang, Shuaichen Chang, Xing Niu, Zhuoyan Xu, Greg Ver Steeg, Jiarong Jiang
arXiv:2608. 03839v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training-free speculative decoding drafts by matching an exact suffix of the context against a pool of earlier context.
By Tao Jin, Phuong Minh Nguyen, Zhenzhu Yan, Teeradaj Racharak, Naoya Inoue
The paper introduces the concepts of an information floor and a model gap to analyze block drafting in language models. By estimating these metrics across multiple domains and models, it finds that the all-parallel floor limits per-slot acceptance to 71% on Qwen3-4B, that a single realized token can eliminate most of this floor, and that current drafters still operate far above their floors, indicating significant room for improvement. These results highlight the distinct contributions of short-range conditioning versus proposal quality in block drafting.
By Xinwei Qiang, Xiang Fang, Chang Chen, Yue Guan, Yufei Ding
The paper introduces AdaptiveSpec, a training‑free speculative decoding method that simultaneously adapts the per‑step verification rule and the draft‑tree shape using signals generated during decoding. It replaces the fixed token‑match rule with a margin‑based threshold and adjusts tree depth, width, and node count based on draft confidence and recent acceptance history, allowing the total draft count to vary. Experiments on SGLang show up to 56% throughput gains over EAGLE‑3 while maintaining 93% of lossless task accuracy on GSM8K, MATH‑500, and HumanEval across three models.
By Oszk\'ar Urb\'an, Young D. Kwon, Stylianos I. Venieris, Cecilia Mascolo
Draft-OPD introduces an on‑policy distillation method for speculative draft models, addressing the mismatch between supervised fine‑tuning and inference by letting the target model supervise the drafter on draft‑induced states. The approach uses target‑assisted rollouts for stable continuations and replays drafting from error positions exposed during verification, enabling the drafter to learn from both accepted and rejected proposals. Experiments demonstrate that Draft‑OPD achieves more than five‑fold lossless acceleration across diverse tasks, outperforming prior draft models such as EAGLE‑3 and DFlash by 23 % and 13 % respectively.
By Haodi Lei, Yafu Li, Haoran Zhang, Shunkai Zhang, Qianjia Cheng, Xiaoye Qu, Ganqu Cui, Bowen Zhou, Ning Ding, Yun Luo, Yu Cheng
arXiv:2607. 28166v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models expose a provisional prediction at every denoising step, and on many tasks the candidate answer inside it stabilizes before the step schedule is exhausted.
By Chia-Ming Lee, Shao-Kai Liu, Ming-Ching Chang, Xin Li, Yu-Lun Liu, Chih-Chung Hsu