Truncation Samplers Are Nested: Comparing Decoding Rules Is a Measurement Problem
Settling one comparison between two truncation samplers has cost six thousand A100-hours, and nothing says in advance how far apart two samplers can be. We observe that almost every deployed truncation rule keeps a prefix of the probability-sorted vocabulary, so any two such rules are nested at every decoding step. Nesting yields a closed-form per-step distance and a coupling under which both samplers emit identical text until they first disagree. Accumulated over a generation, this gives a separation certificate that bounds the difference between two samplers on any bounded outcome, is computable from logs a comparison already produces, and equals their sequence-level total variation dis...
| Authors | Rasul Khanbayov, Hasan Kurban |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 11 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 October 2026 |
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