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Temperature sampling is a conventional approach to diversify large language model predictions. As temperature increases, the prediction becomes diverse but also vulnerable to hallucinations -- generating tokens that are sensible but not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Chung-Ching Chang , David Reitter , Renat Aksitov , Yun-Hsuan Sung

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

Large language models (LLMs) can improve reasoning at inference time through test-time scaling (TTS), where multiple reasoning traces are generated and the best one is selected. Prior work shows that increasing the number of samples K…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Yuheng Wu , Azalia Mirhoseini , Thierry Tambe

Inductive reasoning - the process of inferring general rules from a small number of observations - is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence. Recent works suggest that large language models (LLMs) can engage in inductive reasoning by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Kang-il Lee , Hyukhun Koh , Dongryeol Lee , Seunghyun Yoon , Minsung Kim , Kyomin Jung

Multi-sample aggregation strategies, such as majority voting and best-of-N sampling, are widely used in contemporary large language models (LLMs) to enhance predictive accuracy across various tasks. A key challenge in this process is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Weihua Du , Yiming Yang , Sean Welleck

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

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

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

Temperature scaling is a simple method that allows to control the uncertainty of probabilistic models. It is mostly used in two contexts: improving the calibration of classifiers and tuning the stochasticity of large language models (LLMs).…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-28 Pierre-Alexandre Mattei , Bruno Loureiro

Sampling-based decoding strategies have been widely adopted for Large Language Models (LLMs) in numerous applications, targeting a balance between diversity and quality via temperature tuning and tail truncation. Considering the strong…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Yuxuan Zhou , Margret Keuper , Mario Fritz

During language model decoding, it is known that using higher temperature sampling gives more creative responses, while lower temperatures are more factually accurate. However, such models are commonly applied to general instruction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-15 Shehzaad Dhuliawala , Ilia Kulikov , Ping Yu , Asli Celikyilmaz , Jason Weston , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar , Jack Lanchantin

Reinforcement Learning has demonstrated substantial improvements in the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), exhibiting significant applicability across various domains. Recent research has identified that tokens within LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Haomin Zhuang , Yujun Zhou , Taicheng Guo , Yue Huang , Fangxu Liu , Kai Song , Xiangliang Zhang

Increasing diversity in language models is a challenging yet essential objective. A common approach is to raise the decoding temperature. In this work, we investigate this approach through a simplistic yet common case to provide insights…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Alexandre Verine , Florian Le Bronnec , Kunhao Zheng , Alexandre Allauzen , Yann Chevaleyre , Benjamin Negrevergne

Large language models (LLMs) typically employ greedy decoding or low-temperature sampling for reasoning tasks, reflecting a perceived trade-off between diversity and accuracy. We challenge this convention by introducing top-$n\sigma$, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Chenxia Tang , Jianchun Liu , Hongli Xu , Liusheng Huang

Generative models of complex systems often require post-hoc parameter adjustments to produce useful outputs. For example, energy-based models for protein design are sampled at an artificially low ''temperature'' to generate novel,…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2025-12-11 Peter W Fields , Vudtiwat Ngampruetikorn , David J Schwab , Stephanie E Palmer

Temperature is a crucial hyperparameter in large language models (LLMs), controlling the trade-off between exploration and exploitation during text generation. High temperatures encourage diverse but noisy outputs, while low temperatures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Haoran Dang , Cuiling Lan , Hai Wan , Xibin Zhao , Yan Lu

Large language models (LLMs) are applied to all sorts of creative tasks, and their outputs vary from beautiful, to peculiar, to pastiche, into plain plagiarism. The temperature parameter of an LLM regulates the amount of randomness, leading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Max Peeperkorn , Tom Kouwenhoven , Dan Brown , Anna Jordanous

Self-consistency improves reasoning by aggregating diverse stochastic samples, yet the dynamics behind its efficacy remain underexplored. We reframe self-consistency as a dynamic distributional alignment problem, revealing that decoding…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Yiwei Li , Ji Zhang , Shaoxiong Feng , Peiwen Yuan , Xinglin Wang , Jiayi Shi , Yueqi Zhang , Chuyi Tan , Boyuan Pan , Yao Hu , Kan Li

In this research study, we empirically investigate the effect of sampling temperature on the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on various problem-solving tasks. We created a multiple-choice question-and-answer (MCQA) exam by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Matthew Renze , Erhan Guven
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