MARS: Unleashing the Power of Speculative Decoding via Margin-Aware Verification
arXiv:2601.15498v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by decoupling generation and verification. While recent methods improve draft quality by tightly coupling the drafter with the target model, the verification mechanism itself remains largely unchanged, relying on strict token-level rejection sampling. In practice, modern LLMs frequently operate in low-margin regimes where the target model exhibits weak preference among top candidates. In such cases, rejecting plausible runner-up tokens yields negligible information gain […]