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arXiv 提交日期: 2026-01-12
📄 Abstract - Stochastic CHAOS: Why Deterministic Inference Kills, and Distributional Variability Is the Heartbeat of Artifical Cognition

Deterministic inference is a comforting ideal in classical software: the same program on the same input should always produce the same output. As large language models move into real-world deployment, this ideal has been imported wholesale into inference stacks. Recent work from the Thinking Machines Lab has presented a detailed analysis of nondeterminism in LLM inference, showing how batch-invariant kernels and deterministic attention can enforce bitwise-identical outputs, positioning deterministic inference as a prerequisite for reproducibility and enterprise reliability. In this paper, we take the opposite stance. We argue that, for LLMs, deterministic inference kills. It kills the ability to model uncertainty, suppresses emergent abilities, collapses reasoning into a single brittle path, and weakens safety alignment by hiding tail risks. LLMs implement conditional distributions over outputs, not fixed functions. Collapsing these distributions to a single canonical completion may appear reassuring, but it systematically conceals properties central to artificial cognition. We instead advocate Stochastic CHAOS, treating distributional variability as a signal to be measured and controlled. Empirically, we show that deterministic inference is systematically misleading. Single-sample deterministic evaluation underestimates both capability and fragility, masking failure probability under paraphrases and noise. Phase-like transitions associated with emergent abilities disappear under greedy decoding. Multi-path reasoning degrades when forced onto deterministic backbones, reducing accuracy and diagnostic insight. Finally, deterministic evaluation underestimates safety risk by hiding rare but dangerous behaviors that appear only under multi-sample evaluation.

顶级标签: llm model evaluation theory
详细标签: stochastic inference deterministic inference uncertainty modeling emergent abilities safety evaluation 或 搜索:

随机混沌:为何确定性推断扼杀人工智能,而分布变异性是人工认知的命脉 / Stochastic CHAOS: Why Deterministic Inference Kills, and Distributional Variability Is the Heartbeat of Artifical Cognition


1️⃣ 一句话总结

这篇论文挑战了在大型语言模型推理中追求确定性输出的主流做法,认为强制确定性会掩盖模型的不确定性、抑制其涌现能力、使推理变得脆弱并低估安全风险,因此主张将输出的随机性和分布变异性视为人工认知的核心特征加以测量和控制。

源自 arXiv: 2601.07239