Trees from Marginals: Autoregressive drafting with factorized priors
cs.LG, cs.CL
Submitted: 2026-07-07
Updated: 2026-10-21
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Speculative decoding greatly increases the interactivity of autoregressive language models by trading off computation for extra tokens generated in a single forward pass.
Terminology
Abstract
Speculative decoding greatly increases the interactivity of autoregressive language models by trading off computation for extra tokens generated in a single forward pass. Factorized draft models are especially efficient because they predict future-token marginals in parallel, but their independence assumption causes acceptance rates to degrade sharply as the speculative budget grows. We analyze this limitation and introduce Weaver, a lightweight autoregressive adapter that constructs proposal trees from the top-K marginals of a factorized drafter. Weaver restores conditional dependencies between proposed tokens while avoiding a full-vocabulary projection. To support fast verification for models with Gated Delta Net layers, we derive a rollback-free tree-verification algorithm and implement optimized CUDA kernels in SGLang. By combining these model and systems contributions we achieve a 4.08-fold speedup over autoregressive decoding, and outperform a highly optimized DFlash baseline by 16.3%.
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