Fuliang Liu
Author directory2026
DART: Low-Latency Parallel Drafting with Continuity-Aware Tree Pruning for Speculative Decoding
Fuliang Liu | Xue Li | Ketai Zhao | Yinxi Gao | Ziyan Zhou | Zhonghui Zhang | Wanchun Dou | Sheng Zhong | Zhibin Wang | Chen Tian
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Fuliang Liu | Xue Li | Ketai Zhao | Yinxi Gao | Ziyan Zhou | Zhonghui Zhang | Wanchun Dou | Sheng Zhong | Zhibin Wang | Chen Tian
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Speculative decoding is an effective and lossless approach for accelerating LLM inference. However, existing widely adopted model-based draft designs, such as EAGLE3, improve accuracy at the cost of multi-step autoregressive inference, resulting in high drafting latency and ultimately rendering the drafting stage itself a performance bottleneck. We propose DART, a low-latency parallel drafting framework for speculative decoding. DART predicts logits for multiple future masked positions in parallel within a single forward pass based on hidden states of the target model, thereby eliminating autoregressive rollouts in the draft model while preserving a lightweight design. Based on these parallel logit predictions, we further introduce an efficient tree pruning algorithm that constructs high-quality draft token trees with N-gram-enforced semantic continuity. DART substantially reduces draft-stage overhead while preserving high draft accuracy, leading to significantly improved end-to-end decoding speed. Experimental results demonstrate that DART achieves a 2.03×–3.44× wall-clock time speedup across multiple datasets, surpassing EAGLE3 by 30% on average and offering a practical speculative decoding framework.