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Speculative decoding with a quantized target or a quantized draft: does losslessness still hold, and against which distribution?

Lossless is a statement about one distribution, and quantization changes which one without raising any error. The answer separates the draft case from the target case, then shows two ways an FP8 deployment breaks exactness without touching the rejection rule.

Updated Oct 2026 · Worked answers on inference mechanisms, with calculations, implementation details, and follow-up questions.

Lossless is a statement about one distribution, and quantization changes which one without raising any error. The answer separates the draft case from the target case, then shows two ways an FP8 deployment breaks exactness without touching the rejection rule.

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