Skip to content

SharpDraft: Accelerating Long-Context Speculative Decoding with Cardinality-Aware Query Scaling

Oct 2026 · 0 citations · 28 references
Computer Science

Abstract

Long-form reasoning makes inference expensive, and speculative decoding mitigates this cost by verifying multiple draft tokens in parallel. Its speedup, however, can fade as context grows and draft acceptance declines. We focus on attention-mass dilution: as softmax normalizes over more visible Keys, the mass concentrated on the highest-scoring Keys can decrease. We introduce SharpDraft, a training-free method that counteracts this effect through cardinality-aware Query scaling, without the computational overhead of online adaptation. Under explicit assumptions, we derive an exact top-$k$ mass correction and deploy a closed-form fixed-slope approximation. Across AIME-26, GPQA-Diamond, and LongGenBench Diary, SharpDraft achieves $2.59$-$3.19\times$ geometric-mean end-to-end speedups over target-only autoregressive decoding when applied to DFlash, PARD, and EAGLE 3.1. With DFlash, it improves decoding speed and outperforms full-parameter and LoRA-based online adaptation in end-to-end speedup, while matching the unmodified drafter's reported peak allocated GPU memory.

View source

Similar papers

#artificial intelligence Conference Open access Jun 2018

Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents

This paper investigates developing real-world perception for active agents, proposes Gibson Environment for this purpose, and showcases a set of perceptual tasks learned therein.

F. Xia, Amir Zamir, Zhi-Yang He et al. · 1,069 citations · ⚡112
#artificial intelligence Open access May 2023

Evaluating the Performance of Large Language Models on GAOKAO Benchmark

GAOKAO-Bench is introduced, an intuitive benchmark that employs questions from the Chinese GAOKAO examination as test samples, including both subjective and objective questions that contribute a robust evaluation benchmark for future large language models and offers valuable insights into the advantages and limitations...

Xiaotian Zhang, Chun-yan Li, Yi Zong et al. · 216 citations · ⚡17

KTO: Model Alignment as Prospect Theoretic Optimization

This work proposes a HALO that directly maximizes the utility of generations instead of maximizing the log-likelihood of preferences, and suggests that the best loss depends on the inductive biases most appropriate for a given setting, an oft-overlooked consideration.

Kawin Ethayarajh, Winnie Xu, Niklas Muennighoff et al. · 195 citations · ⚡28
#artificial intelligence Open access Jul 2024

Gender, Race, and Intersectional Bias in Resume Screening via Language Model Retrieval

This work investigates the possibilities of using LLMs in a resume screening setting via a document retrieval framework that simulates job candidate selection and finds that the MTEs are biased, significantly favoring White-associated names in 85% of cases and female-associated names in only 11.1% of cases.

Kyra Wilson, Aylin Caliskan · 131 citations · ⚡8
#artificial intelligence Review Nov 2024

How to Build a Quantum Supercomputer: Scaling from Hundreds to Millions of Qubits

This work shows that orders of magnitude enhancement in performance could be obtained by a combination of hardware improvements and tight quantum-HPC integration and introduces high-performance architectures for quantum-probabilistic computing with custom-designed accelerators to tackle today's industry-scale classical...

Masoud Mohseni, Artur Scherer, K. Johnson et al. · 121 citations · ⚡9

Related blog posts

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.