We present HyperDFlash, a block-parallel speculative decoding framework tailored to DeepSeek-V4's Hyper-Connections (HC). Despite the strong performance of DeepSeek-V4's native Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) module on initial token drafting, its draft accuracy degrades sharply at later positions, as error accumulation from unverified intermediate tokens harms draft acceptance rates. Although the original DFlash method supports efficient one-pass block drafting, it cannot be seamlessly adapted to the HC paradigm, since DeepSeek-V4's multi-path residual stream induces inherent feature misalignment with conventional drafting designs. To resolve this architectural mismatch, we propose two dedicated, model-aligned optimizations for HC residual streams. First, we adopt pre-collapse residual states as the exclusive conditioning signal, preserving complete multi-path structural information and better aligning the drafter with the target's native prediction pathway. Second, we replace the heavy generic linear compressor with a lightweight gated residual reducer, whose parameters are directly inherited from the target model's built-in hc_head module. This design yields input-aware path aggregation with three orders of magnitude fewer parameters while maintaining precise architectural alignment. We further enhance model training via a targeted KL distillation loss applied to the LM-head, regularizing predictions against the target distribution to improve early draft quality. Extensive experiments across math reasoning, code synthesis, and conversational benchmarks demonstrate that HyperDFlash consistently outperforms both the native MTP baseline and vanilla DFlash adaptation, achieving substantial gains in average accepted draft length and decoding speedup. These results validate HC alignment, gated reduction, and targeted distillation for high-performance speculative decoding.
Block diffusion speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by predicting all tokens within a block simultaneously for the target model to verify in parallel. Predicting an entire block at once requires a sufficiently capable draft model and effective utilization of the target model's internal knowledge. However, the state-of-the-art method DFlash constrains all draft layers to share a single fused representation derived from only a few target layers, limiting per-layer expressiveness and hindering further scaling of draft capacity. In this paper, we present \modelname, which flares out the narrow conditioning bottleneck of DFlash through a lightweight layer-wise fusion mechanism: each draft layer attends to its own learnable combination of a broad set of target layers at negligible overhead, simultaneously injecting richer target knowledge and providing every draft layer with a distinct input. This enhanced per-layer expressiveness enables scaling the draft model to deeper architectures with consistent gains. We further scale training data from 800K to 2.4M samples to fully exploit the enlarged capacity. On six benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, code generation, and conversation, \modelname attains average wall-clock speedups of 5.52x on Qwen3-4B, 5.46x on Qwen3-8B, and 3.91x on GPT-OSS-20B, improving over DFlash by roughly 11%, 8%, and 5% respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/Tencent/AngelSlim.
Repeated execution of the target model during autoregressive decoding is a major source of LLM inference latency. Unlike linear speculation, which follows a single candidate chain, tree-structured speculation retains multiple branches from shared prefixes; under the same budget, this broader coverage can improve acceptance and efficiency. Adapting it to DeepSeek-V4 is nontrivial: its CSA/HCA online compressed attention concentrates the difficulty on the target-verify side, where branches diverging from a shared prefix compress into different states, breaking cross-branch state consistency. We integrate tree-structured speculative decoding into the DeepSeek-V4-Flash pipeline via branch-aware causal verification, temporary state isolation, and accepted-path state refresh, keeping verification and compressed-state updates consistent across branches. Across budgets D=5 to D=8, batch sizes 1 to 64, and three datasets (GSM8K, MBPP, ShareGPT), tree speculation achieves a higher accepted length than the matched linear configurations in all settings (e.g., at D=8 about 2.83--3.41 versus 2.39--2.84) and improves throughput in nearly all configurations---marginal only at the smallest budget---by up to about 18.5%. More importantly, the gains follow stable, transferable regularities: the relative gain grows with the budget and is most pronounced for less predictable workloads at small-to-medium batch sizes, while beyond a certain budget throughput plateaus and decouples from the still-rising accepted length. These results show that retaining multiple candidate paths under the same budget can effectively improve DeepSeek-V4 decoding efficiency, and offer experience for adapting speculative decoding to future models with compressed, sparse, or structured context representations.
One-shot block drafters for speculative decoding generate the full draft in a single forward pass, achieving strong throughput by eliminating sequential token generation. However, they predict each draft token conditioned only on the prefix context, with no dependence on previously drafted tokens. This non-autoregressive conditioning causes the drafter's distribution to diverge from the verifier's true autoregressive distribution as draft depth grows. This problem becomes more severe in tree-based drafting, where distinct branches are forced to share the same marginal distribution for subsequent tokens. We propose TreeFlash, which addresses this by incorporating an MLP layer conditioned on the drafter's hidden state and the previous token to approximate an autoregressive distribution. TreeFlash retains the O(1) decoding time complexity of one-shot drafters by employing a two-stage approximation mechanism. TreeFlash achieves state-of-the-art performance across a variety of tasks and models, improving over marginal tree drafting by 12% higher block efficiency and 9% higher speedup.
Peer Rheinboldt, Frédéric Berdoz, Roger Wattenhofer