@inproceedings{lee-etal-2026-tabed,
    title = "{TABED}: Test-Time Adaptive Ensemble Drafting for Robust Speculative Decoding in {LVLM}s",
    author = "Lee, Minjae  and
      Kang, Wonjun  and
      Ahn, Byeongkeun  and
      Classen, Christian  and
      Galim, Kevin  and
      Oh, Seunghyuk  and
      Yan, Minghao  and
      Koo, Hyung Il  and
      Lee, Kangwook",
    editor = "Demberg, Vera  and
      Inui, Kentaro  and
      Marquez, Llu{\'i}s",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EACL} 2026",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.205/",
    pages = "3948--3974",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-386-9",
    abstract = "Speculative decoding (SD) has proven effective for accelerating LLM inference by quickly generating draft tokens and verifying them in parallel. However, SD remains largely unexplored for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), which extend LLMs to process both image and text prompts. To address this gap, we benchmark existing inference methods with small draft models on 11 datasets across diverse input scenarios and observe scenario-specific performance fluctuations. Motivated by these findings, we propose **Test-time Adaptive Batched Ensemble Drafting (TABED)**, which dynamically ensembles multiple drafts obtained via batch inference by leveraging deviations from past ground truths available in the SD setting. The dynamic ensemble method achieves an average robust walltime speedup of 1.74{\texttimes} over autoregressive decoding and a 5{\%} improvement over single drafting methods, while remaining training-free and keeping ensembling costs negligible through parameter sharing. With its plug-and-play compatibility, we further enhance TABED by integrating advanced verification and alternative drafting methods. Code and custom-trained models are available at https://github.com/furiosa-ai/TABED."
}