Papers › Stay on topic with Classifier-Free Guidance
Stay on topic with Classifier-Free Guidance
Guillaume Sanchez, Honglu Fan, Alexander Spangher, Elad Levi, Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi, Stella Biderman
Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) has recently emerged in text-to-image generation as a lightweight technique to encourage prompt-adherence in generations. In this work, we demonstrate that CFG can be used broadly as an inference-time technique in pure language modeling. We show that CFG (1) improves the performance of Pythia, GPT-2 and LLaMA-family models across an array of tasks: Q\&A, reasoning, code generation, and machine translation, achieving SOTA on LAMBADA with LLaMA-7B over PaLM-540B; (2) brings improvements equivalent to a model with twice the parameter-count; (3) can stack alongside other inference-time methods like Chain-of-Thought and Self-Consistency, yielding further improvements in difficult tasks; (4) can be used to increase the faithfulness and coherence of assistants in challenging form-driven and content-driven prompts: in a human evaluation we show a 75\% preference for GPT4All using CFG over baseline.
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Tasks
Datasets
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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Common Sense Reasoning | ARC (Easy) | LLaMA 65B + CFG (0-shot) | Accuracy | 84.2 | #8 of 47 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Common Sense Reasoning | ARC (Easy) | LLaMA 30B + CFG (0-shot) | Accuracy | 83.2 | #11 of 47 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Common Sense Reasoning | ARC (Easy) | LLaMA 13B + CFG (0-shot) | Accuracy | 79.1 | #18 of 47 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Common Sense Reasoning | ARC (Easy) | LLaMA 7B + CFG (0-shot) | Accuracy | 58.9 | #42 of 47 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | LAMBADA | LLaMA-65B+CFG (Zero-Shot) | Accuracy | 84.0 | #4 of 37 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | LAMBADA | LLaMA-30B+CFG (zero-shot) | Accuracy | 83.9 | #5 of 37 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | LAMBADA | LLaMA-13B+CFG (zero-shot) | Accuracy | 82.2 | #8 of 37 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Sentence Completion | HellaSwag | LLaMA 65B + CFG (0-shot) | Accuracy | 86.3 | #20 of 89 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Sentence Completion | HellaSwag | LLaMA 30B + CFG (0-shot) | Accuracy | 85.3 | #25 of 89 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Sentence Completion | HellaSwag | LLaMA 13B + CFG (0-shot) | Accuracy | 82.1 | #39 of 89 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Text Generation | SciQ | LLaMA-65B+CFG (zero-shot) | Accuracy | 96.6 | #1 of 3 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Text Generation | SciQ | LLaMA-30B+CFG (zero-shot) | Accuracy | 96.4 | #2 of 3 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Text Generation | SciQ | LLaMA-13B+CFG (zero-shot) | Accuracy | 95.1 | #3 of 3 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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