Speculative Acceptance Does Not Decay with Position: A Full-Length Diagnostic on Long Chain-of-Thought with Independent Drafts

arXiv cs.AIOctober 23, 2026en

arXiv:2610.30644v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The claim that speculative-decoding acceptance rate decays as a chain-of-thought grows longer has become a de facto industry narrative, motivating draft-model co-design and position-aware training. Nearly all direct evidence comes from trained drafters whose offline training length is far shorter than inference, so a purely positional law has never been isolated. We present the first systematic, full-length measurement of acceptance rate as a function of generation position on MATH-500 (all 500 problems), under greedy and sampling decoding, with two independent drafts against DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B: a same-family draft (DeepSeek-R1-Distill

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