Hybrid Verified Decoding: Learning to Allocate Verification in Speculative Decoding

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Su, Xin, Majchrowski, Dawid, Yu, Fangyuan, Shah, Vanshil Atul, Rogawski, Sebastian, Morkisz, Pawel, Bhiwandiwalla, Anahita, Howard, Phillip
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Su, Xin
Majchrowski, Dawid
Yu, Fangyuan
Shah, Vanshil Atul
Rogawski, Sebastian
Morkisz, Pawel
Bhiwandiwalla, Anahita
Howard, Phillip
author_facet Su, Xin
Majchrowski, Dawid
Yu, Fangyuan
Shah, Vanshil Atul
Rogawski, Sebastian
Morkisz, Pawel
Bhiwandiwalla, Anahita
Howard, Phillip
contents Large Language Model (LLM) generation remains expensive because autoregressive decoding calls the model once for each new token. Speculative decoding reduces this cost by drafting multiple tokens and verifying them with the target model in one step, but its speedup depends on how many drafted tokens are accepted. Parameter-free draft sources can propose long continuations at low cost in structured and agentic workloads, yet a cache match that looks promising at one generation step may have low payoff at the next. We propose Hybrid Verified Decoding, which predicts the accepted length of a cache draft before verification and uses this payoff estimate to choose between cache verification and a model-based drafter. Across three LLMs and sixteen datasets, Hybrid Verified Decoding is especially effective on agentic workflows, where it outperforms EAGLE3 in every setting with a 2.73x average speedup. Our analysis shows how prompt structure creates cache opportunities, how high-payoff cache drafts concentrate in a small part of the draft space, and how payoff-guided selection reduces sequential decoding work, pointing to runtime draft selection as a promising direction for speculative decoding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_01019
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hybrid Verified Decoding: Learning to Allocate Verification in Speculative Decoding
Su, Xin
Majchrowski, Dawid
Yu, Fangyuan
Shah, Vanshil Atul
Rogawski, Sebastian
Morkisz, Pawel
Bhiwandiwalla, Anahita
Howard, Phillip
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large Language Model (LLM) generation remains expensive because autoregressive decoding calls the model once for each new token. Speculative decoding reduces this cost by drafting multiple tokens and verifying them with the target model in one step, but its speedup depends on how many drafted tokens are accepted. Parameter-free draft sources can propose long continuations at low cost in structured and agentic workloads, yet a cache match that looks promising at one generation step may have low payoff at the next. We propose Hybrid Verified Decoding, which predicts the accepted length of a cache draft before verification and uses this payoff estimate to choose between cache verification and a model-based drafter. Across three LLMs and sixteen datasets, Hybrid Verified Decoding is especially effective on agentic workflows, where it outperforms EAGLE3 in every setting with a 2.73x average speedup. Our analysis shows how prompt structure creates cache opportunities, how high-payoff cache drafts concentrate in a small part of the draft space, and how payoff-guided selection reduces sequential decoding work, pointing to runtime draft selection as a promising direction for speculative decoding.
title Hybrid Verified Decoding: Learning to Allocate Verification in Speculative Decoding
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01019