arXiv:2606. 27359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many decoding methods for large language models can be understood as shifting probability mass toward outputs that are more likely under the model, either locally at the token level or globally at the sequence level.
By Johannes Zenn, Jonas Geiping
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.
By Yuanhao Ding, Meimingwei Li, Esteban Garces Arias, Matthias A{\ss}enmacher, Christian Heumann, Chongsheng Zhang
arXiv:2509. 21474v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While diffusion language models (DLMs) have achieved competitive performance in text generation, improving their reasoning ability with reinforcement learning remains an active research area.
By Guanghan Wang, Gilad Turok, Yair Schiff, Marianne Arriola, Volodymyr Kuleshov
arXiv:2607. 16209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Context reranking and pruning have become essential for improving the efficiency of modern Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, yet an interpretable and unified framework remains underexplored.
By Yanqiao Chen, Dongsheng Hou, Yuhan Rui, Zhen Cao, Yepang Liu
arXiv:2502. 05163v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) necessitates effective mechanisms to ensure their responsible deployment by accurately distinguishing unsafe content from benign content.
By Yihe Deng, Yu Yang, Junkai Zhang, Wei Wang, Bo Li
arXiv:2608. 07827v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Confidence estimation for large language models (LLMs) aims to estimate the probability that a generated answer is correct, while calibration aligns these estimates with empirical accuracy.
By Avery Ma, Lorne Schell, Vin Bhaskara, Leila Pishdad
GrammarRL introduces a label‑free reinforcement learning approach that adapts language models to grammar constraints without annotated data. It optimizes two self‑supervised rewards—direct and reverse—using a Reinforce Leave‑One‑Out objective over grammar‑constrained rollouts, and regularizes toward a frozen base model. Experiments on sign‑language gloss translation, hierarchical text classification, and named entity recognition with Llama models show consistent gains over constrained greedy decoding and competitive performance to beam search while keeping inference cost low.
By Gabriele Tuccio, Antonino Furnari, Aldo Gangemi, Misael Mongiov\`{\i}
The paper introduces Retrieval-Augmented Decoding (RAD), a decoding-time method that improves the truthfulness of large language models without retraining. RAD uses a small reference set of up to ten annotated examples to build a grounding space of context embeddings and next-token logits, which it retrieves and aggregates during inference to shape the model’s output. Experiments on four open-ended generation benchmarks and four different LLMs show that RAD consistently outperforms strong baselines and generalizes well across tasks.
By Manh Nguyen, Sunil Gupta, Hung Le
arXiv:2607. 02781v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time alignment steers a frozen language model during decoding using auxiliary reward signals, avoiding the cost of repeated weight updates.
By Yaswanth Chittepu, Ativ Joshi, Sohini Chintala, Scott Niekum
The paper introduces Grammar‑Aligned Decoding (GAD), addressing the issue that conventional grammar‑constrained decoding (GCD) can distort a large language model’s probability distribution, yielding grammatical but low‑likelihood outputs. GAD proposes an adaptive sampling method, Approximate Expected Futures (ASAp), which uses prior samples to over‑approximate future grammaticality, ensuring outputs remain both grammatical and faithful to the model’s conditional probabilities. Experiments on code generation and structured NLP tasks demonstrate that ASAp often produces higher‑likelihood outputs than existing GCD techniques while still enforcing the required grammatical constraints.
By Kanghee Park, Jiayu Wang, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Nadia Polikarpova, Loris D'Antoni
arXiv:2608. 10137v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Grammar Constrained Decoding (GCD) forces Language Models (LMs) to produce syntactically valid outputs by masking out non-conforming tokens at each step.
By I\c{s}{\i}l \"Ozg\"u, Yaoxuan Wu, Guy Van den Broeck, Miryung Kim
arXiv:2606. 09635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ensuring the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) under distribution drift requires inference-time adaptation.
By Hankun Lin, Ruqi Zhang