DeLTa: A Decoding Strategy based on Logit Trajectory Prediction Improves Factuality and Reasoning Ability

Yunzhen He, Yusuke Takase, Hidetoshi Shimodaira


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in real-world applications. However, concerns about the reliability of the content they generate persist, as it frequently deviates from factual correctness or exhibits deficiencies in logical reasoning. This paper proposes a novel decoding strategy aimed at enhancing both factual accuracy and inferential reasoning without requiring any modifications to the architecture or pre-trained parameters of LLMs. Our approach adjusts next-token probabilities by analyzing the trajectory of logits from lower to higher layers in Transformers and applying linear regression. We find that this Decoding by Logit Trajectory-based approach (DeLTa) effectively reinforces factuality and reasoning while mitigating incorrect generation. Experiments on TruthfulQA demonstrate that DeLTa attains up to a 4.9% improvement over the baseline. Furthermore, it enhances performance by up to 8.1% on StrategyQA and 7.3% on GSM8K, both of which demand strong reasoning capabilities.
Anthology ID:
2025.uncertainlp-main.26
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Uncertainty-Aware NLP (UncertaiNLP 2025)
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editor:
Noidea Noidea
Venues:
UncertaiNLP | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
309–321
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.uncertainlp-main.26/
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Cite (ACL):
Yunzhen He, Yusuke Takase, and Hidetoshi Shimodaira. 2025. DeLTa: A Decoding Strategy based on Logit Trajectory Prediction Improves Factuality and Reasoning Ability. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Uncertainty-Aware NLP (UncertaiNLP 2025), pages 309–321, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DeLTa: A Decoding Strategy based on Logit Trajectory Prediction Improves Factuality and Reasoning Ability (He et al., UncertaiNLP 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.uncertainlp-main.26.pdf