Trees from Marginals: Autoregressive drafting with factorized priors
About
Speculative decoding greatly increases the interactivity of autoregressive language models by trading off computation for extra tokens generated in a single forward pass. Factorized draft models are especially efficient because they predict future-token marginals in parallel, but their independence assumption causes acceptance rates to degrade sharply as the speculative budget grows. We analyze this limitation and introduce Weaver, a lightweight autoregressive adapter that constructs proposal trees from the top-K marginals of a factorized drafter. Weaver restores conditional dependencies between proposed tokens while avoiding a full-vocabulary projection. To support fast verification for models with Gated Delta Net layers, we derive a rollback-free tree-verification algorithm and implement optimized CUDA kernels in SGLang. By combining these model and systems contributions we achieve a 4.37-fold speedup over autoregressive decoding, and outperform a highly optimized DFlash baseline by 24.7%.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chat | MT-Bench | -- | 73 | |
| Math | GSM8K | Speedup4.85 | 14 | |
| Math | MATH500 | Speedup5.3 | 14 | |
| Chat | ShareChat | Speedup2.85 | 8 | |
| Aggregate Performance | Macro Avg. | Speedup4.37 | 7 | |
| Code | HumanEval | Speedup5.17 | 2 |