OWL: Overcoming Window Length-Dependence in Speculative Decoding for Long-Context Inputs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Lee, Jaeseong, hwang, seung-won, Qiao, Aurick, Oliaro, Gabriele, Wang, Ye, Rajbhandari, Samyam
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Lee, Jaeseong
hwang, seung-won
Qiao, Aurick
Oliaro, Gabriele
Wang, Ye
Rajbhandari, Samyam
author_facet Lee, Jaeseong
hwang, seung-won
Qiao, Aurick
Oliaro, Gabriele
Wang, Ye
Rajbhandari, Samyam
contents Speculative decoding promises faster inference for large language models (LLMs), yet existing methods fail to generalize to real-world settings. Benchmarks typically assume short contexts (e.g., 2K tokens), whereas practical workloads involve long contexts. We find current approaches degrade severely with long contexts; for instance, EAGLE3 even slows down the generation speed by 0.81x. We address these limitations by releasing a new long-context benchmark (LongSpecBench) and introducing a novel model (OWL). OWL achieves about 5x higher acceptance length than EAGLE3 on long-context inputs through three innovations: (1) an LSTM-based drafter conditioned only on the last-token state, making it generalize to various lengths, (2) a special token [SPEC] in the verifier that produces richer representation for drafter, and (3) a hybrid algorithm combining both tree and non-tree decoding methods. We release all code and datasets to advance future research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_07535
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle OWL: Overcoming Window Length-Dependence in Speculative Decoding for Long-Context Inputs
Lee, Jaeseong
hwang, seung-won
Qiao, Aurick
Oliaro, Gabriele
Wang, Ye
Rajbhandari, Samyam
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Speculative decoding promises faster inference for large language models (LLMs), yet existing methods fail to generalize to real-world settings. Benchmarks typically assume short contexts (e.g., 2K tokens), whereas practical workloads involve long contexts. We find current approaches degrade severely with long contexts; for instance, EAGLE3 even slows down the generation speed by 0.81x. We address these limitations by releasing a new long-context benchmark (LongSpecBench) and introducing a novel model (OWL). OWL achieves about 5x higher acceptance length than EAGLE3 on long-context inputs through three innovations: (1) an LSTM-based drafter conditioned only on the last-token state, making it generalize to various lengths, (2) a special token [SPEC] in the verifier that produces richer representation for drafter, and (3) a hybrid algorithm combining both tree and non-tree decoding methods. We release all code and datasets to advance future research.
title OWL: Overcoming Window Length-Dependence in Speculative Decoding for Long-Context Inputs
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07535