What is Speculative Decoding? (trending on paperswithco.de) [R]

A method that is currently trending on Papers with Code is Speculative Decoding.

https://preview.redd.it/dm4nh4t71o7h1.png?width=3082&format=png&auto=webp&s=b6468668667d4bcfb6c9248d3af7fd09f21fe0da

Speculative decoding is an inference optimization technique that uses a fast, small "draft" model to quickly propose several future tokens, which are then verified in parallel by a larger, slower "target" model.

This process significantly speeds up token generation for large language models (LLMs) by allowing multiple tokens per step without sacrificing output quality.

SGLang, one of the most popular frameworks for running LLMs alongside vLLM, just released a blog post detailing how they achieve state-of-the-art latencies for LLM inference serving using Modal and Z.ai's DFlash speculative decoding models.

Learn more at https://paperswithcode.co/methods/speculative-decoding. You can also find all the papers that cite the original paper that introduced this technique.

SGLang's blog: https://www.lmsys.org/blog/2026-06-15-next-generation-speculative-decoding-dflash-v2/

Let me know which other methods I should add!

Cheers,
Niels from HF