Speculative Probing: LLM Monitoring at Speculative-Decoding Cost
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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence
arXiv:2608.28099 (cs)
[Submitted on 28 Aug 2026]
Title:Speculative Probing: LLM Monitoring at Speculative-Decoding Cost
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Abstract:Real-time classification during language model inference is valuable for safety filtering, behavioral analysis, and model monitoring, but current approaches force a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Hidden-state probes are fast but limited: they are either not context-aware: operating on a single vector and cannot model interactions across positions; or they are very costly: having dedicated classifier models (Llama Guard, Qwen Guard, LLM-as-judge) or performing computation on hidden states for all tokens and then pooling the results (MultiMax). This shows an intrinsic trade-off between efficiency and accuracy.
However, we find that the speculative-decoding module in recent LLMs can be repurposed for efficient high-quality classification. By appending a trained soft prompt at the end of the target sequence, we can repurpose the speculative-decoding module into a sequence classifier. At inference time in a speculative-decoding pipeline, the KV cache is already in GPU memory, so classification adds negligible overhead. We evaluate on four classification tasks across four models (Qwen3.5-4B, 9B, 27B, MiniCPM4.1-8B). Our small probes consistently outperform zero-shot GPT-5.4-mini and, on multilingual prompt safety, match or beat specialized 8B safety classifiers (Qwen3Guard-Gen-8B, Llama-Guard-3-8B) without running a full LLM.
| Subjects: | Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.28099 [cs.AI] |
| (or arXiv:2608.28099v1 [cs.AI] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.28099
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled Speculative Probing: LLM Monitoring at Speculative-Decoding Cost, by Collin Zhang and 2 other authors
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