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Inference & ServingMedium· Speculative Decoding· Latency Optimization· Model Efficiency
Walk me through how speculative decoding works and why it speeds things up.
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See plansSpeculative decoding operates by having a draft model generate a sequence of K tokens, which are then verified by the target model in a single forward pass. Because the target model’s verification step is a prefill operation, it is parallelizable and compute-bound rather than sequential and memory-bandwidth-bound. The speed-up is quantified by the average acceptance rate (alpha) and the number of tokens drafted (K), allowing the system to generate multiple tokens per target model forward pass.