Interactive NeurIPS tutorial teaches speculative decoding: draft model proposes, target model verifies

Madisonkanna · x · 2026-09-07

dizhangfdu and Madisonkanna built an interactive tutorial on speculative decoding for the NeurIPS Education Track, with an accompanying blog post. It explains why autoregressive decoding is the inference bottleneck, how a small draft model proposes several tokens that the target model verifies, and why strict rejection sampling keeps outputs losslessly aligned with the target distribution. Speculative decoding now runs under nearly every hosted LLM, and the tutorial traces its evolution and what's next.

Related event: NeurIPS Education Track Releases Interactive Speculative Decoding Tutorial(3 posts)→

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