What is the difference between T0 and T1, and why is there such a large discrepancy in acceptance rate?

#2
by sunny-infra - opened

In Evaluation, what is the difference between T=0 and T=1, and why is there such a large discrepancy in acceptance rate?

T denotes the sampling temperature. T=0 uses greedy decoding; T=1.0 uses sampling at temperature 1.0. Both use the same draft checkpoint and preserve the target's output distribution under the respective decoding settings.

Under rejection sampling, expected per-token acceptance is:

Ξ±=βˆ‘xmin⁑(p(x),q(x)) \alpha = \sum_x \min(p(x), q(x))

where p and q are the target and draft distributions. This measures their overlapping probability mass: greater overlap means higher acceptance.

At T=0, all probability mass is concentrated on the top token, so the distributions overlap completely whenever their top choices agree. T=1.0 retains the sampling entropy, with multiple candidates carrying non-negligible probability mass. Even when the models prefer the same token, they can assign different probabilities to the candidates. Rejection sampling corrects these differences by rejecting some proposals, so the same draft can achieve strong greedy agreement yet substantially lower acceptance under sampling.

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