# StreamServe: Adaptive Speculative Flows for Low-Latency Disaggregated LLM Serving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09562 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09562/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Serving systems and request scheduling, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 13 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [Serving systems and request scheduling](https://mlsanity.com/inference/serving-systems-and-request-scheduling/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17192/) (2022)
- [Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10774/) (2024)
- [DistServe: Disaggregating Prefill and Decoding for Goodput-optimized Large Language Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09670/) (2024)
- [Taming Throughput-Latency Tradeoff in LLM Inference with Sarathi-Serve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02310/) (2024)
- [Prompt Cache: Modular Attention Reuse for Low-Latency Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04934/) (2023)
- [FlashInfer: Efficient and Customizable Attention Engine for LLM Inference Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01005/) (2025)
- [LMCache: An Efficient KV Cache Layer for Enterprise-Scale LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09665/) (2025)
- [Efficient LLM Scheduling by Learning to Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15792/) (2024)
- [SpecDec++: Boosting Speculative Decoding via Adaptive Candidate Lengths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19715/) (2024)
- [Optimal Scheduling Algorithms for LLM Inference: Theory and Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01002/) (2025)
- [FairBatching: Fairness-Aware Batch Formation for LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14392/) (2025)
- [Speculative Verification: Exploiting Information Gain to Refine Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24328/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Efficient LLM serving must balance throughput and latency across diverse, bursty workloads. We introduce StreamServe, a disaggregated prefill decode serving architecture that combines metric aware routing across compute lanes with adaptive speculative decoding that tunes speculation depth online from runtime signals. StreamServe comprises four components: StreamScheduler for request orchestration, FlowGuard for multi signal routing, PipeServe Engine for disaggregated prefill decode execution on multi GPU, and SpecuStream for runtime adaptive speculation. We evaluate StreamServe on four benchmarks ALPACA, GSM8K, HUMANEVAL, and SUM with 80 queries each and 320 total using 4 A800 40GB GPUs configured as two stream pairs. Across these workloads, StreamServe reduces latency by 11 to 18 times relative to tensor parallel vLLM baselines and reaches throughput up to 2235 tokens per second on summarization tasks. Time per output token remains stable across configurations, indicating that the gains arise from architectural efficiency rather than token quality degradation. Although evaluated on a single node 4 GPU setup, these results suggest that jointly adapting routing and speculation within a disaggregated framework creates a distinct operating regime for LLM inference.