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Sequoia: Scalable, Robust, and Hardware-aware Speculative Decoding

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arxiv 2402.12374 v3 pith:BWQXTQUK submitted 2024-02-19 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords sequoiatimesdecodingspeculativehardware-awareinferenceintroducesrobust
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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abstract

As the usage of large language models (LLMs) grows, performing efficient inference with these models becomes increasingly important. While speculative decoding has recently emerged as a promising direction for speeding up inference, existing methods are limited in their ability to scale to larger speculation budgets, and adapt to different hyperparameters and hardware. This paper introduces Sequoia, a scalable, robust, and hardware-aware algorithm for speculative decoding. To attain better scalability, Sequoia introduces a dynamic programming algorithm to find the optimal tree structure for the speculated tokens. To achieve robust speculative performance, Sequoia uses a novel sampling and verification method that outperforms prior work across different decoding temperatures. Finally, Sequoia introduces a hardware-aware tree optimizer that maximizes speculative performance by automatically selecting the token tree size and depth for a given hardware platform. Evaluation shows that Sequoia improves the decoding speed of Llama2-7B, Llama2-13B, and Vicuna-33B on an A100 by up to $4.04\times$, $3.73\times$, and $2.27\times$. For offloading setting on L40, Sequoia achieves as low as 0.56 s/token for exact Llama2-70B inference latency, which is $9.96\times$ on our optimized offloading system (5.6 s/token), $9.7\times$ than DeepSpeed-Zero-Inference, $19.5\times$ than Huggingface Accelerate.

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Forward citations

Cited by 12 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Bole: Efficient Tree Speculation for Hybrid-Attention Language Models

    cs.DC 2026-08 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Bole derives an exact parallel closed-form for tree-structured verification of gated delta linear attention, plus a GPU kernel and serving-runtime integration that improve hybrid-LLM decode throughput.

  2. Beyond KV Reconstruction: Functional Reconstruction for MLA Draft Models in Speculative Decoding

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    A post-conversion training objective that reconstructs the original attention function of MLA-converted draft models improves speculative-decoding acceptance in most of 64 matched task cells.

  3. Trees from Marginals: Autoregressive drafting with factorized priors

    cs.LG 2026-07 accept novelty 7.0 of 10

    Weaver restores conditional dependencies on top-K factorized marginals to build high-acceptance draft trees, plus a fused GDN tree-verify kernel, yielding 4.37× AR speedup and 24.7% over DFlash.

  4. AsymSpec: Efficient Cloud-Edge Speculative Decoding over Asymmetric Networks

    cs.DC 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    AsymSpec speeds cloud-edge speculative decoding by uploading only token-probability pairs, moving correction traffic to the downlink, and overlapping independent requests instead of same-request runahead.

  5. Approximate Speculative Decoding

    cs.LG 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A training-free verifier, ASD, allows a bounded number of low-regret draft-target mismatches during speculative decoding and reuses the target-greedy suffix, yielding 3 to 15 percent throughput gains with mostly small...

  6. BEST-Route: Adaptive LLM Routing with Test-Time Optimal Compute

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A routing system that chooses both the model and the number of samples per query to meet a quality threshold, yielding up to 60% cost savings.

  7. POSS: Position Specialist Generates Better Draft for Speculative Decoding

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Using position-specialized draft layers instead of one single draft model improves later-token acceptance in speculative decoding, yielding modest speedups on Llama-3-8B and Llama-2-13B.

  8. CLaSp: In-Context Layer Skip for Self-Speculative Decoding

    cs.CL 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A training-free, context-adaptive layer-skipping method for self-speculative decoding that reports roughly 1.1x to 1.8x speedups on LLaMA models while preserving output distribution.

  9. Ghidorah: Fast LLM Inference on Edge with Speculative Decoding and Hetero-Core Parallelism

    cs.DC 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    On unified-memory edge hardware, Ghidorah partitions Medusa-style speculative decoding across CPU and GPU with all-column weight splits, sparse ARM kernels, and profile-based tuning, reporting up to 7.6x decode speedup.

  10. Reinforcement Speculative Decoding for Fast Ranking

    cs.AI 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    RSD uses reinforcement learning to train an agent that iteratively modifies an LLM's ranking under a fixed call budget, outperforming single-token and speculative-decoding baselines on IR and RS datasets.

  11. AngelSpec: Towards Real-World High Performance Inference with Speculative Decoding

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    AngelSpec + DFly pair a chat MTP drafter with a code/math block-diffusion drafter and load-aware verification pruning, reaching up to 2.4x AR throughput on Hy3-A21B.

  12. SpecASR: Accelerating LLM-based Automatic Speech Recognition via Speculative Decoding

    eess.AS 2025-07 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    SpecASR accelerates LLM-based ASR by 3.04x-3.79x over autoregressive decoding using adaptive draft lengths, draft token recycling, and sparse token trees, but the speedups are simulated from Whisper proxy models rathe...

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