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Main Author: Mikhaylovskiy, Nikolay
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02320
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author Mikhaylovskiy, Nikolay
author_facet Mikhaylovskiy, Nikolay
contents Autoregressive language models typically use temperature parameter at inference to shape the probability distribution and control the randomness of the text generated. After the text was generated, this parameter can be estimated using maximum likelihood approach. Following it, we propose a procedure to estimate the temperature of any text, including ones written by humans, with respect to a given language model. We evaluate the temperature estimation capability of a wide selection of small-to-medium Large Language Models (LLMs). We then use the best-performing Qwen3 14B to estimate temperatures of popular corpora, finding that while most measured temperatures are close to 1, notable exceptions include Jokes, GSM8K, and AG News (1.1), and Python code (0.9).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_02320
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Estimating Text Temperature with Language Models
Mikhaylovskiy, Nikolay
Computation and Language
Autoregressive language models typically use temperature parameter at inference to shape the probability distribution and control the randomness of the text generated. After the text was generated, this parameter can be estimated using maximum likelihood approach. Following it, we propose a procedure to estimate the temperature of any text, including ones written by humans, with respect to a given language model. We evaluate the temperature estimation capability of a wide selection of small-to-medium Large Language Models (LLMs). We then use the best-performing Qwen3 14B to estimate temperatures of popular corpora, finding that while most measured temperatures are close to 1, notable exceptions include Jokes, GSM8K, and AG News (1.1), and Python code (0.9).
title Estimating Text Temperature with Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02320