Text Generation: Probabilistic Sampling

Overview

In our previous lesson, we mastered deterministic generation methods—greedy search and beam search. These techniques are excellent for tasks requiring consistency and correctness, but they share a fundamental limitation when generating text from language models: they're too conservative.

When we want creative, diverse, or surprising text generation from transformer models, we need to introduce controlled randomness. This lesson explores probabilistic sampling techniques that balance creativity with quality, giving language models the ability to produce varied, interesting outputs while maintaining coherence.

Think of this as the difference between a conversation with a very knowledgeable but predictable expert versus one with a creative, thoughtful friend who surprises you with interesting perspectives.

Learning Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

• Understand why randomness improves text generation
• Implement and tune temperature sampling for creativity control
• Use top-k sampling to limit choice sets intelligently
• Apply nucleus (top-p) sampling for dynamic token selection
• Combine multiple techniques for production-ready systems
• Debug and optimize sampling parameters for different use cases
• Handle common issues like repetition and incoherence

The Case for Controlled Randomness

Why Perfect Predictions Aren't Perfect

Deterministic methods optimize for likelihood—they choose what's most probable given the training data. But the most probable text isn't always the most:

• Interesting: "The weather is nice" vs. "The crimson sunset painted the horizon"
• Useful: Generic responses vs. specific, tailored answers
• Human-like: Robotic predictability vs. natural variation

The Exploration-Exploitation Balance

Every text generation step involves a fundamental trade-off:

Real-world analogy: Choosing a restaurant

• Exploitation: Always go to your proven favorite
• Exploration: Try completely random new places
• Smart sampling: Try highly-rated new places in genres you like

Temperature Sampling: The Creativity Dial

Core Concept

Temperature sampling modifies the probability distribution before sampling, controlling how "sharp" or "flat" the distribution becomes.

Mathematical formulation: $p_i = \frac{\exp(z_i/T)}{\sum_j \exp(z_j/T)}$

Where:

• $z_i$ = original logit for token $i$
• $T$ = temperature parameter
• Lower $T$ → more focused (sharper distribution)
• Higher $T$ → more random (flatter distribution)

Temperature Effects Visualization

Understanding Temperature Values

Python Implementation

python
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def temperature_sampling(model, tokenizer, prompt, temperature=0.7, max_length=50):
    """
    Generate text using temperature sampling.
    
    Args:
        temperature: Controls randomness (lower = more focused, higher = more random)
    """
    input_ids = tokenizer.encode(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
    generated = input_ids[0].tolist()
    
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Temperature Tuning Guidelines

For different content types:

python
# Recommended temperature ranges
TEMPERATURE_GUIDES = {
    "factual_qa": 0.1,           # Want precise, correct answers
    "technical_docs": 0.3,       # Clear, accurate explanations
    "news_articles": 0.5,        # Professional but not robotic
    "blog_posts": 0.7,           # Engaging and personable
    "creative_writing": 0.9,     # Original and surprising
    "poetry": 1.2,               # Highly creative and artistic
    "brainstorming": 1.5,        # Maximum idea diversity
}
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Top-K Sampling: Intelligent Choice Limitation

Core Concept

Top-K sampling addresses a key problem with temperature sampling: even with low temperature, there's still a small chance of selecting very inappropriate tokens. Top-K limits the choice to only the K most likely tokens.

Algorithm:

1. Get probability distribution from model
2. Select only the top-K most likely tokens
3. Renormalize probabilities among these K tokens
4. Sample from this reduced distribution (optionally with temperature)

Visualization: Top-K Filtering Effect

Python Implementation

python
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def top_k_sampling(model, tokenizer, prompt, k=50, temperature=1.0, max_length=50):
    """
    Generate text using top-k sampling.
    
    Args:
        k: Number of top tokens to consider
        temperature: Temperature scaling (applied after top-k filtering)
    """
    input_ids = tokenizer.encode(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
    generated = input_ids[0].tolist()
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Choosing K Values

Top-K vs. Temperature Trade-offs

python
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# Comparison of different approaches
examples = [
    {"method": "Pure temperature", "params": {"temperature": 0.8}, 
     "pros": ["Simple", "Smooth control"], 
     "cons": ["Can select very low-probability tokens"]},
    
    {"method": "Pure top-k", "params": {"k": 50, "temperature": 1.0}, 
     "pros": ["Prevents bad tokens", "Consistent quality"], 
     "cons": ["Hard cutoff can be arbitrary"]},
    
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Nucleus (Top-P) Sampling: Dynamic Choice Sets

Core Concept

Nucleus sampling (also called top-p sampling) addresses a key limitation of top-k: different contexts require different numbers of reasonable choices.

Key insight: Instead of a fixed number of tokens, select the smallest set of tokens whose cumulative probability exceeds threshold p.

Algorithm:

1. Sort tokens by probability (descending)
2. Find the smallest set where cumulative probability ≥ p
3. Renormalize probabilities within this "nucleus"
4. Sample from the nucleus

Why Nucleus Sampling is Revolutionary

Context-adaptive selection:

• Confident predictions: Nucleus might contain only 5-10 tokens
• Uncertain predictions: Nucleus might contain 100+ tokens
• Self-adjusting: Model's confidence determines choice set size

Visualization: Nucleus Formation

Python Implementation

python
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def nucleus_sampling(model, tokenizer, prompt, p=0.9, temperature=1.0, max_length=50):
    """
    Generate text using nucleus (top-p) sampling.
    
    Args:
        p: Cumulative probability threshold (0.0 to 1.0)
        temperature: Temperature scaling
    """
    input_ids = tokenizer.encode(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
    generated = input_ids[0].tolist()
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Choosing P Values

Nucleus vs. Top-K Comparison

Advanced Techniques and Combinations

The Production Recipe: Combined Sampling

Most production systems combine multiple techniques for optimal results:

python
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def combined_sampling(model, tokenizer, prompt, 
                     top_k=50, top_p=0.9, temperature=0.7, max_length=50):
    """
    Simplified production sampling combining key techniques.
    """
    input_ids = tokenizer.encode(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
    generated = input_ids[0].tolist()
    
    for _ in range(max_length):
        outputs = model(input_ids=torch.tensor([generated]))
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Other modern strategies

• Typical sampling (a.k.a. locally typical decoding): prioritizes tokens whose surprise is close to the expected entropy, often improving coherence over pure top‑p.
• Contrastive search: balances model likelihood with a degeneration penalty to reduce repetition.

Handling Repetition

Repetition is a common issue in probabilistic sampling. Several techniques help:

Repetition Penalty

Reduce probability of recently used tokens:

python
# Simple repetition penalty implementation
def apply_repetition_penalty(logits, past_tokens, penalty=1.2):
    for token_id in past_tokens:
        if logits[token_id] > 0:
            logits[token_id] /= penalty
        else:
            logits[token_id] *= penalty
    return logits
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Frequency and Presence Penalties

• Frequency penalty: Penalize based on how often a token appears
• Presence penalty: Penalize any token that has appeared at all

Parameter Recommendations by Use Case

Practical Implementation with Hugging Face

The Transformers library makes advanced sampling easy:

python
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from transformers import pipeline

# Set up the pipeline
generator = pipeline('text-generation', model='gpt2')
prompt = "The future of artificial intelligence will"

# Temperature sampling
temp_output = generator(
    prompt,
    max_length=50,
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Key Hugging Face Parameters

• do_sample=True: Enable probabilistic sampling
• temperature: Control randomness (0.1-2.0)
• top_k: Limit to top-k tokens (0 = disabled)
• top_p: Nucleus sampling threshold (0.0-1.0)
• repetition_penalty: Penalize repeated tokens (1.0-2.0)
• num_return_sequences: Generate multiple outputs

Common Issues and Solutions

Quick Troubleshooting Guide

Parameter Tuning Process

1. Start with defaults: temperature=0.7, top_p=0.9, top_k=50
2. Adjust temperature first: Control overall creativity level
3. Fine-tune filtering: Adjust top_p/top_k for quality
4. Test extensively: Use diverse prompts and evaluate outputs

Evaluating Sampling Quality

Key Evaluation Criteria

1. Fluency: Is the text grammatically correct?
2. Coherence: Does it make logical sense?
3. Relevance: Does it address the prompt appropriately?
4. Creativity: Is it interesting and non-generic?
5. Consistency: Does quality remain stable across samples?

Summary

What We've Learned

1. Temperature sampling: Control creativity with a single parameter
2. Top-k sampling: Limit choices to reasonable options
3. Nucleus sampling: Adaptive, context-aware token selection
4. Combined approaches: Production-ready systems using multiple techniques
5. Parameter tuning: Guidelines for different use cases
6. Common issues: How to debug and fix sampling problems

The Complete Sampling Toolkit

You now have the complete toolkit for text generation:

Deterministic Methods (previous lesson):

• Greedy search: Fast, reliable, predictable
• Beam search: Higher quality, still deterministic

Probabilistic Methods (this lesson):

• Temperature: Creativity dial
• Top-k: Smart choice limitation
• Nucleus: Adaptive selection
• Combined: Production-ready systems

When to Use What

Practice Exercises

Exercise 1: Parameter Exploration

Create a simple interface that lets you adjust temperature, top-k, and top-p parameters in real-time. Generate text with the same prompt using different settings and analyze the differences.

Exercise 2: Use Case Optimization

Choose a specific use case (e.g., writing product descriptions, generating study notes, creating story outlines) and systematically tune parameters to optimize for that task.

Exercise 3: Quality Evaluation

Implement automated metrics to evaluate generation quality. Compare different sampling methods on dimensions like diversity, fluency, and relevance.

Exercise 4: Repetition Handling

Experiment with different repetition penalty values and strategies. Create examples where repetition is problematic and show how to fix it.

Exercise 5: Production System

Build a complete text generation system that:

• Takes user prompts
• Allows parameter adjustment
• Generates multiple candidates
• Includes basic quality filtering
• Handles edge cases gracefully

Additional Resources

• The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration - Original nucleus sampling paper
• Hugging Face Generation Strategies
• Typical Sampling for Natural Language Generation
• How to Generate Text with Transformers
• OpenAI API Documentation - Real-world parameter examples