Chain-of-Thought reasoning significantly improves the performance of large language models on complex tasks, but incurs high inference latency due to long generation traces.Steplevel speculative reasoning aims to mitigate this cost, yet existing approaches face a longstanding trade-off among accuracy, inference speed, and resource efficiency.We propose ConfSpec, a confidence-gated cascaded verification framework that resolves this trade-off.Our key insight is an asymmetry between generation and verification: while generating a correct reasoning step requires substantial model capacity, step-level verification is a constrained discriminative task for which small draft models are well-calibrated within their competence range, enabling high-confidence draft decisions to be accepted directly while selectively escalating uncertain cases to the large target model.Evaluation across diverse workloads shows that ConfSpec achieves up to 2.24× end-to-end speedups while matching target-model accuracy.Our method requires no external judge models and is orthogonal to token-level speculative decoding, enabling further multiplicative acceleration.

Autoregressive decoding inherently limits the inference throughput of Large Language Model (LLM) due to its sequential dependency.Speculative decoding mitigates this by verifying multiple predicted tokens in parallel, but its efficiency remains constrained by what we identify as verification heterogeneity-the uneven difficulty of verifying different speculative candidates.In practice, a small subset of high-confidence predictions accounts for most successful verifications, yet existing methods treat all candidates uniformly, leading to redundant computation.We present HeteroSpec, a heterogeneity-adaptive speculative decoding framework that allocates verification effort in proportion to candidate uncertainty.Het-eroSpec estimates verification complexity using a lightweight entropy-based quantifier, partitions candidates via a data-driven stratification policy, and dynamically tunes speculative depth and pruning thresholds through coordinated optimization.Across five benchmarks and four LLMs, HeteroSpec delivers an average 4.24× decoding speedup over state-of-the-art methods such as EAGLE-3, while preserving exact output distributions.Crucially, HeteroSpec requires no model retraining and remains compatible with other inference optimizations, making it a practical direction for improving speculative decoding efficiency.