DeepOffer

Explain speculative decoding: why output quality is preserved and when it does not help.

ML System DesignReported interview question
Reported in public interview compilations — NVIDIA, Together AI

A small draft model proposes several tokens and the target model verifies them in parallel; rejection sampling preserves the target distribution. Speedup depends on acceptance rate and verification cost, so a poor draft or short outputs may lose.

Make interfaces and ownership explicit; add versioning, access control, monitoring, canary rollout, rollback, and a plan for delayed labels or human review.

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