Acceptance Dynamics Across Cognitive Domains in Speculative Decoding

arXiv:2604.14682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference. It uses a small draft model to propose a tree of future tokens. A larger target model then verifies these tokens in a single batched forward pass. Despite the growing body of work on speculative methods, the degree to which the cognitive characteristics of a task affect acceptance probability remains largely unexplored. We present an empirical study of tree-based speculative dec