The core trick of speculative decoding: generation is serial, verification is parallel
cneuralnetwork · x · 2026-10-22
Part two highlights the key asymmetry behind speculative decoding: generating tokens and verifying tokens are computationally very different problems.
- Autoregressively generating 4 tokens takes 4 sequential forward passes;
- But given those 4 tokens in advance, a transformer can evaluate their conditional probabilities in parallel via causal attention in a single pass.
This is essentially the entire trick of speculative decoding.
Related event: Illustrated Guide to Speculative Decoding(3 posts)→
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