Paper Detail

SPEED-Bench: A Unified and Diverse Benchmark for Speculative Decoding

Talor Abramovich, Maor Ashkenazi, Carl, Putterman, Benjamin Chislett, Tiyasa Mitra, Bita Darvish Rouhani, Ran Zilberstein, Yonatan Geifman

huggingface Score 10.5

Published 2026-02-10 · First seen 2026-04-14

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Abstract

Speculative Decoding (SD) has emerged as a critical technique for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference. Unlike deterministic system optimizations, SD performance is inherently data-dependent, meaning that diverse and representative workloads are essential for accurately measuring its effectiveness. Existing benchmarks suffer from limited task diversity, inadequate support for throughput-oriented evaluation, and a reliance on high-level implementations that fail to reflect production environments. To address this, we introduce SPEED-Bench, a comprehensive suite designed to standardize SD evaluation across diverse semantic domains and realistic serving regimes. SPEED-Bench offers a carefully curated Qualitative data split, selected by prioritizing semantic diversity across the data samples. Additionally, it includes a Throughput data split, allowing speedup evaluation across a range of concurrencies, from latency-sensitive low-batch settings to throughput-oriented high-load scenarios. By integrating with production engines like vLLM and TensorRT-LLM, SPEED-Bench allows practitioners to analyze system behaviors often masked by other benchmarks. We highlight this by quantifying how synthetic inputs overestimate real-world throughput, identifying batch-size dependent optimal draft lengths and biases in low-diversity data, and analyzing the caveats of vocabulary pruning in state-of-the-art drafters. We release SPEED-Bench to establish a unified evaluation standard for practical comparisons of SD algorithms.

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BibTeX

@misc{abramovich2026speed,
  title = {SPEED-Bench: A Unified and Diverse Benchmark for Speculative Decoding},
  author = {Talor Abramovich and Maor Ashkenazi and Carl and Putterman and Benjamin Chislett and Tiyasa Mitra and Bita Darvish Rouhani and Ran Zilberstein and Yonatan Geifman},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Speculative Decoding (SD) has emerged as a critical technique for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference. Unlike deterministic system optimizations, SD performance is inherently data-dependent, meaning that diverse and representative workloads are essential for accurately measuring its effectiveness. Existing benchmarks suffer from limited task diversity, inadequate support for throughput-oriented evaluation, and a reliance on high-level implementations that fail to reflect production},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2604.09557},
  keywords = {Speculative Decoding, Large Language Model, inference, benchmarking, throughput evaluation, semantic diversity, production engines, vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, draft length, vocabulary pruning, code available, huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2604.09557},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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