Large Language Models suffer from high inference latency, especially when generating long chains of thought. Existing speculative decoding methods draft and verify tokens in parallel but ignore semantic equivalence, causing inefficient rejections. The proposed SemanticSpec framework verifies entire semantic sequences by probing internal hidden states, achieving up to 2.7× speedup on DeepSeekR1-32B and 2.1× on QwQ-32B while outperforming token‑level and sequence‑level baselines in both efficiency and effectiveness.
By Ximing Dong, Shaowei Wang, Dayi Lin, Boyuan Chen, Ahmed E. Hassan
The paper introduces T2D, a framework that prunes and adapts a target large language model into a draft model optimized for both inference latency and alignment with the target model’s outputs. By formulating draft model design as an optimization problem, T2D achieves up to 92% pruning while maintaining high speculative decoding performance across multiple target model families and domains. The resulting draft models can also be integrated with other speculative decoding techniques to yield additional gains.
By Shahriar Kabir Nahin, Xiao Ye, Muhao Chen, Ben Zhou, Anshuman Chhabra
arXiv:2512.23765v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose tokens and a stronge...
By Tiancheng Su, Meicong Zhang, Guoxiu He
Speculative decoding accelerates generation by verifying multiple drafted tokens in a single target-model forward pass, reducing sequential decoding iterations. Model-free variants avoid auxiliary draft models by reusing text and model states already available during generation, but their speedup depends on the reliability of the constructed drafts.
arXiv:2607. 10661v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative decoding has significantly accelerated Large Language Model (LLM) inference by alleviating memory-bound bottlenecks.
By Zipeng Gao, Zhi Zheng, Qingrong Xia, Junda Lin, Ziwei Zhao, Tong Xu, Zhefeng Wang, Enhong Chen
arXiv:2512.02337v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Growing demands from tasks like code generation, deep reasoning, and long-document understanding have made long-context generation a crucial capabi...
By Zhendong Tan, Xingjun Zhang, Chaoyi Hu, Junjie Peng, Kun Xia