EAGLE3 Draft Head — DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B
A speculative decoding draft head for deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B, trained using the EAGLE3 method on Google Cloud TPU with the SpecJAX framework.
EAGLE3 draft heads accelerate autoregressive generation by proposing multiple tokens per step that a target model then verifies in parallel — typically achieving 2-3x throughput gains with no change in output quality.
Usage
SGLang (GPU)
Note: DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen uses the Qwen2 architecture. EAGLE3 support requires a small patch to SGLang (adding
set_eagle3_layers_to_capture()to the Qwen2 model). See the SpecJAX inference guide for details.
python -m sglang.launch_server \
--model deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B \
--speculative-algorithm EAGLE3 \
--speculative-draft-model-path thoughtworks/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B-Eagle3 \
--speculative-num-steps 5 \
--speculative-eagle-topk 4 \
--dtype bfloat16
sglang-jax (TPU)
Note: Requires the same Qwen2 EAGLE3 patch applied to sglang-jax. The sglang-jax EAGLE3 pipeline is functional but not yet performance-optimized.
python -m sgl_jax.launch_server \
--model-path deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B \
--speculative-algorithm EAGLE3 \
--speculative-draft-model-path thoughtworks/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B-Eagle3 \
--speculative-eagle-topk 1 \
--speculative-num-steps 3 \
--speculative-num-draft-tokens 4 \
--tp-size 4 --dtype bfloat16
Python (SGLang client)
import sglang as sgl
llm = sgl.LLM(
model="deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B",
speculative_algorithm="EAGLE3",
speculative_draft_model_path="thoughtworks/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B-Eagle3",
speculative_num_steps=5,
speculative_eagle_topk=4,
dtype="bfloat16",
)
Training Details
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Framework | SpecJAX — pure JAX, no Flax/PyTorch |
| Hardware | Google Cloud TPU v5e-32 (single host, 4 chips, TP=4) |
| Dataset | 54K mixed: ShareGPT (45%) + UltraChat-200K (35%) + Open-PerfectBlend (20%) |
| Epochs | 3 |
| Steps | 9,960 total |
| Optimizer | AdamW, cosine LR decay, 3% warmup |
| Learning rate | 8e-4 |
| Batch size | B=1, sequence length T=512, gradient accumulation 16 |
| TTT length | 7 (multi-step speculative rollout) |
| Training time | ~4.4 hours |
| Precision | bfloat16 |
Training Method
This model uses EAGLE3's Test-Time Training (TTT) objective with a rollout length of 7. At each training step, the draft head autoregressively proposes 7 tokens; the target model provides ground-truth hidden states and logits for all positions; a geometric loss (0.8^k weighting) trains the draft to match the target at each position.
Performance
Token acceptance rates on generic instruction-following data (ShareGPT-style prompts):
| Position | Acceptance Rate |
|---|---|
| acc_0 (1st draft token) | 61.5% |
| acc_1 | 58.0% |
| acc_2 | 56.5% |
Measured on held-out evaluation data. Actual throughput gains depend on hardware, prompt distribution, and runtime version.
Model Architecture
The draft head is a single-layer transformer that operates on the target model's hidden states:
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Architecture | LlamaForCausalLM (1 decoder layer) |
| Hidden size | 4096 |
| Attention heads | 32 (GQA: 8 KV heads) |
| Vocabulary size | 152,064 (full target vocab) |
| Draft vocab size | 32,000 (top tokens by training frequency) |
| Parameters | ~350M |
Limitations
- Trained on English-dominant instruction data; performance may degrade on non-English inputs or highly domain-specific content.
- Acceptance rates are measured on generic chat data and will vary by prompt distribution.
- This is a v1 checkpoint trained on generic data. A v2 with target-model-regenerated training data is planned.
License
This model is released under the MIT License. The base model (DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B) is subject to its own license terms.
References
@article{li2025eagle3,
title={EAGLE3: Scalable Speculative Decoding with Training-Free Multi-Draft Speculation},
author={Li, Yuhui and Wei, Fangyun and Zhang, Chao and Zhang, Hongyang},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.01840},
year={2025}
}