arXiv:2608.20375v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Tree-based speculative decoding raises the mean accepted tokens of standard speculative decoding by verifying multiple draft paths, and existing tree b...
By Xuming Ye, Zeming Ma, Runjie Yu, Yuan Liu, Tianle Li, Shuhan Bai, Jian Zhou, Fei Wu
The paper introduces Tree Exit Verification (TEV), an exact, level‑parallel speculative decoding method that uses a single exit‑node decision and a bonus‑token decision to verify draft continuations. By deriving a canonical exit law, the authors show that TEV achieves the same acceptance as optimal verifiers while reducing verifier‑stage latency by 15%. They also propose Exit‑Guided Draft‑Tree Training (ExitTrain), which improves draft trees and increases average output‑block length by 13%, leading to a 14% end‑to‑end speedup over DDTree across dialogue, code, and mathematical reasoning tasks.
By Shijing Hu, Xuancheng Ren, Zhihui Lu, Pan Zhou
arXiv:2609.22098v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates language-model inference by letting a cheap drafter propose tokens that the target model verifies in parallel. Recent...
By Huapeng Zhou, Huayu Wang, Xinyu Wang
arXiv:2606. 03819v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One-shot block drafters for speculative decoding generate the full draft in a single forward pass, achieving strong throughput by eliminating sequential token generation.
By Peer Rheinboldt, Fr\'ed\'eric Berdoz, Roger Wattenhofer
The paper introduces the Expected Decoding Rounds (EDR) objective, a theoretical framework that models speculative decoding as a Markov reward process and directly optimizes the number of decoding rounds. EDR weights local rejection costs by state occupancies, eliminating auxiliary hyperparameters and enabling unbiased stochastic optimization via temporal‑difference gradients. Applying EDR to fine‑tune state‑of‑the‑art draft models (DSpark and DFly) improves mean accepted length and outperforms prior training objectives across nine benchmarks in math reasoning, code generation, and chat.
By Yunxiao Zhao, Changxiao Cai
Speculative decoding losslessly accelerates autoregressive language models by verifying multiple draft tokens in parallel. Diffusion-based drafters further reduce proposal latency by predicting an entire token block in parallel, but their position-wise distributions are marginal rather than conditioned on tokens selected along each draft path.
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:2609.39972v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates language model inference by verifying multiple draft tokens in a single target-model pass. Recent parallel drafters ha...
By Chumeng Liang, Linxuan Wang, Xinyu Peng, Huabin Liu, Yuxin Chen, Ge Liu, Guang Lin, Qifan Song, Jianguo Li
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
arXiv:2608. 13524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding losslessly accelerates autoregressive language models by verifying multiple draft tokens in parallel.
By Tianyi Li, Yaxin Luo, Xinyi Shang, Zhiqiang Shen
TreeSpark is a new training and inference framework that extends the semi‑autoregressive DSpark architecture to improve speculative decoding. It builds parent‑conditioned candidate trees in a single backbone pass and then replays their expansion, pruning, and packing during training, using survival negative log‑likelihood and a capped coverage hinge to weight retained edges and promote target‑important alternatives. Evaluations on Qwen3‑4B and Qwen3‑8B across nine general benchmarks and six writing domains show that TreeSpark increases mean acceptance length by 23.4%–31.6% and mean single‑request throughput by 15.1%–25.0% compared to DSpark, with additional gains when using the proposed supervision.
whyItMatters":"TreeSpark demonstrates that a unified training and inference approach can substantially boost both acceptance length and throughput in speculative decoding, offering measurable performance improvements for large language models."
By Jihao Zhao, Qianyu Jiang, Shuaishuai Zu, Pengfei Li, Guanghuan Fang, Ben Feng, Biao Qin, Zhibin Wang, Baochuan Yang
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