Papers by Zane Cao
ConfSpec: Efficient Step-Level Speculative Reasoning via Confidence-Gated Verification (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to chain-of-thought reasoning incur high inference latency due to long generation traces. |
| Approach: | They propose a confidence-gated cascaded verification framework that reduces the trade-off between generation and verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 2.24 speedups while matching target-model accuracy. |
HeteroSpec: Leveraging Contextual Heterogeneity for Efficient Speculative Decoding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive decoding limits the inference throughput of Large Language Models due to its sequential dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allocates verification effort in proportion to candidate uncertainty. |
| Outcome: | Speculative decoding achieves an average speedup over state-of-the-art methods . a small subset of high-confidence predictions accounts for most successful verifications . |