Beyond the Target: From Imitation to Collaboration in Speculative Decoding
Speculative decoding (SPD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by letting a smaller draft model propose multiple future tokens that are verified in parallel by a larger target model. The dominant SPD paradigm treats the target model as the sole reliable teacher, accepting a draft token only when it exactly matches the target prediction. This design implicitly assumes that the target is always the better choice at every position. In practice, this assumption does not hold. Although the draft is the weaker model overall, it is not uniformly inferior at the token level. In a meaningful fraction of cases where draft and target disagree, the draft's choice is the one that leads to...
| Authors | Jinze Li, Yixing Xu, Guanchen Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 24 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 May 2026 |
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