Learning Adaptive LLM Decoding
Decoding from large language models (LLMs) typically relies on fixed sampling hyperparameters (e.g., temperature, top-p), despite substantial variation in task difficulty and uncertainty across prompts and individual decoding steps. We propose to learn adaptive decoding policies that dynamically select sampling strategies at inference time, conditioned on available compute resources. Rather than fine-tuning the language model itself, we introduce lightweight decoding adapters trained with reinforcement learning and verifiable terminal rewards (e.g. correctness on math and coding tasks). At the sequence level, we frame decoding as a contextual bandit problem: a policy selects a decoding st...
| Authors | Chloe H. Su, Zhe Ye, Samuel Tenka et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 10 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 March 2026 |
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