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speculative decoding

Applied AI interview questions tagged speculative decoding, across every topic.

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Concepts behind "speculative decoding"

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Speculative DecodingDecoding is sequential and memory-bound, so generating each token one at a time underuses the GPU. Speculative decoding uses a small, fast draft model to propose several tokens ahead, then the large model verifies them all in a single parallel pass, accepting the longest correct prefix. It speeds up generation with no change to output quality, since the big model still validates every token. Applied-AI interviews probe it because it is a clever, widely-used latency optimization that exploits the memory-bound nature of decode.
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