Haoran Zhang
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2026
Draft-OPD: On-Policy Distillation for Speculative Draft Models
Haodi Lei | Yafu Li | Haoran Zhang | Shunkai Zhang | Qianjia Cheng | Xiaoye Qu | Ganqu Cui | Bowen Zhou | Ning Ding | Yun Luo | Yu Cheng
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Haodi Lei | Yafu Li | Haoran Zhang | Shunkai Zhang | Qianjia Cheng | Xiaoye Qu | Ganqu Cui | Bowen Zhou | Ning Ding | Yun Luo | Yu Cheng
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by pairing a target model with a lightweight draft model whose proposed tokens are verified in parallel. A common way to build draft models, like EAGLE3 or DFlash is supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on target-generated trajectories. However, we observe that SFT quickly plateaus: the draft model’s acceptance length on test data stops improving. The reason is an offline-to-inference mismatch: In SFT, the drafter learns from fixed target-generated trajectories, whereas during speculative decoding it is evaluated on blocks proposed under its own policy. This motivates on-policy distillation (OPD), where the target model supervises the drafter on draft-induced states. Yet OPD remains difficult for draft models, as they cannot reliably roll out complete sequences independently, whereas target-assisted generation makes the collected sequences follow the target distribution and thus eliminates the on-policy signal. We therefore propose Draft-OPD, which uses target-assisted rollout for stable continuations and replays drafting from the verification-exposed error positions. This allows the drafter to learn from target feedback on both accepted and rejected proposals, focusing training on the draft-induced errors that limit speculative acceptance. Experiments show that Draft-OPD achieves over 5× lossless acceleration for thinking models across diverse tasks, improving over EAGLE-3 and DFlash by 23% and 13%.