arXiv AI

EvoSpec: Evolving Speculative Decoding via Real-Time Vocabulary and Parameter Adaptation

arXiv:2605. 27390v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates Large Language Model inference through draft-then-verify generation, yet lightweight draft models face coupled efficiency and quality limitations: large-vocabulary output projection is costly, while limited draft capacity and static parameters reduce acceptance under specialized or shifting inputs.

arXiv AI
Jun 3

KnapSpec: Self-Speculative Decoding via Adaptive Layer Selection as a Knapsack Problem

arXiv:2602. 20217v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-speculative decoding (SSD) accelerates LLM inference by skipping layers to create an efficient draft model, yet existing methods often rely on static heuristics that ignore the dynamic computational overhead of attention in long-context scenarios.

By Seongjin Cha, Gyuwan Kim, Dongsu Han, Tao Yang, Insu Han
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 AI
Aug 7

When Drafts Evolve: Speculative Decoding Meets Online Learning

arXiv:2603. 12617v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speculative decoding has emerged as a widely adopted paradigm for accelerating large language model inference, where a lightweight draft model rapidly generates candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by a larger target model.

By Yu-Yang Qian, Hao-Cong Wu, Yichao Fu, Hao Zhang, Peng Zhao
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

TSS: Target-Side Sparsification for Speculative Decoding in Domain-Specific Large Language Models

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