Xiaodong Cai
Author directory2026
Entropy Equilibrium Sampling: Tuning-Free Truncation for Language Model Decoding
Xiaodong Cai | Hai Lin | Shaoxiong Zhan | Weiqi Luo | Hai-Tao Zheng | Hong-Gee Kim | XiuTeng Zhou | Chunxia Ma | Yu Yang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xiaodong Cai | Hai Lin | Shaoxiong Zhan | Weiqi Luo | Hai-Tao Zheng | Hong-Gee Kim | XiuTeng Zhou | Chunxia Ma | Yu Yang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Token sampling strategies critically influence text generation quality in large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods introduce additional hyperparameters, requiring extensive tuning and complicating deployment. We present Entropy Equilibrium Sampling (EES), a tuning-free approach grounded in information theory that dynamically determines the candidate set size using a first-crossing rule: it stops candidate-set expansion at the first index where cumulative probability mass exceeds the normalized entropy of the top-k distribution and retains the preceding prefix. We evaluate EES on reasoning, mathematical, and open-ended generation tasks across multiple model architectures and scales. Our results show that EES achieves robust performance across temperature settings without retuning truncation hyperparameters, delivering competitive accuracy with tuned baselines while maintaining diversity. Analysis reveals that the retained candidate-set size k* automatically encodes temperature effects, adapting from near-greedy behavior at low temperatures to broad candidate retention at high temperatures. By eliminating truncation-specific hyperparameter tuning, EES simplifies deployment while providing stable and competitive performance. Our code is publicly available.