Approximate Speculative Decoding
Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by verifying a draft block with a target model in parallel. Under standard greedy verification, decoding stops at the first draft token that differs from the target argmax, discarding the remaining target-scored suffix. Although accepting such a mismatch changes the decoding trajectory, it can make a contiguous suffix reusable when its tokens remain target-greedy under the realized prefix. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{Approximate Speculative Decoding (ASD)}, a training-free verifier that replaces binary first-mismatch truncation with budgeted longest-prefix selection. ASD accepts selected mismatches subject to a local targe...
| Authors | Yuannuo Feng, Zegang Peng, Yuxin Xie et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 4 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 August 2026 |
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