READER: Retrieval-Assisted Drafter for Efficient LLM Inference

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09072v2
• Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2025 20:13:25 GMT
• Title: READER: Retrieval-Assisted Drafter for Efficient LLM Inference
• Authors: Maxim Divilkovskiy, Vitaly Malygin, Sergey Zlobin, Stanislav Ilyushin, Sultan Isali, Vasily Kalugin, Nuriza Aitassova, Fei Yi, Weidi Zeng,
• Abstract summary: Autoregressive Language Models instantiate a factorized likelihood over token sequences, yet their strictly sequential decoding process imposes an intrinsic lower bound on latency inference.<n>This bottleneck has emerged as a central obstacle to the scalable deployment of large-scale generative models.<n>We present READER, a speculative decoding framework that bypasses the training of the auxiliary draft model.
• Score: 0.0386965802948046
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Autoregressive Language Models instantiate a factorized likelihood over token sequences, yet their strictly sequential decoding process imposes an intrinsic lower bound on inference latency. This bottleneck has emerged as a central obstacle to the scalable deployment of large-scale generative models. Existing acceleration techniques partially mitigate token-level latency by relying on auxiliary draft models or introducing an additional training phase, but fail to address the dominant memory and communication costs. We present READER, a provably lossless speculative decoding framework that bypasses the training of the auxiliary draft model. READER formalizes speculative decoding as a stochastic tree construction problem and exploits the empirical redundancy structure of natural language to generate high-probability candidate continuations. Our method revisits the problem of constructing draft trees, establishing substantial statistical improvements over stochastic draft-tree methods and providing a complexity-theoretic analysis that characterizes the optimality frontier of speculative decoding under bounded computation and memory resources. Beyond the single-sequence regime traditionally considered in prior work, we introduce a memory-optimal key-value cache-serving strategy that guarantees amortized sublinear overhead in the batch dimension, allowing READER to scale to realistic inference workloads. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate up to 6.13x wall-clock speedup on single-prompt inference and up to 5.92x on batched inference, consistently surpassing prior speculative decoding baselines, while preserving exact output equivalence, with even more pronounced gains in retrieval-augmented generation pipelines. Our results close a key gap between theoretical parallelism limits and practical LLM inference, suggesting a new standard for efficient deployment.

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