From Positionwise Confidence to Prefix Scheduling: Verifier Skipping in Speculative Decoding

The paper explores a new lossy strategy for speculative decoding called verifier skipping, which allows certain draft prefixes to be committed without invoking the verifier. It investigates which confidence signals—raw token confidence, learned marginal survival, or learned conditional survival—best schedule these skips, finding that raw confidence often performs best despite higher positionwise AUROC for learned signals. Experiments on HumanEval with DiffuCoder-7B-Instruct and Qwen3-32B show that all three signals can reduce verifier calls by 9.6% to 13.5% while maintaining the same pass@1 as Strict SDD.

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• diffusion
• benchmarks