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Multi-Candidate Speculative Decoding

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arxiv 2401.06706 v1 pith:XONKV7Z5 submitted 2024-01-12 cs.CL

Multi-Candidate Speculative Decoding

classification cs.CL
keywords modeldecodingspeculativeacceptancecandidatedraftmodelsmulti-candidate
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large language models have shown impressive capabilities across a variety of NLP tasks, yet their generating text autoregressively is time-consuming. One way to speed them up is speculative decoding, which generates candidate segments (a sequence of tokens) from a fast draft model that is then verified in parallel by the target model. However, the acceptance rate of candidate tokens receives limitations from several factors, such as the model, the dataset, and the decoding setup. This paper proposes sampling multiple candidates from a draft model and then organising them in batches for verification. We design algorithms for efficient multi-candidate verification while maintaining the distribution of the target model. Our approach shows significant improvements in acceptance rates on multiple datasets and models, consistently outperforming standard speculative decoding.

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Forward citations

Cited by 8 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. When Is a Draft Accepted? A Theory of Acceptance in Speculative Decoding

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Develops theory for acceptance in speculative decoding under greedy/relaxed/tree criteria, with exact KL certificates and margin bounds, evaluated on Qwen3 models.

  2. UniVer: A Unified Perspective for Multi-step and Multi-draft Speculative Decoding

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    UniVer frames tree-based speculative decoding as conditional optimal transport, proving it is lossless with optimal acceptance rates and delivering 4.2-8.5% longer accepted sequences than standard rejection sampling.

  3. Copy-as-Decode: Grammar-Constrained Parallel Prefill for LLM Editing

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Copy-as-Decode recasts LLM editing as grammar-constrained decoding over copy and generate primitives, delivering closed-form upper-bound speedups of 13x pooled on editing benchmarks via parallel prefill without any training.

  4. SpecTr-GBV: Multi-Draft Block Verification Accelerating Speculative Decoding

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    SpecTr-GBV combines multi-draft and block verification via optimal transport to achieve the optimal expected acceptance length under i.i.d. draft generation.

  5. Revisiting Lossy Verification in Speculative Decoding: Mechanisms, Trade-offs, and Failure Modes

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Lossy speculative-decoding verification splits into truncation-based and collaborative methods; truncation-based methods underperform their matched baselines, and capping draft overshoot preserves quality.

  6. Unlocking Parallelism in Autoregressive Language Models via Speculative Decoding with Progressive Tree Drafting

    cs.CL 2026-07 accept novelty 6.0

    PTD accelerates autoregressive LLM decoding up to ~2× by guiding the target model to explore multiple coherent draft paths via a progressive, pruned tree in a single forward pass.

  7. Copy-as-Decode: Grammar-Constrained Parallel Prefill for LLM Editing

    cs.CL 2026-04 conditional novelty 6.0

    Copy-as-Decode recasts LLM editing as grammar-constrained decoding over copy/generate primitives, using parallel prefill to replace autoregressive generation of verbatim spans.

  8. Multi-Drafter Speculative Decoding with Alignment Feedback

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    MetaSD integrates multiple heterogeneous drafters into speculative decoding, dynamically selecting them via alignment feedback modeled as a multi-armed bandit to consistently outperform single-drafter baselines.