{"paper":{"title":"Before and After Temperature: A Distributional View of Creative LLM Generation","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Aditi Kaushal, Harsha Ponnada, Sahiti Bulusu, Saiteja Dasari, S. Shria Parupudi, V. S. Raghu Parupudi","submitted_at":"2026-05-31T21:13:47Z","abstract_excerpt":"Reference-free evaluation of large language model (LLM) creativity relies on perplexity, entropy, and top-1 margin. We show that a much stronger signal lives one step earlier in the pipeline: in how sampling temperature \\emph{reshapes} the model's token distribution before the next token is drawn. On Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct generations of 500 open-ended creative prompts at $T \\in \\{0.3, 0.8, 1.5\\}$, a single per-token feature derived from this reshaping predicts the within-prompt creativity rank at Spearman $\\rho{=}0.918$ against an averaged gpt-4o\\,/\\,gemini-2.5-pro judge ($n{=}500$) and $\\rho{"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.01451","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.01451/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}