How draft-model speculative sampling makes LLM inference 2-3x faster without changing the output: why decode is bandwidth-bound, the draft-verify-accept loop, the rejection-sampling step that keeps it lossless, the acceptance-rate math that decides the speedup, EAGLE and Medusa as learned drafters, and the batch-size regime where speculation quietly makes things slower.
Speculative-Decoding
-
Speculative Decoding Explained: Trading Compute for Bandwidth to Decode Faster