The Role of Generator Access in Autoregressive Post-Training

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Rege, Amit Kiran
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Rege, Amit Kiran
author_facet Rege, Amit Kiran
contents We study how generator access constrains autoregressive post-training. The central question is whether the learner is confined to fresh root-start rollouts or can return to previously built prefixes and query the next-token rule there. In the root-start regime, output sampling, generated-token log probabilities, top-$k$ reports, and full next-token distributions along sampled trajectories all reduce to one canonical experiment, limited by the on-policy probability of reaching informative prefixes. Weak prefix control breaks this barrier, and once control is available, richer observations such as conditional sampling or logits can outperform top-$1$ access. Changing only the generator interface creates an exponential gap for KL-regularized outcome-reward post-training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_04855
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Role of Generator Access in Autoregressive Post-Training
Rege, Amit Kiran
Machine Learning
We study how generator access constrains autoregressive post-training. The central question is whether the learner is confined to fresh root-start rollouts or can return to previously built prefixes and query the next-token rule there. In the root-start regime, output sampling, generated-token log probabilities, top-$k$ reports, and full next-token distributions along sampled trajectories all reduce to one canonical experiment, limited by the on-policy probability of reaching informative prefixes. Weak prefix control breaks this barrier, and once control is available, richer observations such as conditional sampling or logits can outperform top-$1$ access. Changing only the generator interface creates an exponential gap for KL-regularized outcome-reward post-training.
title The Role of Generator Access in Autoregressive Post-Training
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04855