AdaSD: Adaptive Speculative Decoding for Efficient Language Model Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Lu, Kuan-Wei, Hong, Ding-Yong, Liu, Pangfeng, Wu, Jan-Jan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Lu, Kuan-Wei
Hong, Ding-Yong
Liu, Pangfeng
Wu, Jan-Jan
author_facet Lu, Kuan-Wei
Hong, Ding-Yong
Liu, Pangfeng
Wu, Jan-Jan
contents Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their increasing parameter sizes significantly slow down inference. Speculative decoding mitigates this issue by leveraging a smaller draft model to predict candidate tokens, which are then verified by a larger target model. However, existing approaches often require additional training, extensive hyperparameter tuning, or prior analysis of models and tasks before deployment. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Speculative Decoding (AdaSD), a hyperparameter-free decoding scheme that dynamically adjusts generation length and acceptance criteria during inference. AdaSD introduces two adaptive components: one to determine when to stop candidate token generation and the other to decide token acceptance, updated in real time based on token entropy and Jensen-Shannon distance. This approach eliminates the need for pre-analysis or fine-tuning and is compatible with off-the-shelf models. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that AdaSD achieves up to 1.46x speedup over vanilla speculative decoding while limiting accuracy degradation to under 1.8%, making it a practical solution for efficient and adaptive LLM inference.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_11280
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AdaSD: Adaptive Speculative Decoding for Efficient Language Model Inference
Lu, Kuan-Wei
Hong, Ding-Yong
Liu, Pangfeng
Wu, Jan-Jan
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their increasing parameter sizes significantly slow down inference. Speculative decoding mitigates this issue by leveraging a smaller draft model to predict candidate tokens, which are then verified by a larger target model. However, existing approaches often require additional training, extensive hyperparameter tuning, or prior analysis of models and tasks before deployment. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Speculative Decoding (AdaSD), a hyperparameter-free decoding scheme that dynamically adjusts generation length and acceptance criteria during inference. AdaSD introduces two adaptive components: one to determine when to stop candidate token generation and the other to decide token acceptance, updated in real time based on token entropy and Jensen-Shannon distance. This approach eliminates the need for pre-analysis or fine-tuning and is compatible with off-the-shelf models. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that AdaSD achieves up to 1.46x speedup over vanilla speculative decoding while limiting accuracy degradation to under 1.8%, making it a practical solution for efficient and adaptive LLM inference.
title AdaSD: Adaptive Speculative Decoding for Efficient Language Model Inference
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11280