Strong Drafts Need Compact Memories: Long-Context Speculative Decoding with Compressed KV Cache
Long-context LLM applications such as document summarization and multi-turn agents require generation from prefixes spanning tens of thousands of tokens, making decoding latency a major bottleneck. Speculative decoding (SD) reduces latency without changing model outputs, but its speedup depends on both accepted draft tokens and draft-step latency: Lightweight drafts are fast but lack the capacity to capture long-range dependencies, whereas strong independent drafts recover acceptance but incur growing KV-access cost at long prefixes. We introduce memory-augmented drafting for long-context SD, equipping a strong independent draft with compressed draft-side KV memory: A lightweight adaptor ...
| Authors | Tong Yuan, Chengxi Liao, Zeyi Wen |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 31 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 August 2026 |
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