SP$^2$ec: Adaptive Self-Speculative Decoding for Vision-Language Models

Abstract:Speculative Decoding (SD) has demonstrated its efficacy in accelerating large language model inference, but for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), the diverse input modalities make it difficult for a small trained drafter to achieve consistently high throughput. Self-speculative decoding reuses parts of the target model as a drafter which retains the multi-modal capability of the VLMs, yet its efficiency depends on choosing a suitable draft configuration for each prompt. We propose Single-Peak SPeculative decoding (SP$^2$ec), a training-free bandit algorithm that adapts the draft configuration during generation. SP$^2$ec exploits the single-peak throughput pattern observed in existing self-speculative methods, including SWIFT, KnapSpec, SpecVLM, and our simple cosSim. Our algorithmic design explicitly minimizes a novel notion of wall-time regret for each given query, corresponding to the empirical wall-time latency. Theoretical guarantees on the wall-time regret show that SP$^2$ec can exploit the optimal draft configuration, with negligible exploration cost. Extensive experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and LLaVA-NeXT-Mistral-7B across visual and textual tasks show consistent improvements of up to 11\% over the original self-speculative methods, demonstrating the wide applicability of the proposed SP$^2$ec algorithm.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2610.18735 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2610.18735v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.18735 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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