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Faster LLM Inference via Sequential Monte Carlo (arxiv.org)
3 points by matt_d 166 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of discarding a draft's tokens at the first mistake, this keeps several drafts and reweights them, so checking stays a fixed-size step with no rollbacks. It runs 2.36 times faster than draft-and-check decoding, staying within 3% of the target model's accuracy.

Abstract

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates language model inference by drafting tokens from a cheap proposal model and verifying them against an expensive target model via rejection sampling. Because rejection truncates the draft block at the first error, throughput degrades when draft and target diverge. Rather than rejecting draft tokens outright, we propose to reweight them. To this end, we introduce sequential Monte Carlo speculative decoding (SMC-SD), which replaces token-level rejection with importance-weighted resampling over a population of draft particles. SMC-SD is a principled approximate inference scheme that trades exactness for additional speed, while preserving theoretical bounds on its per-step approximation error. Because LLM inference is memory bandwidth-bound, the arithmetic needed to draft particles and to score them in parallel comes nearly for free -- SMC-SD uses idle compute to turn verification into a vectorized, fixed-size operation with no rollback. Empirically, SMC-SD achieves 2.36x speed-up over speculative decoding and a 5.2x speed-up over autoregressive decoding, while remaining within 3% of the target model's accuracy on reasoning, instruction-following, and coding benchmarks.

Yahya Emara, Mauricio Barba da Costa, Chi-Chih Chang, Cameron Freer, Tim Vieira, Ryan Cotterell, Mohamed S. Abdelfattah
arXiv:2604.15672 · cs.LG, cs.CL · submitted Apr 17, 2026
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