Speedbumps: Rejection Attacks on Speculative Decoding

Speedbumps: Rejection Attacks on Speculative Decoding explores how Speculative Rejection Attacks (SRAs) can degrade the efficiency of speculative decoding by causing draft and target models to disagree more often, leading to more target-model forward passes per token. The authors introduce two attacks—Speedbump-P and Speedbump-D—that append adversarial suffixes to attacker-controlled content, optimizing the expected length of the accepted speculative prefix. In some scenarios, these attacks slow inference below autoregressive decoding, reduce output quality, yet remain effective under sampling and transfer across drafters or target models sharing a drafter.

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