Longze Chen, Renke Shan, Huiming Wang, Lu Wang, Ziqiang Liu, Run Luo, Jiawei Wang, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for drafting Large Language Models require additional modules to be trained, which can be challenging to implement and ensure compatibility across various LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose an in-context layer-skipping strategy for self-speculative decoding that uses a plug-and-play mechanism to skip intermediate layers of the verify model to construct a compressed draft model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a speedup of 1.3 1.7 on LLaMA3 series models without altering the original distribution of the generated text. |
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Draft
& Verify: Lossless Large Language Model Acceleration via Self-Speculative Decoding (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for accelerating Large Language Models have been criticized for their inference costs and inefficient decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-speculative decoding approach for accelerating Large Language Models without an auxiliary model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a speedup of up to 1.99 with no additional neural network training and no extra memory footprint. |
LongSpec: Long-Context Lossless Speculative Decoding with Efficient Drafting and Verification (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can process extremely long contexts, requiring efficient inference over extended inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses a constant-sized key-value cache to train long-context models. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that LongSpec achieves 3.26x speedup over strong Flash Attention baselines and 2.34x wall clock time on four math reasoning tasks. |
MARS: Unleashing the Power of Speculative Decoding via Margin-Aware Verification (2026.findings-acl)
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Jingwei Song, Xinyu Wang, Hanbin Wang, Xiaoxuan Lei, Tianyu Shi, Shixin Han, Eric Yang, Xiao-Wen Chang, Lynn Ai
| Challenge: | Autoregressive large language models suffer from high inference latency due to memorybandwidth constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that decouples generation and verification by decoupling tokens and a lightweight draft model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method delivers consistent and significant speedups over state-of-the-art baselines while preserving generation quality across diverse benchmarks. |
KNN-SSD: Enabling Dynamic Self-Speculative Decoding via Nearest Neighbor Layer Set Optimization (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have proven highly capable in handling downstream tasks, but the token-by-token generation in autoregressive decoding results in quadratic computational complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that proposes skipping certain layers to construct a draft model, which eliminates the need for additional parameters or training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.31.6 speedup in LLM inference while being sensitive to domain shifts. |
Speculative Verification: Exploiting Information Gain for Speculative Decoding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are used for many applications but their size and computational cost make inference serving a significant challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient augmentation to Speculative Decoding (SD) that predicts speculation accuracy and dynamically adapts the verification length to maximize throughput. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces wasted verification on rejected tokens and improves decoding efficiency. |
PLD+: Accelerating LLM Inference by Leveraging Language Model Artifacts (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | speculative decoding is a novel decoding paradigm for large language models . however, its use is limited by its computational resources and fine-tuning requirements . |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free approach that accelerates inference of large language models . they use draft and verify principle to accelerate inference process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms tuning-free approaches on input-guided tasks and outperformed state-of-the-art EAGLE on four of the tasks. |
SpecBound: Adaptive Bounded Self-Speculation with Layer-wise Confidence Calibration (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate autoregressive inference in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-draft framework that suppresses spurious confidence via layer-wise temperature annealing in early-exit decision and adaptively bounds speculation length based on token-wise decoding difficulty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework suppresses spurious confidence and bounds speculation length based on token-wise decoding difficulty. |
Faster In-Context Learning for LLMs via N-Gram Trie Speculative Decoding (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In-Context Learning (ICL) is a key method in prompt engineering, but its long retrieved contexts and limited token throughput will slow reasoning speeds. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the overlap between context and model output to generate drafts from the context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the highest mean speedup on Vicuna-7B, Llama2-7B-Chat, and Llma3-8B-Instruct tasks. |
From Tokens to Steps: Verification-Aware Speculative Decoding for Efficient Multi-Step Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Speculative decoding (SD) allows a lightweight draft model to propose outputs that a stronger target model verifies. |
| Approach: | They propose a verification-aware speculative decoding framework that performs step-level verification using only model-internal signals. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SpecGuard outperforms both SD and reward-guided SD in accuracy and reliability tests. |
Draft Model Knows When to Stop: Self-Verification Speculative Decoding for Long-Form Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Conventional speculative decoding methods use a predefined length policy for proposing drafts, but the reality deviates from this assumption. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-verification length policy that adaptively determines the lengths of draft sequences by referring to the draft entropy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 17% speedup on MT-Bench and 22% speedup in long-form reasoning. |