SpecHop: Continuous Speculation for Accelerating Multi-Hop Retrieval Agents
Quick Answer
SpecHop introduces a continuous speculation framework for multi-hop retrieval tasks, reducing latency by up to 40% while maintaining accuracy.
Quick Take
By leveraging multiple speculative threads and asynchronous verification, it approaches oracle latency gains, significantly enhancing the efficiency of in information-intensive applications.
Key Points
- SpecHop maintains multiple speculative threads to accelerate multi-hop .
- Achieves up to 40% latency reduction on retrieval-augmented multi-hop tasks.
- Asynchronous verification allows for real-time commitment of correct branches.
- The framework approaches optimal latency gains with sufficient active threads.
- Empirical results closely match theoretical predictions for latency improvements.
Paper Resources
📖 Reader Mode
~2 min readAbstract:Large language models increasingly use external tools such as web search and document retrieval to solve information-intensive tasks. However, multi-hop tool use in complex tasks introduces substantial latency, since the model must repeatedly wait for tool observations before continuing. We study how to accelerate such trajectories without changing the final trajectory the model would have taken without acceleration, assuming access to faster but less reliable speculator tools. We develop a theoretical framework for lossless speculation in multi-hop tool-use settings, characterizing the optimal achievable latency gain. We propose SpecHop, a continuous speculation framework that maintains multiple speculative threads, verifies predicted observations asynchronously as target tool outputs arrive, commits correct branches, and rolls back incorrect ones. This preserves accuracy while reducing wall-clock latency. We show that SpecHop can approach oracle latency gains with enough active threads. Empirically, on retrieval-augmented multi-hop tasks, SpecHop closely matches theoretical predictions and reduces latency by up to 40\% in some settings. Code: this https URL
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.21965 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2605.21965v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.21965 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
Submission history
From: Mehrdad Saberi [view email]
[v1]
Thu, 21 May 2026 03:55:47 UTC (488 KB)
— Originally published at arxiv.org
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