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arXiv AI By Philipp Emanuel Weidmann, Allen Roush, Judah Goldfeder, Sanjay Basu, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv

XTC: Head-Aware Sampling by Excluding Top Choices

Read the original on arXiv AI →

XTC (Exclude Top Choices) is a lightweight, head‑aware decoding operator that improves diversity in autoregressive language models by removing overly probable tokens that dominate the next‑token distribution. It works by identifying tokens above a plausibility threshold, probabilistically excluding the dominant choices, and renormalizing the remaining distribution. Across 60 experiments on models such as Gemma 3 and DeepSeek R1, XTC boosts Distinct‑2 scores by 11–15 % and cuts repeat trigrams by 27–47 %, while a Mechanical Turk study shows a 62.3 % preference for XTC‑generated text without loss of fluency.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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