AngelSpec: Towards Real-World High Performance Inference with Speculative Decoding
On the map: Efficient LLM inference and serving → Speculative decoding
Abstract (arXiv)
Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference without changing the target distribution, but no single drafting structure performs best across real-world workloads. Autoregressive multi-token prediction (MTP) is a lightweight, stable proposal mechanism, whereas block-parallel diffusion amortizes drafting latency over much longer candidate sequences; the better choice depends strongly on the output distribution. We present AngelSpec, a unified training framework for MTP and block-parallel speculative decoding that addresses this heterogeneity at three levels. At the training level, rather than fitting one universal drafter to a uniform data mixture, we co-specialize structure and data: the MTP drafter is trained on diverse conversational data for high-entropy open-ended chat, and the block-diffusion drafter on code and mathematics data for longer predictable continuations. At the architecture level, we propose DFly, a block-diffusion framework combining a hybrid target-conditioning backbone with a predecessor-conditioned autoregressive head, improving target-feature utilization and intra-block dependency modeling while keeping generation parallel. At the inference level, both acceptance length and verification cost vary with domain, request, online load, and hardware, so DFly treats verification as a shared batch-level resource: it reallocates compute toward high-confidence prefixes across requests and combines expected utility with a profiled cost model to adapt verification depth online. Across the Hy3 series, DFly raises the average accepted length on Hy3-A21B by roughly 30% and attains the highest average throughput at every tested concurrency from 4 to 64, a 1.98-2.40x speedup over autoregressive decoding and 10.5-11.8% higher throughput than DFlash. We release AngelSpec to support training and extending these methods.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Speculative decoding, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving. Builds on 47 of its 52 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2026.
Builds on
47 of 52 references.
Closest ancestors · 32
Same direction, newest first
- 2026D-cut: Adaptive Verification Depth Pruning for Batched Speculative Decoding16 Jul
- 2026DSpark: Confidence-Scheduled Speculative Decoding with Semi-Autoregressive Generation6 Jul
- 2026TreeFlash: Parallel AR-Approximation for Faster Speculative Decoding2 Jun
- 2026DFlare: Scaling Up Draft Capacity for Block Diffusion Speculative Decoding1 Jun
- 2026Domino: Decoupling Causal Modeling from Autoregressive Drafting in Speculative Decoding28 May
- 2026Draft Less, Retrieve More: Hybrid Tree Construction for Speculative Decoding19 May
- 2026D-PACE: Dynamic Position-Aware Cross-Entropy for Parallel Speculative Drafting12 May
- 2026ECHO: Elastic Speculative Decoding with Sparse Gating for High-Concurrency Scenarios10 Mar
- 2026Learning to Draft: Adaptive Speculative Decoding with Reinforcement Learning2 Mar
- 2026LK Losses: Direct Acceptance Rate Optimization for Speculative Decoding27 Feb
- 2026DFlash: Block Diffusion for Flash Speculative Decoding5 Feb
- 2026DART: Diffusion-Inspired Speculative Decoding for Fast LLM Inference27 Jan
20 more
- 2026TALON: Confidence-Aware Speculative Decoding with Adaptive Token Trees12 Jan
- 2025Speculative Decoding: Performance or Illusion?31 Dec
- 2025LogitSpec: Accelerating Retrieval-based Speculative Decoding via Next Next Token Speculation2 Jul
- 2025SpecBranch: Speculative Decoding via Hybrid Drafting and Rollback-Aware Branch Parallelism16 May
- 2025PARD: Accelerating LLM Inference with Low-Cost PARallel Draft Model Adaptation23 Apr
- 2025EAGLE-3: Scaling up Inference Acceleration of Large Language Models via Training-Time Test3 Mar
- 2024DySpec: Faster Speculative Decoding with Dynamic Token Tree Structure15 Oct
- 2024PEARL: Parallel Speculative Decoding with Adaptive Draft Length13 Aug
- 2024OPT-Tree: Speculative Decoding with Adaptive Draft Tree Structure25 Jun
- 2024EAGLE-2: Faster Inference of Language Models with Dynamic Draft Trees24 Jun
- 2024SpecDec++: Boosting Speculative Decoding via Adaptive Candidate Lengths30 May
- 2024Dynamic Speculation Lookahead Accelerates Speculative Decoding of Large Language Models7 May
- 2024Sequoia: Scalable, Robust, and Hardware-aware Speculative Decoding19 Feb
- 2024GliDe with a CaPE: A Low-Hassle Method to Accelerate Speculative Decoding3 Feb
- 2024EAGLE: Speculative Sampling Requires Rethinking Feature Uncertainty26 Jan
- 2024Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Heads19 Jan
- 2024Unlocking Efficiency in Large Language Model Inference: A Comprehensive Survey of Speculative Decoding15 Jan
- 2023SpecInfer: Accelerating Generative Large Language Model Serving with Tree-based Speculative Inference and Verification16 May
- 2023Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling2 Feb
- 2022Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decoding30 Nov
Other references · 15
- 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 9,743
- 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
- 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,053
- 2021Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Datasetcited by 5,203
- 2021Program Synthesis with Large Language Modelscited by 3,509
- 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Codecited by 1,906
- 2026DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligencecited by 877
- 2026GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineeringcited by 502
- 2024Better & Faster Large Language Models via Multi-token Predictioncited by 344
- 2024Mooncake: A KVCache-centric Disaggregated Architecture for LLM Servingcited by 193
- 2025OpenCodeReasoning: Advancing Data Distillation for Competitive Codingcited by 106
- 2025Big-Math: A Large-Scale, High-Quality Math Dataset for Reinforcement Learning in Language Modelscited by 104
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.
4 papers.
- 2026DFlow: Enabling Verifier Information Flow in Block Diffusion Speculative Decodingcited by 2
- 2026OasisKV: Scaling In-Decode KV Cache Beyond HBM with Lookahead Sparse Prefetchingcited by 0
- 2026Reciprocal Guidance: Orchestrating Draft and Verify Budgets for Advancing the Diffusion-AR Self-Speculation Frontiercited by 0
- 2026Training Parallel Speculative Draft Models by Directly Minimizing Expected Decoding Roundscited by 0
- 2026Training Parallel Speculative Draft Models by Directly Minimizing Expected Decoding Rounds7 Oct 2026
- 2026Reciprocal Guidance: Orchestrating Draft and Verify Budgets for Advancing the Diffusion-AR Self-Speculation Frontier28 Sep 2026
- 2026DFlow: Enabling Verifier Information Flow in Block Diffusion Speculative Decoding6 Sep 2026
- 2026OasisKV: Scaling In-Decode KV Cache Beyond HBM with Lookahead Sparse Prefetching8 Aug 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2024ParallelSpec: Parallel Drafter for Efficient Speculative Decoding
- 2026JetSpec: Breaking the Scaling Ceiling of Speculative Decoding with Parallel Tree Drafting
- 2026D^2SD: Accelerating Speculative Decoding with Dual Diffusion Draft Models
- 2025Draft, Verify, and Improve: Toward Training-Aware Speculative Decoding
- 2024Closer Look at Efficient Inference Methods: A Survey of Speculative Decoding
- 2025DiffuSpec: Unlocking Diffusion Language Models for Speculative Decoding
- 2026DARTree: Speculative Diffusion Decoding with Autoregressive Draft Trees
- 2026Unlocking Parallelism in Autoregressive Language Models via Speculative Decoding with Progressive Tree Drafting