arxivcs.LGcs.AI2026-07-09
A Practical Investigation of Training-free Relaxed Speculative Decoding
Guoxuan Xia, Luka Ribar, Paul Balanca
Speculative decoding accelerates sampling from an autoregressive LLM by using a faster auxiliary model to draft tokens which are then verified in parallel by the LLM. Standard speculative decoding is lossless: its rejection and resampling steps exactly preserve the LLM's sampling…