Decoding Uncertainty: The Impact of Decoding Strategies for Uncertainty Estimation in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Decoding strategies affect the probability distribution underlying the output of a language model and can therefore affect both generation quality and uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They investigate the impact of decoding strategies on uncertainty estimation in large language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the uncertainty estimation of large language models by reducing repetition. |
Similar Papers
A Survey of Uncertainty Estimation Methods on Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but could produce biased, hallucinated, or non-factual responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct extensive experimental evaluations of LLM uncertainty estimation methods . large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method could produce biased, hallucinated, or non-factual responses . a lack of comprehensive surveys on LLM uncertainty estimation is a problem . |
A Thorough Examination of Decoding Methods in the Era of LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Decoding methods are essential for converting language models from next-token predictors into practical task solvers. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate decoding methods in general-purpose large language models . they find that decoding method performance is notably task-dependent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform task-dependently and are influenced by alignment, model size, and quantization. |
On Decoding Strategies for Neural Text Generators (2022.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a recent study suggests that decoding strategies may be more important than the model architecture itself when generating text from probabilistic models. |
| Approach: | They propose to measure changes in attributes of generated text as a function of decoding strategy and task using human and automatic evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed study shows that decoding strategies do not always transfer across tasks . authors show that the differences in attributes are not always consistent across tasks, they say . |
Decoding Decoded: Understanding Hyperparameter Effects in Open-Ended Text Generation (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Generative large language models generate a high-dimensional probability distribution over all tokens in their vocabulary. |
| Approach: | They conduct extensive sensitivity analyses to determine how hyperparameter choices shape the outputs of generative large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods influence the distribution of diversity and coherence metrics in human-written text, but the optimal configurations vary across models and tasks. |
A Survey of Confidence Estimation and Calibration in Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks in various domains, but they can be unreliable due to factual errors in their generations. |
| Approach: | They summarize recent advances in LLM confidence estimation and calibration and outline their main lessons learned. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be used to assess the reliability of models and to calibrate them across tasks. |
Unlocking Efficiency in Large Language Model Inference: A Comprehensive Survey of Speculative Decoding (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Heming Xia, Zhe Yang, Qingxiu Dong, Peiyi Wang, Yongqi Li, Tao Ge, Tianyu Liu, Wenjie Li, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have a high inference latency stemming from autoregressive decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel decoding paradigm that drafts multiple tokens and verifies them in parallel . they aim to provide a catalyst for further research on Speculative Decoding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method drafts multiple tokens and verifies them in parallel . it can be used to accelerate inference in large language models. |
The Impact of Inference Acceleration on Bias of LLMs (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work suggests strategies to increase inference efficiency with LLMs . however, these strategies may inadvertently lead to some side-effects. |
| Approach: | They propose to optimize inference acceleration strategies such as quantization, pruning, and caching to reduce inference cost and latency while maintaining predictive performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategies reduce cost and latency while maintaining predictive performance while preserving the model size. |
Uncertainty-Aware Contrastive Decoding (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models excel in a wide range of tasks, but generating factually accurate outputs remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that dynamically adjusts model contributions at each decoding step based on uncertainty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves factual accuracy and reliability over existing methods. |
Understanding Cross-Lingual Alignment—A Survey (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Cross-lingual alignment is the meaningful similarity of representations across languages in multilingual language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of methods to improve cross-lingual alignment . they argue that an effective trade-off between language-neutral and language-specific information is key . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be applied to encoder models and encoder-decoder-only models . they show that language-neutral and language-specific information is key . |
Fine-tuning Large Language Models with Limited Data: A Survey and Practical Guide (2026.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models provide strong foundations, but effective adaptation under data scarcity requires efficient and efficient fine-tuning techniques. |
| Approach: | They propose to review parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques that lower training and deployment costs and domain and cross-lingual adaptation methods for both encoder and decoder models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques lower training and deployment costs, domain and cross-lingual adaptation methods, and model specialization strategies. |