arXiv Computation and Language

Breaking the Likelihood Trap: Variance-Calibrated Modulation for Large Language Model Decoding

The paper introduces Variance‑Calibrated Modulation (VCM), a training‑free pre‑decoding technique that reshapes language model probability distributions before truncation. VCM uses two dynamic mechanisms: a Contextual Searchlight via PMI to suppress stopwords and highlight context‑relevant tokens, and an Adaptive Self‑Debiasing that applies scale‑invariant penalization based on real‑time logit standard deviation. Experiments on open‑ended generation, factual QA, and mathematical reasoning show that VCM consistently reduces the likelihood trap, improving diversity, coherence, and reasoning accuracy with minimal computational cost.

arXiv AI
Sep 15

Look Before You Leap: Factual Decoding with Internal Attribution Signals

The paper introduces DescaPE, a decoding framework that uses internal model signals to reduce hallucinations in large language models. By identifying a factual‑salient layer span and training a lightweight probe to approximate its signal, DescaPE penalizes high‑risk continuations and rewards factually grounded ones during inference. Experiments on five factuality benchmarks across three LLMs show that DescaPE improves factuality with only a 1.10× latency overhead.

By Hayeong Ryu, JungMin Yun, Byeonggeuk Lim, Sunhee Jo, YoungBin Kim
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

SimLens for Early Exit in Large Language Models: Eliciting Accurate Latent Predictions with One More Token

SimLens is a training‑free decoder that improves early‑layer predictions in large language models by keeping only the start token and a candidate answer token and performing a lightweight continuation through the remaining layers. It outperforms direct linear readouts, yielding higher accuracy on tasks such as ARC, BoolQ, and HeadQA with LLaMA‑7B and Vicuna‑7B. The method is extended to Linear SimLens for confidence estimation and combined into SimExit, a hybrid early‑exit mechanism that achieves significant speedups while maintaining accuracy.

By Ming Ma, Bowen Zheng, Zhongqiao Lin, Tianming Yang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Elastic Threshold Attention: Learned Contextual Sparsity for Long-Context Decoding

Elastic Threshold Attention (ETA) is a trainable attention mechanism that dynamically predicts contextual thresholds from query representations, enabling selective pruning of KV cache tokens during long‑context decoding. By multiplicatively suppressing sub‑threshold logits during training, ETA avoids representation collapse and eliminates localized attention sinks, allowing a 1.45B model to match dense attention performance at roughly 85% training sparsity and 38% active decode density. At inference, a custom Triton kernel achieves up to 2.5× faster decoding on sequences up to 512K tokens, and an offline calibration step can further reduce compute by 27% by freezing per‑head thresholds.

By Themistoklis Haris, Henry Li, Maryam Karimzadehgan
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Language Models Can Control Their Own Attention

The paper introduces Declarative Attention (DA), a protocol that lets language models explicitly declare which parts of their context to focus on during generation. By partitioning decoding into full-context, region-specific, and recent-output-only modes, the inference engine can skip large portions of the KV cache, dramatically reducing attended tokens. Experiments on 15 long-context tasks with off-the-shelf models show significant savings (52.0% and 31.1% reductions) with only modest accuracy drops that diminish as model size increases.

By Namgyu Ho, Huzama Ahmad, Woosung Koh, Se-Young Yun, Tal Schuster, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos
arXiv AI
Jun 9

End-to-End Context Compression at Scale

arXiv:2606. 09659v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context language model inference is bottlenecked by memory, as the KV cache grows with context length.

By Ang Li, Sean McLeish, Haozhe Chen, Nimit Kalra, Zaiqian Chen, Artem Gazizov, Venkata Anoop Suhas Kumar Morisetty, Bhavya Kailkhura, Harshitha Menon, Zhuang Liu, Brian R. Bartoldson, Tom Goldstein, Sanae Lotfi, Micah Goldblum, Pavel Izmailov
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Resonant Context Anchoring: Decoupling Attention Routing and Signal Gain at Inference Time

arXiv:2606. 01923v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit "contextual disregard" when faced with input evidence that conflicts with their internal parametric memory, leading to persistent factual hallucinations.

By Mingkuan Zhao, Yide Gao, Wentao Hu, Suquan Chen, Tianchen Huang, Zhenhua An, Zetao Chang, Xiayu Sun, Yuheng Min
arXiv AI
Jul 22

Large Language Models Explore by Latent Distilling

arXiv:2604. 24927v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generating diverse responses is crucial for test-time scaling of large language models (LLMs), yet standard stochastic sampling mostly yields surface-level lexical variation, limiting semantic exploration.

By Yuanhao Zeng, Ao Lu, Lufei Li, Zheng Zhang, Yexin Li, Kan Ren