Cactus: Accelerating Auto-Regressive Decoding with Constrained Acceptance Speculative Sampling

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Cactus accelerates auto-regressive decoding with constrained acceptance speculative sampling for large language models

advanced Published 8 Apr 2026
Action Steps
  1. Implement speculative sampling with smaller draft models
  2. Apply constrained acceptance criteria to allow for slight variations in generated distributions
  3. Use techniques like top-$k$ or temperature sampling to improve acceptance rates
  4. Evaluate and refine the Cactus approach for specific use cases and models
Who Needs to Know This

ML researchers and engineers on a team can benefit from Cactus to improve decoding efficiency, while working with large language models

Key Insight

💡 Constrained acceptance speculative sampling can improve decoding efficiency without sacrificing accuracy

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🚀 Cactus accelerates auto-regressive decoding for LLMs with speculative sampling!

Key Takeaways

Cactus accelerates auto-regressive decoding with constrained acceptance speculative sampling for large language models

Full Article

Title: Cactus: Accelerating Auto-Regressive Decoding with Constrained Acceptance Speculative Sampling

Abstract:
arXiv:2604.04987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative sampling (SpS) has been successful in accelerating the decoding throughput of auto-regressive large language models by leveraging smaller draft models. SpS strictly enforces the generated distribution to match that of the verifier LLM. This is unnecessarily restrictive as slight variations of the verifier's distribution, such as sampling with top-$k$ or temperature, would also be acceptable. Typical acceptance sampling (TAS) alleviate
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