<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="ding-etal-2026-breaking">
    <titleInfo>
        <title>Breaking the Likelihood Trap: Variance-Calibrated Modulation for Large Language Model Decoding</title>
    </titleInfo>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Yuanhao</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Ding</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Meimingwei</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Esteban</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Garces Arias</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Matthias</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Aßenmacher</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Christian</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Heumann</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Chongsheng</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
        <role>
            <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
        </role>
    </name>
    <originInfo>
        <dateIssued>2026-10</dateIssued>
    </originInfo>
    <typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
    <relatedItem type="host">
        <titleInfo>
            <title>Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing</title>
        </titleInfo>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Hung-Yi</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Lee</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Sunipa</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Dev</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Jessy</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Li</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <name type="personal">
            <namePart type="given">Desmond</namePart>
            <namePart type="family">Elliott</namePart>
            <role>
                <roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
            </role>
        </name>
        <originInfo>
            <publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
            <place>
                <placeTerm type="text">Budapest, Hungary</placeTerm>
            </place>
        </originInfo>
        <genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
        <identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-459-0</identifier>
    </relatedItem>
    <abstract>In open-ended generation, LLMs frequently fall into the “likelihood trap”, characterized by repetitive degeneration and vocabulary dullness, resulting in a discrepancy between machine-generated and human-written text. While post-hoc tail truncation (e.g., Top-p, Min-p) avoids sampling from the unreliable tail, it can misalign generation with human lexical preferences by over-sampling from the uncalibrated head; fixed scalar repetition penalties, in turn, ignore how the scale of the logit distribution varies across inference steps, which can disrupt semantic coherence. To address both shortcomings, we propose Variance-Calibrated Modulation (VCM), a training-free pre-decoding intervention. VCM directly reshapes the probability distribution prior to truncation via two dynamic mechanisms: (1) Contextual Searchlight via PMI, which naturally suppresses global stopwords and elevates context-evoked tokens, and (2) Adaptive Self-Debiasing, which utilizes real-time logit standard deviation to provide scale-invariant penalization. In experiments across open-ended generation, factual QA, and mathematical reasoning, we show that VCM consistently mitigates the likelihood trap. With negligible computational overhead, VCM integrates with existing decoding strategies, improving diversity and coherence and, particularly at higher decoding temperatures, reasoning accuracy. Our code is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/AetherDing/VCM</abstract>
    <identifier type="citekey">ding-etal-2026-breaking</identifier>
    <location>
        <url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1778/</url>
    </location>
    <part>
        <date>2026-10</date>
        <extent unit="page">
            <start>40502</start>
            <end>40528</end>
        </extent>
    </part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>

%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Breaking the Likelihood Trap: Variance-Calibrated Modulation for Large Language Model Decoding
%A Ding, Yuanhao
%A Li, Meimingwei
%A Garces Arias, Esteban
%A Aßenmacher, Matthias
%A Heumann, Christian
%A Zhang, Chongsheng
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F ding-etal-2026-breaking
%X In open-ended generation, LLMs frequently fall into the “likelihood trap”, characterized by repetitive degeneration and vocabulary dullness, resulting in a discrepancy between machine-generated and human-written text. While post-hoc tail truncation (e.g., Top-p, Min-p) avoids sampling from the unreliable tail, it can misalign generation with human lexical preferences by over-sampling from the uncalibrated head; fixed scalar repetition penalties, in turn, ignore how the scale of the logit distribution varies across inference steps, which can disrupt semantic coherence. To address both shortcomings, we propose Variance-Calibrated Modulation (VCM), a training-free pre-decoding intervention. VCM directly reshapes the probability distribution prior to truncation via two dynamic mechanisms: (1) Contextual Searchlight via PMI, which naturally suppresses global stopwords and elevates context-evoked tokens, and (2) Adaptive Self-Debiasing, which utilizes real-time logit standard deviation to provide scale-invariant penalization. In experiments across open-ended generation, factual QA, and mathematical reasoning, we show that VCM consistently mitigates the likelihood trap. With negligible computational overhead, VCM integrates with existing decoding strategies, improving diversity and coherence and, particularly at higher decoding temperatures, reasoning accuracy. Our code is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/AetherDing/VCM
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1778/
%P 40502-40528

Markdown (Informal)

[Breaking the Likelihood Trap: Variance-Calibrated Modulation for Large Language Model Decoding](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1778/) (Ding et al., EMNLP 2026)

• Breaking the Likelihood Trap: Variance-Calibrated Modulation for Large Language Model Decoding (Ding et al., EMNLP 2026)

ACL

• Yuanhao Ding, Meimingwei Li, Esteban Garces Arias, Matthias Aßenmacher, Christian Heumann, and Chongsheng Zhang. 2026. Breaking the Likelihood Trap: Variance-Calibrated Modulation for Large Language Model Decoding. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 40502–40528, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.