The "end-to-end" label for LLMs is a misnomer. In practice, they depend on a non-differentiable decoding process that requires laborious, hand-tuning of hyperparameters like temperature and top-p. This paper introduces AutoDeco, a novel architecture that enables truly "end-to-end" generation by learning to control its own decoding strategy. We augment the standard transformer with lightweight heads that, at each step, dynamically predict context-specific temperature and top-p values alongside the next-token logits. This approach transforms decoding into a parametric, token-level process, allowing the model to self-regulate its sampling strategy within a single forward pass. Through extensive experiments on eight benchmarks, we demonstrate that AutoDeco not only significantly outperforms default decoding strategies but also achieves performance comparable to an oracle-tuned baseline derived from "hacking the test set"-a practical upper bound for any static method. Crucially, we uncover an emergent capability for instruction-based decoding control: the model learns to interpret natural language commands (e.g., "generate with low randomness") and adjusts its predicted temperature and top-p on a token-by-token basis, opening a new paradigm for steerable and interactive LLM decoding.
@article{arxiv.2510.26697,
title = {The End of Manual Decoding: Towards Truly End-to-End Language Models},
author = {Zhichao Wang and Dongyang Ma and Xinting Huang and Deng Cai and Tian Lan and Jiahao Xu and Haitao Mi and Xiaoying Tang and Yan Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.26697},
year = {2025}
}