Speculative Actions: A Lossless Framework for Faster Agentic Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ye, Naimeng, Ahuja, Arnav, Liargkovas, Georgios, Lu, Yunan, Kaffes, Kostis, Peng, Tianyi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ye, Naimeng
Ahuja, Arnav
Liargkovas, Georgios
Lu, Yunan
Kaffes, Kostis
Peng, Tianyi
author_facet Ye, Naimeng
Ahuja, Arnav
Liargkovas, Georgios
Lu, Yunan
Kaffes, Kostis
Peng, Tianyi
contents AI agents are increasingly deployed in complex, interactive environments, yet their runtime remains a major bottleneck for training, evaluation, and real-world use. Typical agent behavior unfolds sequentially, with each action requiring an API call that can incur substantial latency. For example, a game of chess between two state-of-the-art agents can take hours. We introduce Speculative Actions, a lossless acceleration framework for general agentic systems. Inspired by speculative execution in microprocessors and speculative decoding in LLM inference, our method uses faster models to predict likely future actions and execute them in parallel, committing only when predictions match. We evaluate speculative actions across gaming, e-commerce, and web search environments, and additionally study a lossy extension in an operating systems setting. Across domains, we achieve up to 55% next-action prediction accuracy, translating into up to 20% latency reductions. Finally, we present a cost-latency analysis that formalizes the tradeoff between speculative breadth and time savings. This analysis enables principled tuning and selective branch launching to ensure that multi-branch speculation delivers practical speedups without prohibitive cost growth.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_04371
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Speculative Actions: A Lossless Framework for Faster Agentic Systems
Ye, Naimeng
Ahuja, Arnav
Liargkovas, Georgios
Lu, Yunan
Kaffes, Kostis
Peng, Tianyi
Artificial Intelligence
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Multiagent Systems
AI agents are increasingly deployed in complex, interactive environments, yet their runtime remains a major bottleneck for training, evaluation, and real-world use. Typical agent behavior unfolds sequentially, with each action requiring an API call that can incur substantial latency. For example, a game of chess between two state-of-the-art agents can take hours. We introduce Speculative Actions, a lossless acceleration framework for general agentic systems. Inspired by speculative execution in microprocessors and speculative decoding in LLM inference, our method uses faster models to predict likely future actions and execute them in parallel, committing only when predictions match. We evaluate speculative actions across gaming, e-commerce, and web search environments, and additionally study a lossy extension in an operating systems setting. Across domains, we achieve up to 55% next-action prediction accuracy, translating into up to 20% latency reductions. Finally, we present a cost-latency analysis that formalizes the tradeoff between speculative breadth and time savings. This analysis enables principled tuning and selective branch launching to ensure that multi-branch speculation delivers practical speedups without prohibitive cost growth.
title Speculative Actions: A Lossless Framework for Faster Agentic Systems
topic Artificial Intelligence
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04371