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Large Language Models (LLMs) generate text by sampling the next token from a probability distribution over the vocabulary at each decoding step. Popular sampling methods like top-p (nucleus sampling) often struggle to balance quality and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Minh Nhat Nguyen , Andrew Baker , Clement Neo , Allen Roush , Andreas Kirsch , Ravid Shwartz-Ziv

The quality of text generated by large language models depends critically on the decoding sampling strategy. While mainstream methods such as Top-$k$, Top-$p$, and Min-$p$ achieve a balance between diversity and accuracy through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Yuanhao Ding , Meimingwei Li , Esteban Garces Arias , Matthias Aßenmacher , Christian Heumann , Chongsheng Zhang

Obtaining high-quality outputs from Large Language Models (LLMs) often depends upon the choice of a sampling-based decoding strategy to probabilistically choose the next token at each generation step. While a variety of such sampling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Runyan Tan , Shuang Wu , Phillip Howard

For open-ended language generation tasks such as storytelling and dialogue, choosing the right decoding algorithm is critical to controlling the tradeoff between generation quality and diversity. However, there presently exists no consensus…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-23 Hugh Zhang , Daniel Duckworth , Daphne Ippolito , Arvind Neelakantan

Decoding strategies for generative large language models (LLMs) are a critical but often underexplored aspect of text generation tasks. Guided by specific hyperparameters, these strategies aim to transform the raw probability distributions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Esteban Garces Arias , Meimingwei Li , Christian Heumann , Matthias Aßenmacher

Despite their growing capabilities, language models still frequently reproduce content from their training data, generate repetitive text, and favor common grammatical patterns and vocabulary. A possible cause is the decoding strategy: the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Giorgio Franceschelli , Mirco Musolesi

Modern language models operate on subword-tokenized text in order to make a trade-off between model size, inference speed, and vocabulary coverage. A side effect of this is that, during inference, models are evaluated by measuring the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 David Pohl , Marco Cognetta , Junyoung Lee , Naoaki Okazaki

Diversity is an essential metric for evaluating the creativity of outputs generated by language models. Temperature-based sampling is a common strategy to increase diversity. However, for tasks that require high precision, e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Sergey Troshin , Wafaa Mohammed , Yan Meng , Christof Monz , Antske Fokkens , Vlad Niculae

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance across a wide range of downstream language tasks. Temperature sampling is a commonly used decoding strategy for LLMs' generation process. However, a fixed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Shimao Zhang , Yu Bao , Shujian Huang

Despite the remarkable advances in language modeling, current mainstream decoding methods still struggle to generate texts that align with human texts across different aspects. In particular, sampling-based methods produce less-repetitive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Haozhe Ji , Pei Ke , Hongning Wang , Minlie Huang

Long samples of text from neural language models can be of poor quality. Truncation sampling algorithms--like top-$p$ or top-$k$ -- address this by setting some words' probabilities to zero at each step. This work provides framing for the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-28 John Hewitt , Christopher D. Manning , Percy Liang

Research in natural language processing has demonstrated that the quality of generations from trained autoregressive language models is significantly influenced by the used sampling strategy. In this study, we investigate the impact of…

Sound · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Mathias Rose Bjare , Stefan Lattner , Gerhard Widmer

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to complex tasks that require extended reasoning. In such settings, models often benefit from diverse chains-of-thought to arrive at multiple candidate solutions. This requires two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Xueyan Li , Guinan Su , Mrinmaya Sachan , Jonas Geiping

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in code generation. However, existing LLMs' decoding strategies are designed for Natural Language (NL) generation, overlooking the differences between NL and programming…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-12-29 Yuqi Zhu , Jia Li , Ge Li , YunFei Zhao , Jia Li , Zhi Jin , Hong Mei

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle to accurately read and comprehend extremely long texts. Current methods for improvement typically rely on splitting long contexts into fixed-length chunks. However, fixed truncation risks…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Boheng Sheng , Jiacheng Yao , Meicong Zhang , Guoxiu He

This chapter explores advancements in decoding strategies for large language models (LLMs), focusing on enhancing the Locally Typical Sampling (LTS) algorithm. Traditional decoding methods, such as top-k and nucleus sampling, often struggle…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Jaydip Sen , Saptarshi Sengupta , Subhasis Dasgupta

Standard decoding strategies for text generation, including top-k, nucleus sampling, and contrastive search, select tokens based on likelihood, restricting selection to high-probability regions. Human language production operates…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Esteban Garces Arias , Nurzhan Sapargali , Christian Heumann , Matthias Aßenmacher

Large language model (LLM) scaling inference is key to unlocking greater performance, and leveraging diversity has proven an effective way to enhance it. Motivated by the observed relationship between solution accuracy and meaningful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Tianchun Wang , Zichuan Liu , Yuanzhou Chen , Jonathan Light , Weiyang Liu , Haifeng Chen , Xiang Zhang , Wei Cheng

With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), enhancing their performance has become a research hotspot. This paper presents a novel multi-prompt ensemble decoding…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Jiaxin Guo , Daimeng Wei , Yuanchang Luo , Shimin Tao , Hengchao Shang , Zongyao Li , Shaojun Li , Jinlong Yang , Zhanglin Wu , Zhiqiang Rao , Hao Yang

Decoding from large language models (LLMs) typically relies on fixed sampling hyperparameters (e.g., temperature, top-p), despite substantial variation in task difficulty and uncertainty across prompts and individual decoding steps. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Chloe H. Su , Zhe Ye , Samuel Tenka , Aidan Yang , Soonho Kong , Udaya Ghai
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