@inproceedings{zhu-etal-2026-text,
title = "Text-to-Distribution Prediction with Quantile Tokens and Neighbor Context",
author = "Zhu, Yilun and
Zhuang, Yuan and
Vedula, Nikhita and
Dhyani, Dushyanta and
Xu, Shaoyuan and
Bayati, Mohsen and
Wang, Bryan and
Malmasi, Shervin",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.758/",
pages = "16632--16648",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Many applications of LLM-based text regression require predicting a full conditional distribution rather than a single point value. We study distributional regression under empirical-quantile supervision, where each input is paired with multiple observed quantile outcomes, and the target distribution is represented by a dense grid of quantiles. We address two key limitations of current approaches: the lack of local grounding for distribution estimates, and the reliance on shared representations that create an indirect bottleneck between inputs and quantile outputs. In this paper, we introduce Quantile Token Regression, which, to our knowledge, is the first work to insert dedicated quantile tokens into the input sequence, enabling direct input-output pathways for each quantile through self-attention. We further augment these quantile tokens with retrieval, incorporating semantically similar neighbor instances and their empirical distributions to ground predictions with local evidence from similar instances. We also provide the first theoretical analysis of loss functions for quantile regression, clarifying which distributional objectives each optimizes. Experiments on the Inside Airbnb and StackSample benchmark datasets with LLMs ranging from 1.7B to 14B parameters show that quantile tokens with neighbors consistently outperform baselines ($\sim$4 points lower MAPE and 2$\times$ narrower prediction intervals), with especially large gains on smaller and more challenging datasets where quantile tokens produce substantially sharper and more accurate distributions."
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<abstract>Many applications of LLM-based text regression require predicting a full conditional distribution rather than a single point value. We study distributional regression under empirical-quantile supervision, where each input is paired with multiple observed quantile outcomes, and the target distribution is represented by a dense grid of quantiles. We address two key limitations of current approaches: the lack of local grounding for distribution estimates, and the reliance on shared representations that create an indirect bottleneck between inputs and quantile outputs. In this paper, we introduce Quantile Token Regression, which, to our knowledge, is the first work to insert dedicated quantile tokens into the input sequence, enabling direct input-output pathways for each quantile through self-attention. We further augment these quantile tokens with retrieval, incorporating semantically similar neighbor instances and their empirical distributions to ground predictions with local evidence from similar instances. We also provide the first theoretical analysis of loss functions for quantile regression, clarifying which distributional objectives each optimizes. Experiments on the Inside Airbnb and StackSample benchmark datasets with LLMs ranging from 1.7B to 14B parameters show that quantile tokens with neighbors consistently outperform baselines (\sim4 points lower MAPE and 2\times narrower prediction intervals), with especially large gains on smaller and more challenging datasets where quantile tokens produce substantially sharper and more accurate distributions.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Text-to-Distribution Prediction with Quantile Tokens and Neighbor Context
%A Zhu, Yilun
%A Zhuang, Yuan
%A Vedula, Nikhita
%A Dhyani, Dushyanta
%A Xu, Shaoyuan
%A Bayati, Mohsen
%A Wang, Bryan
%A Malmasi, Shervin
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F zhu-etal-2026-text
%X Many applications of LLM-based text regression require predicting a full conditional distribution rather than a single point value. We study distributional regression under empirical-quantile supervision, where each input is paired with multiple observed quantile outcomes, and the target distribution is represented by a dense grid of quantiles. We address two key limitations of current approaches: the lack of local grounding for distribution estimates, and the reliance on shared representations that create an indirect bottleneck between inputs and quantile outputs. In this paper, we introduce Quantile Token Regression, which, to our knowledge, is the first work to insert dedicated quantile tokens into the input sequence, enabling direct input-output pathways for each quantile through self-attention. We further augment these quantile tokens with retrieval, incorporating semantically similar neighbor instances and their empirical distributions to ground predictions with local evidence from similar instances. We also provide the first theoretical analysis of loss functions for quantile regression, clarifying which distributional objectives each optimizes. Experiments on the Inside Airbnb and StackSample benchmark datasets with LLMs ranging from 1.7B to 14B parameters show that quantile tokens with neighbors consistently outperform baselines (\sim4 points lower MAPE and 2\times narrower prediction intervals), with especially large gains on smaller and more challenging datasets where quantile tokens produce substantially sharper and more accurate distributions.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.758/
%P 16632-16648
Markdown (Informal)
[Text-to-Distribution Prediction with Quantile Tokens and Neighbor Context](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.758/) (Zhu et al., ACL 2026)
ACL
- Yilun Zhu, Yuan Zhuang, Nikhita Vedula, Dushyanta Dhyani, Shaoyuan Xu, Mohsen Bayati, Bryan Wang, and Shervin Malmasi. 2026. Text-to-Distribution Prediction with Quantile Tokens and Neighbor Context. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 16632–16648, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.