AI RESEARCH

Cost-Aware Diffusion Draft Trees for Speculative Decoding

arXiv CS.CL

ArXi:2606.01813v1 Announce Type: new Speculative decoding accelerates inference by having a lightweight drafter propose tokens verified in parallel by the target language model. Block diffusion drafters such as DFlash generate an entire draft block in one pass, yielding per-position marginals; DDTree uses these to build a candidate tree that maximizes expected acceptance length under a fixed node budget. We observe, however, that acceptance length is non-decreasing in budget: it always favors larger trees regardless of verification cost, offering no principled basis for budget selection. We.