DFlow: Enabling Verifier Information Flow in Block Diffusion Speculative Decoding
Authors: Yaojie Zhang, Linfeng Zhang, Bin Cui, Xupeng Miao
Organizations: School of Computer Science & Beijing Key Laboratory of Software and Hardware Cooperative Artificial Intelligence Systems, Peking University · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Institute of Computational Social Science, Peking University (Qingdao)
Block diffusion speculative decoding improves LLM inference efficiency by proposing a block of future tokens in parallel and verifying them with a single forward pass through the target model. However, existing methods retain only the accepted prefix and discard the rejected suffix, preventing the computation spent on these positions from benefiting subsequent drafting rounds and forcing the drafter to repeatedly reconstruct representations for future tokens from scratch. We observe that rejection only determines whether a proposed token can be committed, while the verifier representations at rejected positions can still provide useful information for subsequent predictions. Based on this observation, we propose DFlow, a simple yet effective framework that enables verifier information to flow across drafting rounds. DFlow reuses the hidden states produced by the target verifier for the rejected suffix to guide subsequent drafting without additional target computation. To effectively learn this information flow across drafting rounds, we introduce a self-condition train strategy that feeds verifier representations from earlier predictions back into subsequent predictions. Experiments on Qwen3 models across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that DFlow consistently improves draft quality and acceptance length over DFlash.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Average acceptance length of different methods on Qwen3-1.7B under greedy decoding.
Figure 2: Pipeline of DFlow. DFlow reuses verifier hidden states from rejected suffix positions through the relay module to enhance the corresponding mask embeddings in the next drafting round, without an additional target model forward.
Math
Code
Chat
Overall
Model
Method
GSM8K
MATH-500
HumanEval
MBPP
MT-Bench
Alpaca
Avg.
Temperature = 0
Qwen3-1.7B
EAGLE-3
3.71
3.62
3.30
3.07
3.20
2.73
3.27
DFlash
4.30
4.08
3.51
3.43
3.43
2.61
3.56
DFlow
4.83
4.53
3.83
3.75
3.78
2.85
3.93
Qwen3-4B
EAGLE-3
3.30
3.14
3.08
3.00
3.07
2.86
3.08
Table 1: Average acceptance length τ under the low-concurrency setting. Results are reported under both greedy decoding ( T=0 ) and sampling decoding ( T=1 ). The average is computed over all evaluated benchmarks.
Task
Method
Concurrency
1
2
4
8
16
32
Qwen3-4B
GSM8K
Baseline
146.25
287.58
549.67
1063.16
1804.22
2850.74
EAGLE-3
233.99 1.60×
420.16 1.46×
758.99 1.38×
1210.98 1.14×
1634.96 0.91×
1942.57 0.68×
DFlash
349.59 2.39×
635.08 2.21×
1124.58 2.05×
1802.80 1.70×
2368.26 1.31×
2672.69 0.94×
DFlow
376.26 2.57×
679.39 2.36×
1217.36 2.21×
1959.07 1.84×
2580.66 1.43×
3208.95 1.13×
Table 2: High-concurrency throughput on Qwen3 models. Baseline rows report absolute throughput in TPS. Other entries report TPS with green subscripts indicating speedup over the corresponding baseline.