DFlash: Block Diffusion for Flash Speculative Decoding

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speculative-decoding diffusion-models llm-optimization inference-acceleration parallel-generation

Summary

DFlash is a new speculative decoding framework that uses a lightweight block diffusion model for parallel token drafting, achieving over 6x acceleration compared to autoregressive methods. It significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods like EAGLE-3 while maintaining high output quality.

Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but require inherently sequential decoding, leading to high inference latency and poor GPU utilization. Speculative decoding mitigates this bottleneck by using a fast draft model whose outputs are verified in parallel by the target LLM; however, existing methods still rely on autoregressive drafting, which remains sequential and limits practical speedups. Diffusion LLMs offer a promising alternative by enabling parallel generation, but current diffusion models typically underperform compared with autoregressive models. In this paper, we introduce DFlash, a speculative decoding framework that employs a lightweight block diffusion model for parallel drafting. By generating draft tokens in a single forward pass and conditioning the draft model on context features extracted from the target model, DFlash enables efficient drafting with high-quality outputs and higher acceptance rates. Experiments show that DFlash achieves over 6x lossless acceleration across a range of models and tasks, delivering up to 2.5x higher speedup than the state-of-the-art speculative decoding method EAGLE-3.
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Paper page - DFlash: Block Diffusion for Flash Speculative Decoding

Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2602.06036

Abstract

DFlash is a speculative decoding framework that uses a lightweight block diffusion model for parallel token drafting, achieving significant speedup over existing autoregressive methods while maintaining high-quality outputs.

Autoregressive large language models(LLMs) deliver strong performance but require inherently sequential decoding, leading to high inference latency and poor GPU utilization.Speculative decodingmitigates this bottleneck by using a fast draft model whose outputs are verified in parallel by the target LLM; however, existing methods still rely on autoregressive drafting, which remains sequential and limits practical speedups.Diffusion LLMsoffer a promising alternative by enablingparallel generation, but current diffusion models typically underperform compared with autoregressive models. In this paper, we introduce DFlash, aspeculative decodingframework that employs a lightweightblock diffusion modelfor parallel drafting. By generatingdraft tokensin a single forward pass and conditioning the draft model oncontext featuresextracted from the target model, DFlash enables efficient drafting with high-quality outputs and higheracceptance rates. Experiments show that DFlash achieves over 6xlossless accelerationacross a range of models and tasks, delivering up to 2.5x higher speedup than the state-of-the-artspeculative decodingmethodEAGLE-3.

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Can I use ParoQuant with DFlash?

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Yes, DFlash works well with quantized models, including ParoQuant-quantized ones.

hay man love your work! Would you be able to make a dflash for the 122b one? Is it hard?

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#### z-lab/Qwen3.6-27B-DFlash Text Generation• 2B• Updated11 days ago • 30.5k • 263 #### z-lab/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-DFlash Text Generation• 0.5B• Updated12 days ago • 58.9k • 214 #### z-lab/Qwen3.5-27B-DFlash Text Generation• 2B• Updatedabout 1 month ago • 23.6k • 107 #### spiritbuun/Qwen3.6-27B-DFlash-GGUF 2B• Updated14 days ago • 27.2k • 56 Browse 54 models citing this paper## Datasets citing this paper0

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GitHub Trending (daily)

DFlash introduces a block diffusion method for flash speculative decoding to enhance inference speed in large language models.