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Accelerating LLM Inference with Lossless Speculative Decoding Algorithms (2025) (arxiv.org)
1 point by wslh 28 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Speculative decoding has a small model guess several upcoming words that a big model then checks in one pass. These methods let the two models use different word lists, keep output identical to the big model alone, and sped generation up to 2.8 times.

Abstract · Accelerating LLM Inference with Lossless Speculative Decoding Algorithms for Heterogeneous Vocabularies

Accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs) is a critical challenge in generative AI. Speculative decoding (SD) methods offer substantial efficiency gains by generating multiple tokens using a single target forward pass. However, existing SD approaches require the drafter and target models to share the same vocabulary, thus limiting the pool of possible drafters, often necessitating the training of a drafter from scratch. We present three new SD methods that remove this shared-vocabulary constraint. All three methods preserve the target distribution (i.e., they are lossless) and work with off-the-shelf models without requiring additional training or modifications. Empirically, on summarization, programming, and long-context tasks, our algorithms demonstrate significant speedups of up to 2.8x over standard autoregressive decoding. By enabling any off-the-shelf model to serve as a drafter and requiring no retraining, this work substantially broadens the applicability of the SD framework in practice.

Nadav Timor, Jonathan Mamou, Daniel Korat, Moshe Berchansky, Gaurav Jain, Oren Pereg, Moshe Wasserblat, David Harel
arXiv:2502.05202 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Jan 31, 2025 · updated Jun 11, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · ICML'25 Oral (top %1)

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