Shikhar Shukla

Shikhar Shukla

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a small draft model to propose candidate tokens that a larger target model verifies. A critical hyperparameter in this process is the speculation length~$γ$, which determines how many tokens the draft model proposes per step. Nearly all existing systems use a fixed~$γ$ (typically~4), yet empirical evidence suggests that the optimal value varies across task types and, crucially, depends on the compression level applied to the target model. In this paper, we present \textbf{SpecKV}, a lightweight adaptive controller that selects~$γ$ per speculation step using signals extracted from the draft model itself. We profile speculative decoding across 4~task categories, 4~speculation lengths, and 3~compression levels (FP16, INT8, NF4), collecting 5,112 step-level records with per-step acceptance rates, draft entropy, and draft confidence. We demonstrate that the optimal~$γ$ shifts across compression regimes and that draft model confidence and entropy are strong predictors of acceptance rate (correlation~$\approx 0.56$). SpecKV uses a small MLP trained on these signals to maximize expected tokens per speculation step, achieving a 56.0\% improvement over the fixed-$γ$=4 baseline with only 0.34\,ms overhead per decision ($<$0.5\% of step time). The improvement is statistically significant ($p < 0.001$, paired bootstrap test). We release all profiling data, trained models, and notebooks as open-source artifacts.

Sarthak, Shikhar Shukla, Karm Veer Arya

This work is based on the submission to the competition Hindi Constraint conducted by AAAI@2021 for detection of hostile posts in Hindi on social media platforms. Here, a model is presented for detection and classification of hostile posts and further classify into fake, offensive, hate and defamation using Relational Graph Convolutional Networks. Unlike other existing work, our approach is focused on using semantic meaning along with contextutal information for better classification. The results from AAAI@2021 indicates that the proposed model is performing at par with Google's XLM-RoBERTa on the given dataset. Our best submission with RGCN achieves an F1 score of 0.97 (7th Rank) on coarse-grained evaluation and achieved best performance on identifying fake posts. Among all submissions to the challenge, our classification system with XLM-Roberta secured 2nd rank on fine-grained classification.

Sarthak, Shikhar Shukla, Govind Mittal

Language Identification (LI) is an important first step in several speech processing systems. With a growing number of voice-based assistants, speech LI has emerged as a widely researched field. To approach the problem of identifying languages, we can either adopt an implicit approach where only the speech for a language is present or an explicit one where text is available with its corresponding transcript. This paper focuses on an implicit approach due to the absence of transcriptive data. This paper benchmarks existing models and proposes a new attention based model for language identification which uses log-Mel spectrogram images as input. We also present the effectiveness of raw waveforms as features to neural network models for LI tasks. For training and evaluation of models, we classified six languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Russian and Italian) with an accuracy of 95.4% and four languages (English, French, German, Spanish) with an accuracy of 96.3% obtained from the VoxForge dataset. This approach can further be scaled to incorporate more languages.