# RECAP: Context-Aware Prediction Recycling with Request-Local and Persistent Memories for Multimodal Speculative Decoding

**Authors:** Hengjie Zhu, Dayan Wu, Xinze Liu, Peng Fu, Zheng Lin, Weiping Wang  
**Lab:** Chinese Academy of Sciences · **Published:** 4 Nov 2026  
**Links:** [arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05894) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2611.05894) · [Code](https://github.com/Senmo996/RECAP-official-code) · [This page](https://omen-bit.github.io/ai-paper-daily/paper/2611.05894.html)

## Abstract

Recycling a target model's own predictions offers a training-free source of proposals for speculative decoding. In vision-language models, however, existing recycling indexes predictions by the last token alone, conflating predictions computed under different images and prefixes; we find that such reuse fails most often at image-sensitive decoding states. Longer keys reduce this aliasing but match fewer states. We introduce \method, which stores target predictions under one-, two-, and three-token keys: contextual memories live only for the current request and are thus implicitly conditioned on its image, while token-level memory persists across requests to retain coverage. At each lookup, entropy-confidence weighting fuses the retrieved predictions according to their key specificity and concentration. Best-first search composes the fused transitions into a candidate tree, supplemented by suffix-matched continuations, and one target pass verifies the tree under greedy decoding. Without training or an auxiliary draft model, \method\ achieves mean speedups over autoregressive decoding of 1.66\speed and 1.56\speed across seven single-turn benchmarks on Qwen2.5-VL-7B and LLaVA-1.6-7B, exceeding the strongest training-free baseline, Token Recycling (1.51\speed and 1.37\speed). Our implementation is available in https://github.com/Senmo996/RECAP-official-code.

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