MMSpec: Benchmarking Speculative Decoding for Vision-Language Models

Speculative Decoding (SD) has demonstrated its efficacy in accelerating large language model inference, but for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), the diverse input modalities make it difficult for a small trained drafter to achieve consistently high throughput. Self-speculative decoding reuses parts of the target model as a drafter which retains the multi-modal capability of the VLMs, yet its efficiency depends on choosing a suitable draft configuration for each prompt. We propose Single-Peak SPeculative decoding (SP$^2$ec), a training-free bandit algorithm that adapts the draft configuration during generation. SP$^2$ec exploits the single-peak throughput pattern observed in existing self-speculative methods, including SWIFT, KnapSpec, SpecVLM, and our simple cosSim. Our algorithmic design explicitly minimizes a novel notion of wall-time regret for each given query, corresponding to the empirical wall-time latency. Theoretical guarantees on the wall-time regret show that SP$^2$ec can exploit the optimal draft configuration, with negligible exploration cost. Extensive experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and LLaVA-NeXT-Mistral-7B across visual and textual tasks show consistent improvements of up to 11% over the original self-speculative methods, demonstrating the wide applicability of the proposed SP$^2$ec algorithm.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in multimodal perception and reasoning. However, deploying large VLMs on mobile devices remains challenging due to their substantial computational and memory demands. A practical alternative is device-edge co-inference, where a lightweight draft VLM on the mobile device collaborates with a larger target VLM on the edge server via speculative decoding. Nevertheless, directly extending speculative decoding to VLMs suffers from severe inefficiency due to excessive visual-token computation and high communication overhead. To address these challenges, we propose CoVSpec, an efficient collaborative speculative decoding framework for VLM inference. Specifically, we first develop a training-free visual token reduction framework that prunes redundant visual tokens on the mobile device by jointly considering query relevance, token activity, and low-rank dependency. Moreover, we design an adaptive drafting strategy that dynamically adjusts both the verification frequency and the draft length. In addition, we introduce a parallel branching mechanism with decoupled verification-correction to improve draft-side utilization during target-side verification and reduce correction-related transmission overhead. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that CoVSpec achieves up to 2.21x higher throughput than target-only inference and reduces communication overhead by more than 96% compared with baselines, without compromising task accuracy.

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by letting a lightweight drafter propose multiple tokens that are verified by a larger target model. Although effective for text-only LLMs, speculative decoding yields limited gains in VLMs because drafters often diverge on vision-critical content, while existing multimodal acceleration methods do not directly address irrelevant visual evidence or optimize the verifier-accepted prefix length that governs speedup. We propose TIGER, a Text-conditioned vIsual GatEd Routing framework for multimodal speculative decoding. TIGER dynamically selects a sparse set of context-relevant visual tokens based on the drafter's current textual state, rather than expose the full visual token set or a fixed compressed interface. To better align training with inference-time efficiency, we optimize the drafter with acceptance-aligned group-based policy training using verifier-derived rewards based on accepted prefix length, built on top of distillation warm start with KL anchoring. This encourages the drafter not only to imitate the target model, but also to produce speculative continuations that survive verification for longer prefixes. Experiments show that TIGER yields consistent gains in accepted prefix length and speculative speedup under exact verifier-side speculative decoding, while achieving favorable quality-latency trade-offs with comparable downstream accuracy in visual-routing analyses.