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How speculative decoding makes LLMs go brrr – Leonie Monigatti

leoniemonigatti.com · 3,464 words · saved by 1 readers

Learn how speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference without quality loss: the draft-and-verify algorithm, plus Medusa, EAGLE, DFlash, and DSpark.

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) generate text autoregressively. This means that text is generated token by token, where each token requires a full forward pass of the model. This sequential dependency makes inference latency proportional to output length, and thus slow. For latency-critical applications, such as real-time conversation or multi-turn agentic workflows, this is a real bottleneck in production speculative decoding aims to overcome. Speculative decoding is an inference optimization technique that reduces decoding latency while preserving output quality. It was…

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