Nucleus Speculative Decoding: Plausibility-Aware Verification Beyond Exact Distribution
Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive generation by letting a lightweight draft model propose tokens that a target model verifies in parallel. However, its standard acceptance rule, designed for exact distribution correction, rejects tokens to which the draft assigns excess probability, even when the target finds them highly plausible: over half of the rejected tokens lie inside the target's own nucleus. Since verification dominates the cost of SD, these rejections waste its most expensive operation. We introduce Nucleus Speculative Decoding (NSD), a plausibility-aware verification rule that accepts a draft token if it passes the standard test or belongs to the target nucle...
| Authors | Shuhao Li, Fanghua Ye, Wanyu Lin et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 6 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 October 2026 |
Popularity, last 2 days
0 now. Counts as reported by the source, snapshotted daily by Silytics.
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.