Not really, although the technique employs a look-up table. The basic idea is that they found that many instruction sequences that cause a mis-speculation once

Not really, although the technique employs a look-up table. The basic idea is that they found that many instruction sequences that cause a mis-speculation once tend to cause it again in the future. This is done in the context of ILP -- mis-speculation means that the processor thought an instruction doesn't need data from a previous one and it executed it in advance, but then it turned out that the result did depend on a previous one, so the first result was retired and the instruction was executed again. In order to avoid this from happening too often, they added a(nother) feedback loop in the whole process: if a sequence of instructions seems to cause a mis-speculation often enough, it's added to a table, so that when it's encountered again, the control unit doesn't speculatively execute an instruction whose result is most likely going to have to be retired anyway. I don't know if there's prior art to this, but the basic idea is fairly straightforward. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that IBM or DEC engineers knew about this prior to 1996.