arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

Dustin: Draft-Augmented Sparse Verification for Efficient Long-Context Generation with Speculative Decoding

arXiv:2606. 24957v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While speculative decoding improves inference throughput for multi-batch long-context Large Language Models (LLMs), its efficiency is often limited by a verification bottleneck where Key-Value (KV) cache loading dominates latency.

By WenHung Lee, Jian-Jia Chen, Xiaolin Lin, Pei-Shuo Wang, Chi-Chih Chang, Chun-Che Yang, Ning-Chi Huang, Grace Li Zhang, Kai-Chiang Wu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

Beyond Tokens: Semantic-Aware Speculative Decoding for Efficient Inference by Probing Internal States

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

ASPIRE: Asynchronous Batched Self-Speculative Decoding for Long-Context LLM Inference

ASPIRE introduces a non‑synchronized batched self‑speculative decoding framework for long‑context LLM inference, addressing the memory bottleneck of attention by drafting tokens with sparse attention and verifying them with full attention. It combines a unified mixed forward pass, a lightweight online speculation scheduler that lets each request independently decide when to verify, and an intra‑draft refresh layer that updates the sparse context at every draft step. Experiments on three models and five benchmarks show 1.70–4.58× speedup over autoregressive baselines and a 27% average improvement over the strongest prior self‑speculative methods.

By Amir Ziashahabi, Hossein Entezari Zarch, Lei Gao, Murali Annavaram, Salman Avestimehr