Trajectory-Triggered Sparse Collaborative Decoding
Dense assistance methods such as speculative decoding repeatedly verify draft tokens with a target model, keeping target computation coupled to generation. We study sparse collaborative decoding, where a draft model generates most tokens and a target model is invoked only for short corrective segments. The key problem is deciding when to call the target. We show that local uncertainty is a weak trigger: entropy, negative log-likelihood, logit margin, top-$k$ mass, and velocity features give near-chance failure prediction, with AUC 0.50-0.53. In contrast, aggregate trajectory-shape features over the draft confidence path reach AUC 0.86 using a lightweight logistic predictor trained only fr...
| Authors | Amit Ranjan Trivedi, Sruthikesh Surineni, Kyong Ho Lee et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 16 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 October 2026 |
Popularity, last 5 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 Information may be incomplete or out of date.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 23 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.