Speculative decoding is worth it when the workload is highly structured (coding, JSON, SQL), the draft model predicts nearly as accurately as the target, there is spare VRAM for a second model and its KV cache, batches are small, and context is short — it is not worth it for creative writing, high concurrency, or long-context workloads.
Akamai is a technology company whose developer resources cover inference optimization, AI agents, and managed Kubernetes. In the cited material, an Akamai developer advocate explains speculative decoding, in which a smaller draft model proposes tokens and a larger target model verifies them in one forward pass, and demonstrates the technique with vLLM.
vLLM is an open-source library and inference-serving engine for deploying large language models on GPUs and other hardware accelerators. Originally developed in UC Berkeley's Sky Computing Lab, it is maintained by a broad community and provides an OpenAI-compatible API server, as well as Anthropic Messages API and gRPC support. Its serving stack manages attention key-value memory with PagedAttention, continuous batching, chunked prefill, prefix caching, streaming generation, and disaggregated prefill, decode, and encode. It also supports speculative decoding, quantization, optimized attention and GEMM/MoE kernels, automatic kernel generation and graph-level transformations, structured outputs, tool calling, multiple decoding algorithms, and distributed inference through tensor, pipeline, data, expert, and context parallelism. The project integrates with Hugging Face models and supports decoder-only, mixture-of-experts, hybrid state-space, multimodal, embedding, retrieval, reward, and classification models. It can run across NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and other supported accelerators, as well as x86, ARM, and PowerPC CPUs, and can be installed with uv or pip or built from source.
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00:12 My name is Sheila. I'm a DA at Akami and we're here today to discuss um the topic speculative decoding and how you can um figure out whether it's worth enabling for your workloads. Okay, I'm a little anxious. Okay. So, typically when you ask LLM a question, there are usually two phases that happen under the hood. The first is the model would read your prompt, process all the input tokens and then build what is known as a KV cache um which is essentially the model's working um memory um for the rest of the request.
00:55 And this happens only once. Um and then you have the decoding phase which is uh when the model starts to actually write the answer. Um so because every token depends on the previous tokens um this process usually happens one at a time. Um and so imagine you're deploying an application that uses a big model like llama 70 billion model. Um typically like this would require like even up to hundreds like forward passes on the model and this is a very expensive process right um and it can cause a lot of latency for your
01:25 user applications which um brings the question of like what if you didn't have to use your bigger model to handle the token generation. What if you use a smaller model to um do some of that guesswork to speculate on a couple tokens? Um which is still an auto reggressive process, but the whole point is because it's smaller, there's it's a faster process, so it would be a cheaper process.
01:52 Um the output is still the same because um the target model, the main model that has the accuracy still has to verify the tokens and it does this in one forward pass. Um so that's the idea behind speculative decoding. Um I'll just leave this here for a second. So as I said you have a small model um which generates token typically you can set it between three to five for each cycle.
02:17 The target model would handle the predictions um like be able to scale like basically approve or reject it. Um and then for all the for the tokens that are rejected the target model would um recomputee the the token for that. Okay. So, um this process it's great. It can save you a lot in terms of inference generation, but it's not free. Um because you're hosting now two models, you have to account for the memory required to host that second model.
02:49 Not that much since it's a smaller model, but you also have to allocate extra space for um the KV cache for both models. Um yeah so typically you would consider running speculative decoding when you have um extra space in GPU um for example if your workload is high concurrency your your GPUs are probably already busy trying to run all the requests so it wouldn't make sense to implement speculative decoding but if you have extra GPU space it's worth considering but uh we'll talk about how to evaluate whether it's worth
03:22 um and the first question is um choosing the draft model. Um yeah, so typically when you're deciding whether it's worth enabling, um can the draft model predict as accurate as the target model? And then the other question is whether um it's as fast. So you would typically choose a model that's definitely like a fraction of the cost like um yeah, so these are the two main um decisions that you have to balance, right?
03:53 Um, I'm just going to leave this here. Um, so for my situation, um, I will explain why I chose these two models. For my demo setup, when I was running this, I have access to one GPU. I was running on a Blackwell GPU and I wanted to run both the baseline and the speculative decoding setup in one. Um so to be able to do this I had to choose a model that was small enough to be able to fit because I have to split the GPU utilization between the both servers.
04:23 Um so this is what that looked like for instance you can the baseline alone um takes about 16 gigabytes of weight and then the draft model is 2.5. So that leaves a huge amount and space for KB caching. Um, and then when you're thinking about choosing the model, some of the things that you would usually consider is um, first of all, like I said, it has to be smaller, typically 10 to 50 times smaller than your target model.
04:54 Um, it has to have the same tokenizer. Um, ideally from the same model family, otherwise you know, you would have to like manually translate between the different tokenizers. Um, what's the other? Yeah, those are the main things. I think I'm forgetting one. Um, oh yeah, and like I said, the cost and accuracy. Uh, okay. So, oops. So when I was running this, there's three questions.
05:39 Um, speculative decoding, there's some work loads that would benefit from it versus others that wouldn't. Um, typically because the goal here is to get a smaller model that can predict almost as accurately as the target model would. It helps with some use cases when you have a workload that is more like highly structured like coding use cases. Um, what's another one?
06:04 Like writing JSON or SQL prompts. Um, it would probably like benefit more versus if you were using it for a highly creative use case like writing poetry or brainstorming or anything like that. Yeah. So, I think I have this is a quick application. I'm not even sure if it's going to work, but um so here I do have for the first demo, I just have um two tabs here.
06:33 Um like I said, this is just to focus on looking at how the acceptance rate performs depending on the type of task that you have. Um so the first tab here is a structured output. Um when I click this, it will run both at the same time. Whoa. Oh god, I'm just waiting. Technical difficulties. I'm not sure why my demo is not running. Um, let's see. Oh, do I have to reconnect?
07:34 Um, just give me one second. I think I might have to restart the Looks like I need to restart the VLM servers and my setup. Give me just a few minutes. Is this on? LSU I Oh. Um, should I Yeah, I think I need Oh, it's showing up. Okay, there we go. Um, so yeah, I was saying this is a demo. So when I run this, I'll redo it. So you can see um as expected with a speculative on the right side um it was able to generate much much faster um 1.6 times faster.
09:26 Um the key thing to note here is how high the acceptance rate is which is the rate of the tokens that were accepted by the the number of tokens that were accepted over the total generated by the draft model. Um another metric here um you can see with the speculative enabled um you we are able to generate a lot more tokens per second um which improves the throughput.
09:52 And then if I run it for the other case. So here it's another use case. Um as expected same thing. Um but in this case I guess the main metric to see here is the low acceptance rate. And like I said, this is because this is a more um there's more variety in how the next tokens that would be generated because first of all, the temperature is set high.
10:31 It's a creative use case. Um yeah. Um what else? I think that's pretty much for this um case. And then the other situation where oops oh yeah this is what I was I should have put this up here um just to explain when it would benefit and then the other use case would be context length. Um so as I mentioned earlier there's two parts of generating tokens.
11:03 Um with speculative decoding it's supposed to accelerate the generating part not the part where the model reads the prompt. So typically if you have a use case where you need to provide the model with a lot of context like for rag applications or um analyzing lots of documents um with those situations um the model will spend a lot more time with the portion of like building the KV caching um especially if you're using it to do like a quick where the the generated tokens are much less than the context like the input um
11:41 Yeah. So ba I think the main point here is just how to think through like what is your application doing? Um is it highly structured? Do you have enough VRAM space to even consider it? Are you doing more creative scenarios? Are you running a lot of concurrency um or not? Like smaller batch sizes would benefit from this. Um yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna leave this slide here.
12:12 This just basically summarizes uh what I just went through. And if anyone has questions, I'll take one or two questions now. >> Oh, I can't hear you. >> Oh, yeah. Um the question was are there particular tools that I recommend for speculative decoding? So I implemented this with VLM um the serving engine. Um they have really good documentation on how to get started with it.
12:53 This is the simpler one of the simple versions of speculative decoding. There's a couple others like the engram medusa eagle that's more like the architecture beneath is like more advanced. Um, but for getting started, yeah, I would say you can't go wrong with just reading up I when I was doing this, there's there's not much content out there on this, but I did find a few like blogs.
13:16 Uh, when you re when you type in circulative decoding, um, one of the first blogs that will come up by general compute talks about more in detail. Um, there's also like two research papers that were published um, by Google and what's the other company? Yeah, it but that's more like goes like more in depth. Yeah. Um, but I'm also trying to maybe like make more content around this, like maybe like videos.
13:42 It was kind of hard to go through this. I I'm a little all over the place, but I would definitely love to maybe like publish a blog or make snippet videos. Um, yeah, on like YouTube or somewhere, but you can definitely find the resources. >> Okay. Right. I should have covered that. Um, but I don't have the I should have put a QR. Oh, um, as I said, I I'm from Akamay.
14:16 And if you're interested in like learning how to replicate this, you can find it on our website, our GitHub, GitHub. Um, Akami developers. Yeah. Um, yeah. So we have a a lot of like different resources on here. Um I'm focusing on in inference optimizations. Uh we have other people that are focusing on building AI agents um and how to leverage our like manage Kubernetes service, how to use Akami functions.
14:47 So if you have time, please go check out our GitHub pages and also we have a Discord channel that we're trying to build up now. Um so it would be great to chat with some of you on the side. Thank you. >> [music] [music]