@inproceedings{christopher-etal-2025-speculative,
    title = "Speculative Diffusion Decoding: Accelerating Language Generation through Diffusion",
    author = "Christopher, Jacob K  and
      Bartoldson, Brian R.  and
      Ben-Nun, Tal  and
      Cardei, Michael  and
      Kailkhura, Bhavya  and
      Fioretto, Ferdinando",
    editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis  and
      Ritter, Alan  and
      Wang, Lu",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = apr,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.naacl-long.601/",
    pages = "12042--12059",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-189-6",
    abstract = "Speculative decoding has emerged as a widely adopted method to accelerate large language model inference without sacrificing the quality of the model outputs. While this technique has facilitated notable speed improvements by enabling parallel sequence verification, its efficiency remains inherently limited by the reliance on incremental token generation in existing draft models. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes an adaptation of speculative decoding which uses discrete diffusion models to generate draft sequences. This allows parallelization of both the drafting and verification steps, providing significant speedups to the inference process. Our proposed approach, *Speculative Diffusion Decoding (SpecDiff)*, is validated on standard language generation benchmarks and empirically demonstrated to provide up to 7.2x speedups over standard generation processes and up to 1.75x speedups over existing speculative decoding approaches."
}