Read the Room Before Your Model Generates

Muyao Kong, Zhihao Lin


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) generally rely on sampling temperature to regulate the amount of randomness in their outputs. Mainstream methods for selecting temperature typically involve fixed, heuristic global settings and context or token-level calibration, rather than a geometrically interpretable representation of the communicative scenario. In this work, we introduce a simple and interpretable temperature selection framework, the **Scenario-Actor**, which adapts decoding to the inferred situational characteristics. Scenario-Actor extracts scenario-relevant structures from Transformer hidden states and determines the temperature from scenario embedding, a structured geometric representation of the communicative setting. Empirical results show that on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Scenario-Actor achieves strong goal-completion performance in interactive social scenarios, significant gains on open-ended instruction following, and competitive performance on multi-turn conversation compared to multiple baselines.
Anthology ID:
2026.aacl-long.73
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2026
Address:
Hengqin, China
Editors:
Yue Zhang, Ruifeng Xu, Ayu Purwarianti, Tong Rong, Jun Suzuki
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1591–1607
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.73/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Muyao Kong and Zhihao Lin. 2026. Read the Room Before Your Model Generates. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1591–1607, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Read the Room Before Your Model Generates (Kong & Lin, AACL-IJCNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.73.pdf