arXiv Machine Learning

PRISM: Promoting Sampling Diversity of Large Language Models with Implicit Stochastic Modulation

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

On the Effect of Sampling Diversity in Scaling LLM Inference

arXiv:2502. 11027v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model (LLM) scaling inference is key to unlocking greater performance, and leveraging diversity has proven an effective way to enhance it.

By Tianchun Wang, Zichuan Liu, Yuanzhou Chen, Jonathan Light, Weiyang Liu, Haifeng Chen, Xiang Zhang, Wei Cheng
arXiv AI
Oct 12

One-Step Text Generation by Seq-Drifting

The paper introduces Seq-Drifting, a new framework that enables diffusion language models to generate an entire text sequence in a single forward pass. By applying a drift field to continuous token representations, the model learns a direct mapping from Gaussian noise to text, using attraction to guide outputs toward contextually plausible tokens and repulsion to prevent repetition and collapse. Experiments show that Seq-Drifting achieves a perplexity of 36.01 on LM1B and performs competitively in unconditional, conditional, translation, summarization, and reasoning tasks.

By Jiayu Liu, Ruizhi Zhao, Tianyun Ji, Yee Whye Teh, Zhenya Huang, Ning Miao
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 AI
Aug 28

FOCUS & RePAIR: Mitigating Text Degeneration via Token-Level Guidance for Pruned Large Language Models

The paper investigates how pruning large language models can lead to text degeneration, particularly repetition loops, even when perplexity and task accuracy stay stable. By treating decoding as a dynamical process, the authors separate degeneration into loop entry risk and loop persistence, showing that persistence depends on the escape mass given to plausible alternatives. They introduce two token‑level guidance objectives—FOCUS, which reweights distillation toward high‑confidence teacher regions, and RePAIR, which uses onset‑centered positive/negative continuation pairs with a margin loss—to reduce repetition and improve generation quality in pruned models.

By Junyoung Lee, Sehyeon Park, Shinhyoung Jang, Seonha Ryu, Hojeong Kim, Hyunsei Lee, Il Hong Suh, Yeseong Kim
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18

Language models suffer from a curse of ambiguity

arXiv:2608. 15448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly rely on sampling as a driver of their own improvement, making the fidelity of their learned distributions more critical than ever.

By Nicolas Zucchet, Hyun Dong Lee, Scott Linderman
arXiv AI
Sep 1

AdaFuse: Adaptive Ensemble Decoding with Test-Time Scaling for LLMs

AdaFuse is an adaptive ensemble decoding framework for large language models that dynamically selects fusion units during generation. It uses an uncertainty-based criterion to decide when to ensemble, applying a diversity-aware scaling strategy in uncertain states while continuing direct generation when confident. Experiments on question answering, arithmetic reasoning, and machine translation show AdaFuse outperforms strong baselines with an average relative improvement of 6.88%.

By Chengming Cui, Tianxin Wei, Ziyi Chen, Ruizhong Qiu, Zhichen Zeng, Zhining Liu, Xuying Ning, Duo Zhou, Jingrui He
arXiv AI
Jul 16

Representation-Based Exploration for Language Models: From Test-Time to Post-Training

arXiv:2510. 11686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to expand the capabilities of language models, but it is unclear if current RL techniques promote the discovery of novel behaviors, or simply sharpen those already present in the base model.

By Jens Tuyls, Dylan J. Foster, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Jordan T. Ash