Related papers: Beyond Reproducibility: Token Probabilities Expose…

LLM (large language model) practitioners commonly notice that outputs can vary for the same inputs under settings expected to be deterministic. Yet the questions of how pervasive this is, and with what impact on results, have not to our…

There has been a recent explosion of research on Large Language Models (LLMs) for software engineering tasks, in particular code generation. However, results from LLMs can be highly unstable; nondeterministically returning very different…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are now integral across various domains and have demonstrated impressive performance. Progress, however, rests on the premise that benchmark scores are both accurate and reproducible. We demonstrate that the…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed text generation through inherently probabilistic context-aware mechanisms, mimicking human natural language. In this paper, we systematically investigate the performance of various LLMs when…

Despite widespread success in language understanding and generation, large language models (LLMs) exhibit unclear and often inconsistent behavior when faced with tasks that require probabilistic reasoning. In this work, we present the first…

Current evaluations of large language models (LLMs) often overlook non-determinism, typically focusing on a single output per example. This limits our understanding of LLM performance variability in real-world applications. Our study…

Estimating uncertainty in Large Language Models (LLMs) is important for properly evaluating LLMs, and ensuring safety for users. However, prior approaches to uncertainty estimation focus on the final answer in generated text, ignoring…

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT models, are increasingly used in software engineering for various tasks, such as code generation, requirements management, and debugging. While automating these tasks has garnered significant…

The impact of non-deterministic outputs from Large Language Models (LLMs) is not well examined for financial text understanding tasks. Through a compelling case study on investing in the US equity market via news sentiment analysis, we…

Legal literature on machine learning (ML) tends to focus on harms, and thus tends to reason about individual model outcomes and summary error rates. This focus has masked important aspects of ML that are rooted in its reliance on randomness…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a broad range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including document processing and code generation. Autoregressive Language Models (ARMs), which generate…

Nondeterminism in neural network optimization produces uncertainty in performance, making small improvements difficult to discern from run-to-run variability. While uncertainty can be reduced by training multiple model copies, doing so is…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in clinical applications through prompt engineering, allowing flexible clinical predictions. However, they struggle to produce reliable prediction probabilities, which are crucial for…

Autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) trained for next-word prediction have demonstrated remarkable proficiency at producing coherent text. But are they equally adept at forming coherent probability judgments? We use probabilistic…

In LLM inference, the same prompt may yield different outputs across different runs. At the system level, this non-determinism arises from floating-point non-associativity combined with dynamic batching and GPU kernels whose reduction…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionised the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and have achieved state-of-the-art performance in practically every task in this field. However, the prevalent approach used in text generation,…

The rapid advancement of large language model (LLM) technology has led to diverse applications, many of which inherently require randomness, such as stochastic decision-making, gaming, scheduling, AI agents, and cryptography-related tasks.…

Comprehensive evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) is an open research problem. Existing evaluations rely on deterministic point estimates generated via greedy decoding. However, we find that deterministic evaluations fail to capture…

Human decision-making belongs to the foundation of our society and civilization, but we are on the verge of a future where much of it will be delegated to artificial intelligence. The arrival of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed…

The prevailing assumption of an exponential decay in large language model (LLM) reliability with sequence length, predicated on independent per-token error probabilities, posits an inherent limitation for long autoregressive outputs. Our…