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.
Draft-OPD introduces an on‑policy distillation method for speculative draft models, addressing the mismatch between supervised fine‑tuning and inference by letting the target model supervise the drafter on draft‑induced states. The approach uses target‑assisted rollouts for stable continuations and replays drafting from error positions exposed during verification, enabling the drafter to learn from both accepted and rejected proposals. Experiments demonstrate that Draft‑OPD achieves more than five‑fold lossless acceleration across diverse tasks, outperforming prior draft models such as EAGLE‑3 and DFlash by 23 % and 13 % respectively.
By Haodi Lei, Yafu Li, Haoran Zhang, Shunkai Zhang, Qianjia Cheng, Xiaoye Qu, Ganqu Cui, Bowen Zhou, Ning Ding, Yun Luo, Yu Cheng
arXiv:2608.29748v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive language model inference by having a lightweight draft model propose multiple candidate tokens, which a...
By Luxi Lin, Zhanpeng Zeng, Shuang Peng, Songwei Liu, Rongrong Ji
arXiv:2603. 12617v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speculative decoding has emerged as a widely adopted paradigm for accelerating large language model inference, where a lightweight draft model rapidly generates candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by a larger target model.
By Yu-Yang Qian, Hao-Cong Wu, Yichao Fu, Hao Zhang, Peng Zhao
arXiv:2608.20359v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are deployed for increasingly complex tasks involving planning and multi-step decision making, but high-quality performanc...
By Ravisri Valluri, Tung Nguyen, Aditya Grover
TraceSpec is a framework that links trajectory evaluation with adaptive draft training to improve speculative decoding in large language model agents. It introduces a dynamic execution strategy combined with fixed‑prefix replay and provides a new corpus (TraceSpec‑Traj) of 10,000 training and 2,500 test states covering browsing and software engineering tasks. Experiments show that TraceSpec’s state‑conditioned draft allocation boosts replay throughput by 12.5%–22.6% and increases accepted length by up to 10.0% compared to fixed‑turn supervision.
By Jihao Zhao, Shuaishuai Zu, Pengfei Li, Biao Qin, Guanghuan Fang, Ben Feng, Baochuan Yang