English

Text Generation Beyond Discrete Token Sampling

Computation and Language 2025-10-24 v3 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

In standard autoregressive generation, an LLM predicts the next-token distribution, samples a discrete token, and then discards the distribution, passing only the sampled token as new input. To preserve this distribution's rich information, we propose Mixture of Inputs (MoI), a training-free method for autoregressive generation. After generating a token following the standard paradigm, we construct a new input that blends the generated discrete token with the previously discarded token distribution. Specifically, we employ a Bayesian estimation method that treats the token distribution as the prior, the sampled token as the observation, and replaces the conventional one-hot vector with the continuous posterior expectation as the new model input. MoI allows the model to maintain a richer internal representation throughout the generation process, resulting in improved text quality and reasoning capabilities. On mathematical reasoning, code generation, and PhD-level QA tasks, MoI consistently improves performance across multiple models including QwQ-32B, Nemotron-Super-49B, Gemma-3-27B, and DAPO-Qwen-32B, with no additional training and negligible computational overhead.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.14827,
  title  = {Text Generation Beyond Discrete Token Sampling},
  author = {Yufan Zhuang and Liyuan Liu and Chandan Singh and Jingbo Shang and Jianfeng Gao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.14827},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:26:32.476Z