Speculative Speculative Decoding
Autoregressive decoding is bottlenecked by its sequential nature. Speculative decoding has become a standard way to accelerate inference by using a fast draft model to predict upcoming tokens from a slower target model, and then verifying them in parallel with a single target model forward pass. However, speculative decoding itself relies on a sequential dependence between speculation and verification. We introduce speculative speculative decoding (SSD) to parallelize these operations. While a verification is ongoing, the draft model predicts likely verification outcomes and prepares speculations pre-emptively for them. If the actual verification outcome is then in the predicted set, a sp...
| Authors | Tanishq Kumar, Tri Dao, Avner May |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 3 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 May 2026 |
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