When Do Repetition Loops Lock? Truncation Sampling, Bounded Penalties, and a Blind Spot in DRY
Language models sometimes repeat verbatim until the generation limit. We study the exit rather than the entrance: given that a span has already been repeated $n$ times, when is escape still possible? Along the loop the context is deterministic, so loop survival under any sampler can be computed exactly from one forward pass. Pure sampling leaves a positive escape probability at every step; top-$p$ with threshold $π>1/2$ locks a position exactly when the continuation probability reaches $π$. A bounded penalty can leave a position locked; a penalty that outgrows the model's preference for the loop over unseen tokens guarantees escape under top-$p$. The same analysis predicts a blind spot in...
| Authors | Yichuan Chen, Xin Wang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 17 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 October 2026 |
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