Reward-Shifted Speculative Sampling Is An Efficient Test-Time Weak-to-Strong Aligner

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission3012 Authors

Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has become a critical step in their development. Recent research has increasingly focused on test-time alignment, where additional compute is allocated during inference to enhance LLM safety and reasoning capabilities. However, these test-time alignment techniques often incur substantial inference costs, limiting their practical application. We are inspired by the speculative sampling acceleration, which leverages a small draft model to efficiently predict future tokens, to address the efficiency bottleneck of test-time alignment. We introduce the reward-shifted speculative sampling (SSS) algorithm, in which the draft model is aligned with human preferences, while the target model remains unchanged. We theoretically demonstrate that the distributional shift between the aligned draft model and the unaligned target model can be exploited to recover the RLHF optimal solution without actually obtaining it, by modifying the acceptance criterion and bonus token distribution. Our algorithm achieves superior gold reward scores at a significantly reduced inference cost in test-time weak-to-strong alignment experiments, thereby validating both its effectiveness and efficiency.

Paper Type: Short

Research Area: Efficient/Low-Resource Methods for NLP

Research Area Keywords: Test-Time Alignment, Speculative Sampling

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment, Approaches to low-resource settings, Approaches low compute settings-efficiency, Theory

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 3012