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The Effect of Sampling Temperature on Problem Solving in Large Language Models

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arxiv 2402.05201 v3 pith:HEPGQWXM submitted 2024-02-07 cs.CL cs.AI

The Effect of Sampling Temperature on Problem Solving in Large Language Models

classification cs.CL cs.AI
keywords samplingtemperaturellmseffectgithublanguagelargemcqa
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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In this research study, we empirically investigate the effect of sampling temperature on the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on various problem-solving tasks. We created a multiple-choice question-and-answer (MCQA) exam by randomly sampling problems from standard LLM benchmarks. Then, we used nine popular LLMs with five prompt-engineering techniques to solve the MCQA problems while increasing the sampling temperature from 0.0 to 1.6. Despite anecdotal reports to the contrary, our empirical results indicate that changes in temperature from 0.0 to 1.0 do not have a statistically significant impact on LLM performance for problem-solving tasks. In addition, these results appear to generalize across LLMs, prompt-engineering techniques, and problem domains. All code, data, and supplemental materials are available on GitHub at: https://github.com/matthewrenze/jhu-llm-temperature

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