SENSE: Semantic Embedding Navigation with Soft-gated Evaluation for Retrieval-based Speculative Decoding
Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) inference by employing a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens, which are verified in parallel by the target model, without compromising generation quality. While Retrieval-based Speculative Decoding (RSD) is favored for its plug-and-play versatility, its potential is impeded by rigid lexical dependencies, rendering both retrieval and verification brittle to surface-level variations. To address this, we propose SENSE (Semantic Embedding Navigation with Soft-gated Evaluation). By anchoring retrieval on the hidden states of the target model, SENSE establishes robust semantic alignment, which empowers the Soft-gat...
| Authors | Shaowen Chen, Zhicheng Liao, Hongwei Wang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 14 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 April 2026 |
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