Mistletoe introduces a stealthy attack on speculative decoding that collapses acceleration by reducing average accepted length while preserving output semantics.
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Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Heads
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abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) employ auto-regressive decoding that requires sequential computation, with each step reliant on the previous one's output. This creates a bottleneck as each step necessitates moving the full model parameters from High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) to the accelerator's cache. While methods such as speculative decoding have been suggested to address this issue, their implementation is impeded by the challenges associated with acquiring and maintaining a separate draft model. In this paper, we present Medusa, an efficient method that augments LLM inference by adding extra decoding heads to predict multiple subsequent tokens in parallel. Using a tree-based attention mechanism, Medusa constructs multiple candidate continuations and verifies them simultaneously in each decoding step. By leveraging parallel processing, Medusa substantially reduces the number of decoding steps required. We present two levels of fine-tuning procedures for Medusa to meet the needs of different use cases: Medusa-1: Medusa is directly fine-tuned on top of a frozen backbone LLM, enabling lossless inference acceleration. Medusa-2: Medusa is fine-tuned together with the backbone LLM, enabling better prediction accuracy of Medusa heads and higher speedup but needing a special training recipe that preserves the backbone model's capabilities. Moreover, we propose several extensions that improve or expand the utility of Medusa, including a self-distillation to handle situations where no training data is available and a typical acceptance scheme to boost the acceptance rate while maintaining generation quality. We evaluate Medusa on models of various sizes and training procedures. Our experiments demonstrate that Medusa-1 can achieve over 2.2x speedup without compromising generation quality, while Medusa-2 further improves the speedup to 2.3-3.6x.
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representative citing papers
Graft combines pruning and retrieval in a sequential mechanism to build hybrid draft trees for speculative decoding, delivering up to 5.41× speedup and 21.8% better average speedup than EAGLE-3 on large models.
PSD is a training-free framework that jointly optimizes spatial unmasking and temporal speculative decoding in diffusion LLMs to reach up to 5.5x tokens per forward pass while preserving accuracy comparable to greedy decoding.
SlimSpec replaces the standard LM-head in draft models with a low-rank version to deliver 4-5x faster speculative decoding while preserving full vocabulary and competitive acceptance rates.
BubbleSpec exploits long-tail bubbles in synchronous RL by using faster ranks' idle time to pre-generate rollout drafts for speculative decoding, reducing steps by 50% and raising throughput up to 1.8x while preserving exact synchrony.
FASER delivers up to 53% higher throughput and 1.92x lower latency in dynamic LLM serving by adjusting speculative lengths per request, early pruning of rejects, and overlapping draft/verification phases via frontiers.
NI Sampling accelerates discrete diffusion language models up to 14.3 times by training a neural indicator to select which tokens to sample at each step using a trajectory-preserving objective.
WISV uses a channel-aware semantic acceptance policy on hidden representations to boost accepted sequence length by up to 60.8% and cut interaction rounds by 37.3% in distributed speculative decoding, with under 1% accuracy loss.
Visual token pruning in MLLMs fails on complex reasoning due to Relevant Visual Information Shift during decoding, but the DSTP framework fixes it training-free across models.
Sequential KV compression via probabilistic language tries and predictive delta coding achieves 3.3-4.3 bits per token entropy, yielding up to 914x better ratios than TurboQuant even with large overhead.
DMax uses On-Policy Uniform Training and Soft Parallel Decoding to enable aggressive parallelism in dLLMs, raising TPF on GSM8K from 2.04 to 5.47 and on MBPP from 2.71 to 5.86 while preserving accuracy.
KERV integrates kinematic Kalman Filter predictions with speculative decoding in VLA models to achieve 27-37% faster inference while maintaining nearly the same task success rates.
TokenTiming uses dynamic time warping on re-encoded token sequences to enable speculative decoding between models with different vocabularies, reporting 1.57x speedup.
PPOW uses window-level RL with cost-aware speedup and proximity rewards plus adaptive divergence-aware windowing to reach 6.29-6.52 acceptance lengths and 3.39-4.36x speedups in speculative decoding.
Language models trained on parallel streams of computation can overcome single-stream bottlenecks in autonomous agents by enabling simultaneous reading, thinking, and acting.
BitLM replaces per-token softmax with bitwise continuous diffusion inside causal blocks to generate multiple tokens in parallel while preserving autoregressive structure.
ME-DLM augments parallel masked diffusion models with edit-distance-supervised refinements to raise quality on coding and math benchmarks while using far fewer diffusion steps.
PARD-2 uses Confidence-Adaptive Token optimization to align draft model training with acceptance length in speculative decoding, enabling dual-mode operation and up to 6.94x lossless speedup on Llama3.1-8B.
CASCADE formalizes semantic interchangeability and convergence in target model representations to enable context-aware acceptance relaxation in tree-based speculative decoding, delivering up to 3.6x speedup on text-to-image models without quality loss.
WindowQuant performs window-adaptive mixed-precision KV cache quantization guided by similarity to the text prompt, with reordering to enable efficient inference in VLMs.
CoVSpec achieves up to 2.21x higher throughput and over 96% lower communication overhead for device-edge VLM inference via training-free visual token reduction, adaptive drafting, and decoupled parallel verification-correction in speculative decoding.
EVICT adaptively truncates draft trees in MoE speculative decoding by combining drafter signals with profiled costs to retain only cost-effective prefixes, delivering up to 2.35x speedup over autoregressive decoding.
SPIN co-designs sparse attention with hierarchical memory to achieve 1.66-5.66x higher throughput, 7-9x lower TTFT, and up to 58% lower TPOT than vLLM and original sparse implementations.
RACER unifies retrieval of exact matching patterns with logit-driven cues to produce better speculative drafts, achieving more than 2x speedup over autoregressive decoding and outperforming prior training-free speculative decoding methods.
citing papers explorer
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Mistletoe: Stealthy Acceleration-Collapse Attacks on Speculative Decoding
Mistletoe introduces a stealthy attack on speculative decoding that collapses acceleration by reducing average accepted length while preserving output semantics.
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Draft Less, Retrieve More: Hybrid Tree Construction for Speculative Decoding
Graft combines pruning and retrieval in a sequential mechanism to build hybrid draft trees for speculative decoding, delivering up to 5.41× speedup and 21.8% better average speedup than EAGLE-3 on large models.
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PSD: Pushing the Pareto Frontier of Diffusion LLMs via Parallel Speculative Decoding
PSD is a training-free framework that jointly optimizes spatial unmasking and temporal speculative decoding in diffusion LLMs to reach up to 5.5x tokens per forward pass while preserving accuracy comparable to greedy decoding.
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SlimSpec: Low-Rank Draft LM-Head for Accelerated Speculative Decoding
SlimSpec replaces the standard LM-head in draft models with a low-rank version to deliver 4-5x faster speculative decoding while preserving full vocabulary and competitive acceptance rates.
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BubbleSpec: Turning Long-Tail Bubbles into Speculative Rollout Drafts for Synchronous Reinforcement Learning
BubbleSpec exploits long-tail bubbles in synchronous RL by using faster ranks' idle time to pre-generate rollout drafts for speculative decoding, reducing steps by 50% and raising throughput up to 1.8x while preserving exact synchrony.
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FASER: Fine-Grained Phase Management for Speculative Decoding in Dynamic LLM Serving
FASER delivers up to 53% higher throughput and 1.92x lower latency in dynamic LLM serving by adjusting speculative lengths per request, early pruning of rejects, and overlapping draft/verification phases via frontiers.
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NI Sampling: Accelerating Discrete Diffusion Sampling by Token Order Optimization
NI Sampling accelerates discrete diffusion language models up to 14.3 times by training a neural indicator to select which tokens to sample at each step using a trajectory-preserving objective.
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WISV: Wireless-Informed Semantic Verification for Distributed Speculative Decoding in Device-Edge LLM Inference
WISV uses a channel-aware semantic acceptance policy on hidden representations to boost accepted sequence length by up to 60.8% and cut interaction rounds by 37.3% in distributed speculative decoding, with under 1% accuracy loss.
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Why and When Visual Token Pruning Fails? A Study on Relevant Visual Information Shift in MLLMs Decoding
Visual token pruning in MLLMs fails on complex reasoning due to Relevant Visual Information Shift during decoding, but the DSTP framework fixes it training-free across models.
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Sequential KV Cache Compression via Probabilistic Language Tries: Beyond the Per-Vector Shannon Limit
Sequential KV compression via probabilistic language tries and predictive delta coding achieves 3.3-4.3 bits per token entropy, yielding up to 914x better ratios than TurboQuant even with large overhead.
-
DMax: Aggressive Parallel Decoding for dLLMs
DMax uses On-Policy Uniform Training and Soft Parallel Decoding to enable aggressive parallelism in dLLMs, raising TPF on GSM8K from 2.04 to 5.47 and on MBPP from 2.71 to 5.86 while preserving accuracy.
-
KERV: Kinematic-Rectified Speculative Decoding for Embodied VLA Models
KERV integrates kinematic Kalman Filter predictions with speculative decoding in VLA models to achieve 27-37% faster inference while maintaining nearly the same task success rates.
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TokenTiming: A Dynamic Alignment Method for Universal Speculative Decoding Model Pairs
TokenTiming uses dynamic time warping on re-encoded token sequences to enable speculative decoding between models with different vocabularies, reporting 1.57x speedup.
-
Performance-Driven Policy Optimization for Speculative Decoding with Adaptive Windowing
PPOW uses window-level RL with cost-aware speedup and proximity rewards plus adaptive divergence-aware windowing to reach 6.29-6.52 acceptance lengths and 3.39-4.36x speedups in speculative decoding.
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Multi-Stream LLMs: Unblocking Language Models with Parallel Streams of Thoughts, Inputs and Outputs
Language models trained on parallel streams of computation can overcome single-stream bottlenecks in autonomous agents by enabling simultaneous reading, thinking, and acting.
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BitLM: Unlocking Multi-Token Language Generation with Bitwise Continuous Diffusion
BitLM replaces per-token softmax with bitwise continuous diffusion inside causal blocks to generate multiple tokens in parallel while preserving autoregressive structure.
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Edit-Based Refinement for Parallel Masked Diffusion Language Models
ME-DLM augments parallel masked diffusion models with edit-distance-supervised refinements to raise quality on coding and math benchmarks while using far fewer diffusion steps.
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PARD-2: Target-Aligned Parallel Draft Model for Dual-Mode Speculative Decoding
PARD-2 uses Confidence-Adaptive Token optimization to align draft model training with acceptance length in speculative decoding, enabling dual-mode operation and up to 6.94x lossless speedup on Llama3.1-8B.
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CASCADE: Context-Aware Relaxation for Speculative Image Decoding
CASCADE formalizes semantic interchangeability and convergence in target model representations to enable context-aware acceptance relaxation in tree-based speculative decoding, delivering up to 3.6x speedup on text-to-image models without quality loss.
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WindowQuant: Mixed-Precision KV Cache Quantization based on Window-Level Similarity for VLMs Inference Optimization
WindowQuant performs window-adaptive mixed-precision KV cache quantization guided by similarity to the text prompt, with reordering to enable efficient inference in VLMs.
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CoVSpec: Efficient Device-Edge Co-Inference for Vision-Language Models via Speculative Decoding
CoVSpec achieves up to 2.21x higher throughput and over 96% lower communication overhead for device-edge VLM inference via training-free visual token reduction, adaptive drafting, and decoupled parallel verification-correction in speculative decoding.
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Making Every Verified Token Count: Adaptive Verification for MoE Speculative Decoding
EVICT adaptively truncates draft trees in MoE speculative decoding by combining drafter signals with profiled costs to retain only cost-effective prefixes, delivering up to 2.35x speedup over autoregressive decoding.
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Unifying Sparse Attention with Hierarchical Memory for Scalable Long-Context LLM Serving
SPIN co-designs sparse attention with hierarchical memory to achieve 1.66-5.66x higher throughput, 7-9x lower TTFT, and up to 58% lower TPOT than vLLM and original sparse implementations.
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RACER: Retrieval-Augmented Contextual Rapid Speculative Decoding
RACER unifies retrieval of exact matching patterns with logit-driven cues to produce better speculative drafts, achieving more than 2x speedup over autoregressive decoding and outperforming prior training-free speculative decoding methods.
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SMART: When is it Actually Worth Expanding a Speculative Tree?
SMART uses marginal benefit-cost analysis to dynamically build efficient speculative trees, achieving 15-20% additional speedup in LLM and MLLM inference.
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EditFlow: Benchmarking and Optimizing Code Edit Recommendation Systems via Reconstruction of Developer Flows
EditFlow reconstructs temporal developer editing flows from code changes to benchmark and optimize AI code edit recommenders so they align with natural incremental reasoning rather than static snapshots.
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Multi-Token Prediction via Self-Distillation
Self-distillation turns pretrained autoregressive LMs into multi-token predictors that decode over 3x faster with under 5% accuracy drop on GSM8K.
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GlimpRouter: Efficient Collaborative Inference by Glimpsing One Token of Thoughts
GlimpRouter uses the entropy of the first token in each reasoning step to decide whether to invoke a large model, yielding 10.7% higher accuracy and 25.9% lower latency than a standalone large model on AIME25.
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Training-Free Loosely Speculative Decoding: Accepting Semantically Correct Drafts Beyond Exact Match
FLy is a training-free method that speeds up LLM generation by accepting semantically correct but non-exact draft tokens via an entropy gate and deferred verification window.
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Seer: Online Context Learning for Fast Synchronous LLM Reinforcement Learning
Seer improves synchronous LLM RL rollout throughput by up to 2.04x and reduces long-tail latency by 72-94% via divided rollout, context-aware scheduling, and adaptive grouped speculative decoding based on prompt similarity observations.
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Speculative Coupled Decoding for Training-Free Lossless Acceleration of Autoregressive Visual Generation
Speculative Coupled Decoding stabilizes draft sampling in Speculative Jacobi Decoding via an information-theoretic coupling step, delivering up to 4.2x image and 13.6x video speedups with no quality loss or training.
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MEM1: Learning to Synergize Memory and Reasoning for Efficient Long-Horizon Agents
MEM1 uses end-to-end RL to learn constant-memory agents that update a shared state for memory and reasoning, delivering 3.5x better performance and 3.7x lower memory use than larger baselines on long-horizon QA and shopping tasks.
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SnapKV: LLM Knows What You are Looking for Before Generation
SnapKV selects clustered important KV positions per attention head from an observation window at the prompt end, yielding 3.6x faster generation and 8.2x better memory efficiency on 16K-token inputs with comparable performance across 16 datasets.
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SSV: Sparse Speculative Verification for Efficient LLM Inference
SSV presents a sparse speculative-verification framework that resolves mismatches between speculative decoding and dynamic sparse attention to deliver up to 3.49x end-to-end throughput and 6.86x kernel speedups on NVIDIA H100 GPUs.
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Lever: Speculative LLM Inference on Smartphones
Lever optimizes the drafting, verification, and execution stages of speculative decoding for flash-backed LLM inference on smartphones, reporting 2.93x average latency reduction over baseline flash-offloaded inference.
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Acceptance Dynamics Across Cognitive Domains in Speculative Decoding
Empirical measurements across four NLP domains show task type is a stronger predictor of speculative decoding acceptance than tree depth, with chat uniquely achieving expected accepted length over 1 token per step.
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ECHO: Elastic Speculative Decoding with Sparse Gating for High-Concurrency Scenarios
ECHO uses sparse gating and elastic budget pivoting in a super-tree structure to achieve up to 5.35x speedup for LLM inference under high concurrency.
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ConFu: Contemplate the Future for Better Speculative Sampling
ConFu boosts speculative decoding acceptance rates 8-20% over EAGLE-3 by letting draft models use contemplate tokens and MoE to anticipate future generation direction.
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Growing a Multi-head Twig via Distillation and Reinforcement Learning to Accelerate Large Vision-Language Models
TwigVLM adds a twig module to VLMs for twig-guided token pruning and self-speculative decoding, retaining 96% performance after pruning 88.9% visual tokens and delivering 154% speedup on long responses for LLaVA-1.5-7B.
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Unlocking the Edge deployment and ondevice acceleration of multi-LoRA enabled one-for-all foundational LLM
A framework combines multi-LoRA runtime switching, multi-stream stylistic decoding, and Dynamic Self-Speculative Decoding with INT4 quantization to achieve 4-6x memory and latency gains for on-device inference of a one-for-all foundational LLM on Qualcomm chipsets.
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LLMOrbit: A Circular Taxonomy of Large Language Models -From Scaling Walls to Agentic AI Systems
A survey taxonomy of LLMs identifies three scaling crises and six efficiency paradigms while tracing the shift from generation to tool-using agents.
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Small Language Models (SLMs) Can Still Pack a Punch: A survey (updated 2026)
A literature survey of Small Language Models (1-8B parameters) that can perform comparably or better than larger models, covering general-purpose and task-specific approaches plus creation techniques.
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