Dustin: Draft-Augmented Sparse Verification for Efficient Long-Context Generation with Speculative Decoding

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24957v1
• Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2026 08:51:20 GMT
• Title: Dustin: Draft-Augmented Sparse Verification for Efficient Long-Context Generation with Speculative Decoding
• Abstract summary: Dustin is a sparse verification framework designed for speculative decoding.<n>It integrates lookahead signals from the draft model with historical attention from the target model to identify critical tokens.<n>It achieves a 27.85x speedup in self-attention and a 9.17x end-to-end decoding speedup at a 32k sequence length.
• Score: 7.4564440570059
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: While speculative decoding improves inference throughput for multi-batch long-context Large Language Models (LLMs), its efficiency is often limited by a verification bottleneck where Key-Value (KV) cache loading dominates latency. Existing compression methods fail in this regime: static eviction incurs accuracy loss due to saliency shift, while dynamic selection introduces prohibitive computational overhead during the verification path. We propose Dustin, a sparse verification framework designed for long-context speculative decoding. Dustin integrates lookahead signals from the draft model with historical attention from the target model to identify critical tokens with high fidelity across multi-step verification windows. To reduce recomputation latency, this approach further employs a sparse estimation scheme that restricts importance scoring to a minimal subset of attention heads. Evaluations on PG-19 and LongBench with Qwen2.5-72B demonstrate that Dustin achieves a 27.85x speedup in self-attention and a 9.17x end-to-end decoding speedup at a 32k sequence length, all with negligible accuracy degradation.

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