A Theory of Time-Sensitive Language Generation: Sparse Hallucination Beats Mode Collapse
We study language generation in the limit under a global preference ordering on strings, as introduced by Kleinberg and Wei. As is done in previous work, we aim for breadth, but impose an additional requirement of timeliness: higher-ranked strings should be generated earlier. A string is then only credited if it is generated before a deadline, where its deadline is defined by a function that maps a string's rank in the target language to the time by which it must be produced. This is in keeping with a central consideration in machine learning, where inductive bias favors ``simpler'' or ``more plausible'' outputs, all else being equal. We show that timely generation is impossible in a stro...
| Authors | Atul Ganju, Travis McVoy, Shaddin Dughmi et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 11 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 May 2026 |
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