Decoupled Contrastive Decoding via Expert-Aligned Drafting

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.12913v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Contrastive Decoding (CD) improves generation quality, but its amateur-model pass makes decoding expensive. Accelerating CD with speculative decoding raises a proposal-alignment question: should the contrastive signal shape the drafter, or should it remain only in verification? We study this question in the lightweight feature-level drafter regime. Two controlled diagnostics, matched Cross-alpha training and an Approximate Dual-Drafter decompos