Hugging Face Trending Papers

Nash Equilibrium Text: A Game-Theoretic Decoding Framework for Text Generation

The paper introduces a game-theoretic approach to text revision, treating token positions as players and vocabulary items as actions, with utilities based on a language model’s log conditional probability. It shows that Nash equilibria can yield exponentially higher likelihoods than autoregressive outputs as sequence length increases, and proposes Nash decoding, an algorithm that finds an ε-Nash equilibrium in O(1/ε) time. Experiments on CLAPNQ, PubMedQA, and CoQA demonstrate that equilibria derived from masked language models achieve higher F1 and ROUGE scores than autoregressive models, up to 18× larger, without fine-tuning, though with extra test-time computation.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

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.

By Yuanhao Ding, Meimingwei Li, Esteban Garces Arias, Matthias A{\ss}enmacher, Christian Heumann, Chongsheng Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

d2: Improving Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models via Trajectory Likelihood Estimation

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 AI
6d ago

GrammarRL: Effective Grammar-Constrained Decoding via Reinforcement Learning

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}
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Retrieval-augmented Decoding for Improving Truthfulness in Open-ended Generation

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 AI
Sep 4

Grammar-Aligned Decoding

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