# DREAM-S: Speculative Decoding with Searchable Drafting and Target-Aware Refinement for Multimodal Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00535 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00535/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Visual token pruning and efficiency, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 40 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Visual token pruning and efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/visual-token-pruning-and-efficiency/)
- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [Fast autoregressive visual generation](https://mlsanity.com/inference/fast-autoregressive-visual-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17192/) (2022)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01318/) (2023)
- [Analyzing Multi-Head Self-Attention: Specialized Heads Do the Heavy Lifting, the Rest Can Be Pruned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09418/) (2019)
- [Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10774/) (2024)
- [Are Sixteen Heads Really Better than One?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10650/) (2019)
- [Once-for-All: Train One Network and Specialize it for Efficient Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09791/) (2019)
- [ProxylessNAS: Direct Neural Architecture Search on Target Task and Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00332/) (2018)
- [EAGLE: Speculative Sampling Requires Rethinking Feature Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15077/) (2024)
- [Unified Vision-Language Pre-Training for Image Captioning and VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11059/) (2019)
- [Sheared LLaMA: Accelerating Language Model Pre-training via Structured Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06694/) (2023)
- [EAGLE-2: Faster Inference of Language Models with Dynamic Draft Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16858/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Convolution: Attention over Convolution Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03458/) (2019)
- [EAGLE-3: Scaling up Inference Acceleration of Large Language Models via Training-Time Test](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01840/) (2025)
- [Blockwise Parallel Decoding for Deep Autoregressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03115/) (2018)
- [Layer by Layer: Uncovering Hidden Representations in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02013/) (2025)
- [SmolVLM: Redefining small and efficient multimodal models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05299/) (2025)
- [Progressive Differentiable Architecture Search: Bridging the Depth Gap between Search and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12760/) (2019)
- [MMT-Bench: A Comprehensive Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models Towards Multitask AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16006/) (2024)
- [VisualGPT: Data-efficient Adaptation of Pretrained Language Models for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10407/) (2021)
- [Speculative Decoding: Exploiting Speculative Execution for Accelerating Seq2seq Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16487/) (2022)
- [FBNetV2: Differentiable Neural Architecture Search for Spatial and Channel Dimensions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05565/) (2020)
- [Sequoia: Scalable, Robust, and Hardware-aware Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12374/) (2024)
- [SEED-Bench-2: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17092/) (2023)
- [Kangaroo: Lossless Self-Speculative Decoding via Double Early Exiting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18911/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [FOVEA: Focused On-Demand Visual Evidence Adaptation for Cache-Friendly Multimodal Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22883/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speculative decoding (SD) has proven to be an effective technique for accelerating autoregressive generation in large language models (LLMs) however, its application to vision-language models (VLMs) remains relatively unexplored. We propose~textitDREAM-S, a novel SD framework designed specifically for fast and efficient decoding in VLMs. DREAM-S leverages a neural architecture search (NAS) framework with target-aware supernet training to automatically identify both the optimal interaction strategy between the draft and target models, and the most suitable draft model architecture for the underlying hardware implementation platform. DREAM-S additionally incorporates adaptive intermediate feature distillation, guided by attention entropy, to enable efficient draft training. Experiments on a range of well-established VLMs show that DREAM-S achieves up to a 3.85× speedup compared to standard decoding approaches and significantly outperforms existing SD baselines. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/SAI-Lab-NYU/DREAM-S .