Osprey is a target‑agnostic pre‑training method that bootstraps draft models for speculative decoding from existing small language models. By pruning to a shallow backbone, restoring language‑modeling capability with next‑token pretraining, and adapting via vocabulary alignment and distillation, Osprey reduces per‑target work to a lightweight adaptation step. Experiments show that a single Osprey backbone improves mean acceptance length by up to 22.7% and increases tokens per second by 17.5% across several large target models, especially on out‑of‑domain and multilingual data.
By Fengxiang Bie, Yuqing Jian, Yifan Yu, Zhongzhu Zhou, Zelei Shao, Ben Athiwaratkun, Shuaiwen Leon Song, Chenfeng Xu, Xiaoxia Wu, Tianyi Zhang
arXiv:2610.14576v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: As frontier LLMs gain more capabilities, the cost to run them also goes up. At the same time, small language models (SLMs) also gain more capabilities...
By Keegan Wang
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
The paper introduces APEX, a learned controller that improves speculative decoding for large language models by dynamically selecting the best speculation strategy and adjusting draft depth during generation. APEX uses request‑level routing among EAGLE‑3, n‑gram, and draft‑model speculation, and block‑level depth adaptation based on causal decoding signals and verifier feedback. Integrated into vLLM and tested with Qwen3‑8B, APEX achieves up to 5.24× speedup over autoregressive decoding while reducing wasted tokens by 41% compared to fixed‑depth n‑gram speculation.
By Manvi Jha, Zach Zhang, Zhichao Xu, Linbo Liu, Sai Muralidhar Jayanthi, Vinayak Arannil
arXiv:2607. 07748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models achieve strong code generation for high resource languages like Python and Java but suffer sharp performance drops on Low-Resource Programming Languages~(LRPLs) such as Julia.
By Didula Samaraweera, Anjana Supun, Srinath Perera
arXiv:2607. 24434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models are attractive for end-device deployment because only a small subset of experts is active per token, but their routed expert weights often exceed accelerator memory.
By Dengke Han