Waste Not, Want Not; Recycled Gumbel Noise Improves Consistency in Natural Language Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: de Mijolla, Damien, Saddiq, Hannan, Moore, Kim
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author de Mijolla, Damien
Saddiq, Hannan
Moore, Kim
author_facet de Mijolla, Damien
Saddiq, Hannan
Moore, Kim
contents Consistency in the output of language models is critical for their reliability and practical utility. Due to their training objective, language models learn to model the full space of possible continuations, leading to outputs that can vary significantly in style and content, even for similar or repeated inputs. To address this, we propose a novel decoding algorithm that enhances response consistency across different prompts with no degradation in response quality. By incorporating a latent variable into the next-token sampling process based on the Gumbel reparametrisation trick, our method outperforms standard sampling by up to 10% across semantic and stylistic consistency benchmarks. Additionally, our approach integrates seamlessly with existing sampling methods with negligible computational overhead, providing a practical solution for improving the reliability of language model outputs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_00831
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Waste Not, Want Not; Recycled Gumbel Noise Improves Consistency in Natural Language Generation
de Mijolla, Damien
Saddiq, Hannan
Moore, Kim
Computation and Language
Consistency in the output of language models is critical for their reliability and practical utility. Due to their training objective, language models learn to model the full space of possible continuations, leading to outputs that can vary significantly in style and content, even for similar or repeated inputs. To address this, we propose a novel decoding algorithm that enhances response consistency across different prompts with no degradation in response quality. By incorporating a latent variable into the next-token sampling process based on the Gumbel reparametrisation trick, our method outperforms standard sampling by up to 10% across semantic and stylistic consistency benchmarks. Additionally, our approach integrates seamlessly with existing sampling methods with negligible computational overhead, providing a practical solution for improving the reliability of language model outputs.
title Waste Not, Want Not; Recycled Gumbel Noise Improves Consistency in Natural Language Generation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00831