Variational Speculative Decoding: Rethinking Draft Training from Token Likelihood to Sequence Acceptance
Speculative decoding accelerates inference for (M)LLMs, yet a training-decoding discrepancy persists: while existing methods optimize single greedy trajectories, decoding involves verifying and ranking multiple sampled draft paths. We propose *Variational Speculative Decoding* (VSD), formulating dra…