Revisiting Lossy Verification in Speculative Decoding: Mechanisms, Trade-offs, and Failure Modes
Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by allowing a lightweight draft model to propose tokens that are subsequently verified in parallel by a larger target model. Recent approaches introduce lossy verification schemes to further improve efficiency by relaxing strict distributional matching. Yet such relaxation silently rewrites the decoding distribution, and the resulting acceleration can come at the cost of unstable, sometimes severely degraded generation quality. In this work, we present a principled analysis of the distributions induced by lossy verification methods. We show that many seemingly distinct approaches differ only superficially and can be unif...
| Authors | Tianyu Wang, Yuxuan Zhou, Heng Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 September 2026 |
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