The best way to Improve LLM Responses With Higher Sampling Parameters

A deep dive into stochastic decoding with temperature, top_p, top_k, and min_p

10 min read

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11 hours ago

If you ask a Large Language Model (LLM) a matter, the model outputs a probability for each possible token in its vocabulary.

After sampling a token from this probability distribution, we will append the chosen token to our input prompt in order that the LLM can output the chances for the subsequent token.

This sampling process could be controlled by parameters similar to the famous temperature and top_p.

In this text, I’ll explain and visualize the sampling strategies that outline the output behavior of LLMs. By understanding what these parameters do and setting them in line with our use case, we will improve the output generated by LLMs.

For this text, I’ll use VLLM because the inference engine and Microsoft’s recent Phi-3.5-mini-instruct model with AWQ quantization. To run this model locally, I’m using my laptop’s NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 GPU.

Table Of Contents

· Understanding Sampling With Logprobs
∘ LLM Decoding Theory
∘ Retrieving Logprobs With the OpenAI Python SDK
· Greedy Decoding
· Temperature
· Top-k Sampling
· Top-p Sampling
· Combining Top-p…