Does speculative decoding always double speed?
No. Speed depends on proposal quality, drafting cost, verification cost, batch size and implementation. Some workloads see little gain or a slowdown.
Answered in
Speculative Decoding: Faster Tokens Without Changing the Target DistributionA draft model proposes tokens and a target verifies them. Exact speculative sampling keeps the target distribution; speedups depend on the workload.
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