arxivcs.SEcs.AI2026-06-25
Speculative Refinement: A Hybrid Autoregressive Diffusion Decoding Strategy and Its Behavior Across Benchmarks
Aditi Gupta, Neel Mishra, Kushagra Trivedi, Pawan Kumar
How should we evaluate generation systems that combine autoregressive (AR) and diffusion decoding? We study this question through Speculative Refinement (SpecRef), a training-free hybrid method that warm-starts a masked diffusion language model from an AR draft using entropy-guid…