When Parallel Drafter Meets Parallel Speculative Decoding
On the map: Efficient LLM inference and serving → Speculative decoding
Abstract (arXiv)
DSpark-style parallel drafters have made speculative decoding highly effective, yet their draft phase remains serialized on the critical path of every round. Parallel speculative decoding (PSD) overlaps drafting with verification, yet existing methods must guess the accepted prefix and bonus token in advance: a wrong guess reverts the whole batch to serial drafting. We present DPara, a PSD framework that reuses effective parallel drafters yet guarantees backbone--verification overlap in every round, thereby eliminating this probabilistic fallback altogether. While the target verifies, DPara's diffusion backbone precomputes draft representations for every acceptance boundary with the bonus left unspecified; a lightweight autoregressive head then combines the revealed verification outcome with the matching precomputed representation to emit the next round's draft tokens almost instantly---fully parallelizing the dominant backbone forward with verification and leaving only the negligible head cost serial. Experiments on Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B across seven math, coding, and chat benchmarks show that DPara achieves average speedups of 3.21× and 3.52× over autoregressive decoding, surpassing the strongest serial and parallel speculative decoding baselines alike.
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Speculative decoding, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving. Builds on 16 of its 18 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2026.
Builds on
16 of 18 references.
Closest ancestors · 8
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Domino: Decoupling Causal Modeling from Autoregressive Drafting in Speculative Decoding28 May
- 2026DFlash: Block Diffusion for Flash Speculative Decoding5 Feb
- 2026DART: Diffusion-Inspired Speculative Decoding for Fast LLM Inference27 Jan
- 2025EAGLE-3: Scaling up Inference Acceleration of Large Language Models via Training-Time Test3 Mar
- 2024AMUSD: Asynchronous Multi-Device Speculative Decoding for LLM Acceleration22 Oct
- 2024PEARL: Parallel Speculative Decoding with Adaptive Draft Length13 Aug
- 2023Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling2 Feb
- 2022Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decoding30 Nov
Other references · 8
- 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 10,109
- 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,820
- 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
- 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,320
- 2023Let's Verify Step by Stepcited by 3,789
- 2021Program Synthesis with Large Language Modelscited by 3,637
- 2021Datasets: A Community Library for Natural Language Processingcited by 530
- 2024The Perfect Blend: Redefining RLHF with Mixture of Judgescited by 43
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
2 papers.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025FastEagle: Cascaded Drafting for Accelerating Speculative Decoding
- 2026Draft in Parallel, Condition Through Depth: Adjacent Causal Injection for Speculative Decoding
- 2026DEdit: Iterative Draft Editing for Speculative Decoding
- 2026TreeFlash: Parallel AR-Approximation for Faster Speculative Decoding
- 2025Steering Pretrained Drafters during Speculative Decoding
- 2026Reciprocal Guidance: Orchestrating Draft and Verify Budgets for Advancing the Diffusion-AR Self-Speculation Frontier
- 2025Fail Fast, Win Big: Rethinking the Drafting Strategy in Speculative Decoding via Diffusion LLMs
- 2026LongSpark: Efficient speculative decoding with a fixed-cost parallel drafter