Multi-Drafter Speculative Decoding with Alignment Feedback
About
Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a smaller model to draft future tokens, which are then verified by the target LLM. This preserves generation quality by accepting only aligned tokens. However, individual drafters, often trained for specific tasks or domains, exhibit limited effectiveness across diverse applications. To address this, we introduce \textsc{MetaSD}, a unified framework that integrates multiple drafters into the SD process. MetaSD dynamically allocates computational resources to heterogeneous drafters by leveraging alignment feedback and framing drafter selection as a multi-armed bandit problem. Extensive experiments show MetaSD consistently outperforms single-drafter approaches.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Machine Translation | WMT German-English 16 (test) | Speedup ratio2.318 | 26 | |
| Question Answering | Natural Questions (test) | Speedup Ratio2.641 | 26 | |
| Summarization | CNN/Daily Mail (test) | Speedup Ratio3.057 | 26 | |
| Code Generation | MT-Bench (test) | Speedup Ratio3.724 | 26 | |
| Mathematical Reasoning | GSM8K (test) | Relative Speedup2.28 | 17 | |
| Mathematical Reasoning | GSM8K (test) | Speedup Ratio3.52 | 14 | |
| Machine Translation | JA-EN | Speedup Ratio1.26 | 8 | |
| Machine Translation | Ru-En | Speedup Ratio1.503 | 8 | |
| Machine Translation | DE-EN | Speedup Ratio1.693 | 8 | |
| Machine Translation | FR-EN | Speedup Ratio1.775 | 8 |