AdaSPEC: Selective Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Speculative
  Decoders
Authors: name: Yuezhou Hu; name: Jiaxin Guo; name: Xinyu Feng; name: Tuo Zhao
Published: 2025-10-22 17:13:00

Abstract: Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by
employing a small draft model to generate predictions, which are then verified
by a larger target model. The effectiveness of SD hinges on the alignment
between these models, which is typically enhanced by Knowledge Distillation
(KD). However, conventional KD methods aim to minimize the KL divergence
between the draft and target models across all tokens, a goal that is
misaligned with the true objective of SD, which is to maximize token acceptance
rate. Therefore, draft models often struggle to fully assimilate the target
model's knowledge due to capacity constraints, leading to suboptimal
performance. To address this challenge, we propose AdaSPEC, a novel method that
incorporates selective token filtering into the KD process. AdaSPEC utilizes a
reference model to identify and filter out difficult-to-fit tokens, enabling
the distillation of a draft model that better aligns with the target model on
simpler tokens. This approach improves the overall token acceptance rate
without compromising generation quality. We evaluate AdaSPEC across diverse
tasks, including arithmetic reasoning, instruction-following, coding, and
summarization, using model configurations of 31M/1.4B and 350M/2.7B parameters.
Our results demonstrate that AdaSPEC consistently outperforms the
state-of-the-art DistillSpec method, achieving higher acceptance rates across
all tasks (up to 15\%). The code is publicly available at
https://github.com/yuezhouhu/adaspec.