Speculative Decoding: Accelerating LLM Inference When to Use This Skill Use Speculative Decoding when you need to: - Speed up inference by 1.5-3.6× without quality loss - Reduce latency for real-time applications (chatbots, code generation) - Optimize throughput for high-volume serving - Deploy efficiently on limited hardware - Generate faster without changing model architecture Key Techniques : Draft model speculative decoding, Medusa (multiple heads), Lookahead Decoding (Jacobi iteration) Papers : Medusa (arXiv 2401.10774), Lookahead Decoding (ICML 2024), Speculative Decoding Survey (ACL 20…