T2D: Target-to-Draft Model Pruning & Adaptation for Efficient Speculative Decoding

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.

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• llms
• efficiency
• benchmarks
• safety