C2T: A Classifier-Based Tree Construction Method in Speculative Decoding

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Main Authors: Huo, Feiye, Tan, Jianchao, Zhang, Kefeng, Cai, Xunliang, Sun, Shengli
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Huo, Feiye
Tan, Jianchao
Zhang, Kefeng
Cai, Xunliang
Sun, Shengli
author_facet Huo, Feiye
Tan, Jianchao
Zhang, Kefeng
Cai, Xunliang
Sun, Shengli
contents The growing scale of Large Language Models (LLMs) has exacerbated inference latency and computational costs. Speculative decoding methods, which aim to mitigate these issues, often face inefficiencies in the construction of token trees and the verification of candidate tokens. Existing strategies, including chain mode, static tree, and dynamic tree approaches, have limitations in accurately preparing candidate token trees for verification. We propose a novel method named C2T that adopts a lightweight classifier to generate and prune token trees dynamically. Our classifier considers additional feature variables beyond the commonly used joint probability to predict the confidence score for each draft token to determine whether it is the candidate token for verification. This method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods such as EAGLE-2 on multiple benchmarks, by reducing the total number of candidate tokens by 25% while maintaining or even improving the acceptance length.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_13652
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle C2T: A Classifier-Based Tree Construction Method in Speculative Decoding
Huo, Feiye
Tan, Jianchao
Zhang, Kefeng
Cai, Xunliang
Sun, Shengli
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The growing scale of Large Language Models (LLMs) has exacerbated inference latency and computational costs. Speculative decoding methods, which aim to mitigate these issues, often face inefficiencies in the construction of token trees and the verification of candidate tokens. Existing strategies, including chain mode, static tree, and dynamic tree approaches, have limitations in accurately preparing candidate token trees for verification. We propose a novel method named C2T that adopts a lightweight classifier to generate and prune token trees dynamically. Our classifier considers additional feature variables beyond the commonly used joint probability to predict the confidence score for each draft token to determine whether it is the candidate token for verification. This method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods such as EAGLE-2 on multiple benchmarks, by reducing the total number of candidate tokens by 25% while maintaining or even improving the acceptance length.
title C2T: A Classifier-Based Tree Construction Method in Speculative Decoding
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13652