Papers › Long Horizon Temperature Scaling

Long Horizon Temperature Scaling

7 Feb 2023arXiv:2302.03686archive 2025-07-28

Andy Shih, Dorsa Sadigh, Stefano Ermon

Temperature scaling is a popular technique for tuning the sharpness of a model distribution. It is used extensively for sampling likely generations and calibrating model uncertainty, and even features as a controllable parameter to many large language models in deployment. However, autoregressive models rely on myopic temperature scaling that greedily optimizes the next token. To address this, we propose Long Horizon Temperature Scaling (LHTS), a novel approach for sampling from temperature-scaled joint distributions. LHTS is compatible with all likelihood-based models, and optimizes for the long horizon likelihood of samples. We derive a temperature-dependent LHTS objective, and show that finetuning a model on a range of temperatures produces a single model capable of generation with a controllable long horizon temperature parameter. We experiment with LHTS on image diffusion models and character/language autoregressive models, demonstrating advantages over myopic temperature scaling in likelihood and sample quality, and showing improvements in accuracy on a multiple choice analogy task by 10%.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

andyshih12/longhorizontemperaturescaling officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Multiple-choice

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Diffusion

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections