Chongsheng Zhang
2026
Min-k Sampling: Decoupling Truncation from Temperature Scaling via Relative Logit Dynamics
Yuanhao Ding | Meimingwei Li | Esteban Garces Arias | Matthias A{\ss}enmacher | Christian Heumann | Chongsheng Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yuanhao Ding | Meimingwei Li | Esteban Garces Arias | Matthias A{\ss}enmacher | Christian Heumann | Chongsheng Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The quality of text generated by large language models depends critically on the decoding sampling strategy. While mainstream methods such as Top-k, Top-p, and Min-p achieve a balance between diversity and accuracy through probability-space truncation, they share an inherent limitation: extreme sensitivity to the temperature parameter. Recent logit-space approaches like Top-n𝜎 achieve temperature invariance but rely on global statistics that are susceptible to long-tail noise, failing to capture fine-grained confidence structures among top candidates. We propose Min-k Sampling, a novel dynamic truncation strategy that analyzes the local shape of the sorted logit distribution to identify "semantic cliffs": sharp transitions from high-confidence core tokens to uncertain long-tail tokens. By computing a position-weighted relative decay rate, Min-k dynamically determines truncation boundaries at each generation step. We formally prove that Min-k achieves strict temperature invariance and empirically demonstrate its low sensitivity to hyperparameter choices. Experiments on multiple reasoning benchmarks, creative writing tasks, and human evaluation show that Min-k consistently improves text quality, maintaining robust performance even under extreme temperature settings where probability-based methods collapse. We make our code, models, and analysis tools publicly available.
Self-Reinforcing Controllable Synthesis of Rare Relational Data via Bayesian Calibration
Chongsheng Zhang | Hao Wang | Zelong Yu | Esteban Garces Arias | Julian Rodemann | Zhanshuo Zhang | Qilong Li | Gaojuan Fan | Krikamol Muandet | Christian Heumann
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Chongsheng Zhang | Hao Wang | Zelong Yu | Esteban Garces Arias | Julian Rodemann | Zhanshuo Zhang | Qilong Li | Gaojuan Fan | Krikamol Muandet | Christian Heumann
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Imbalanced data are commonly present in real-world applications. While data synthesis can effectively mitigate data scarcity for rare classes, and LLMs have revolutionized text generation, the application of LLMs to the synthesis of relational/structured tabular data remains underexplored. Moreover, existing approaches lack an effective feedback mechanism to guide LLMs in continuously optimizing the quality of the generated data throughout the synthesis process. In this work, we propose RDDG, Relational Data generator with Dynamic Guidance, which is a unified in-context learning framework that employs progressive chain-of-thought (CoT) steps to generate tabular data for enhancing downstream imbalanced classification performance. RDDG first uses core set selection to identify representative samples from the original data, then utilizes in-context learning to discover the inherent patterns and correlations among attributes within the core set, and subsequently generates tabular data while preserving the aforementioned constraints. More importantly, it incorporates a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism that provides automatic assessments of the quality of the generated data, enabling continuous quality optimization throughout the generation process. Experimental results on multiple real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that RDDG outperforms existing approaches in both data fidelity and downstream imbalanced classification performance.
2025
GUARD: Glocal Uncertainty-Aware Robust Decoding for Effective and Efficient Open-Ended Text Generation
Yuanhao Ding | Esteban Garces Arias | Meimingwei Li | Julian Rodemann | Matthias Aßenmacher | Danlu Chen | Gaojuan Fan | Christian Heumann | Chongsheng Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Yuanhao Ding | Esteban Garces Arias | Meimingwei Li | Julian Rodemann | Matthias Aßenmacher | Danlu Chen | Gaojuan Fan | Christian Heumann | Chongsheng Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Open-ended text generation faces a critical challenge: balancing coherence with diversity in LLM outputs. While contrastive search-based decoding strategies have emerged to address this trade-off, their practical utility is often limited by hyperparameter dependence and high computational costs. We introduce GUARD, a self-adaptive decoding method that effectively balances these competing objectives through a novel “Glocal” uncertainty-driven framework. GUARD combines global entropy estimates with local entropy deviations to integrate both long-term and short-term uncertainty signals. We demonstrate that our proposed global entropy formulation effectively mitigates abrupt variations in uncertainty, such as sudden overconfidence or high entropy spikes, and provides theoretical guarantees of unbiasedness and consistency. To reduce computational overhead, we incorporate a simple yet effective token-count-based penalty into GUARD. Experimental results demonstrate that GUARD achieves a good balance between text diversity and coherence, while exhibiting substantial improvements in generation speed. In a more nuanced comparison study across different dimensions of text quality, both human and LLM evaluators validated its remarkable performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/YecanLee/GUARD.