arXiv Machine Learning

SpecRoll: Fast-Slow Verifier-Feedback Adaptation for Speculative Reinforcement Learning Rollouts

arXiv:2608. 04962v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but autoregressive rollout generation remains a major efficiency bottleneck.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Margins, Not Windows: Training-Free Per-Step Lossy Speculative Decoding

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

When RL Meets Adaptive Speculative Training: A Unified Training-Serving System

arXiv:2602. 06932v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Speculative decoding can significantly accelerate LLM serving, yet most deployments today disentangle speculator training from serving, treating speculator training as a standalone offline modeling problem.

By Junxiong Wang, Fengxiang Bie, Jisen Li, Zhongzhu Zhou, Zelei Shao, Yubo Wang, Yinghui Liu, Qingyang Wu, Avner May, Sri Yanamandra, Ce Zhang, Tri Dao, Percy Liang, Ben Athiwaratkun, Shuaiwen Leon Song, Chenfeng Xu, Xiaoxia Wu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Draft-OPD: On-Policy Distillation for Speculative Draft Models

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 Machine Learning
Sep 16

GrowMTP: Can RL Grow Its Own Draft Head?

GrowMTP is a method that trains a draft head entirely within the reinforcement learning (RL) loop, using supervision from the RL verification step and a rollout distribution that is narrower than pretraining. By detaching draft‑head updates from the policy backbone, it enables online training of the draft head from scratch. Experiments on Qwen3‑4B, MiMo‑7B‑SFT, and Qwen3.5‑4B‑Base show rollout speedups ranging from 1.36× to 2.13× and overall end‑to‑end speedups from 1.20× to 1.60×, making it a modular acceleration component for RL frameworks lacking pretrained draft heads.

By Minghua He, Lingzhe Zhang, Yuan Liu, Xiao Zhou, Aiwei Liu
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 Computation and Language
Aug 24

Self-Speculation for Faster Reasoning Models

arXiv:2608.20359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are deployed for increasingly complex tasks involving planning and multi-step decision making, but high-quality performanc...

By Ravisri Valluri, Tung Nguyen, Aditya Grover
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Bole: Efficient Tree Speculation for Hybrid-Attention Language Models

arXiv:2608. 01651v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hybrid-attention large language models combine full attention with recurrent linear attention to reduce long-context inference costs, yet their autoregressive decoding remains memory-bound.

By Li Wang, Yi Su, Xiabao Wu, Chiran You, Yongchao Liu, Zhan Qiu, Juelu Zhang, Jiajun Zheng, Fangxin Liu, Jie Zhang, Chen Tian, Chengying Huan