arXiv Machine Learning By Jiajun He, Zongyu Guo, Jos\'e Miguel Hern\'andez-Lobato, Yuanqi Du

Recipes for Steering and Scaling LLMs via Sampling

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The paper introduces a flexible, theoretically grounded framework for steering and scaling autoregressive large language models (LLMs) through sampling. It presents two algorithms—Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) and Replica Exchange (RE)—that guide generation toward desired distributions such as powering, product, or tilting of the base model. Experiments show these methods outperform Best‑of‑N and standard MCMC baselines, offering a systematic recipe for probabilistic inference with LLMs via sampling.

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