▲ | galaxyLogic a day ago | |
I assume they use software-based pseudo-random-number generators. Those can typically be given a seed-value which determines (deterministically) the sequence of random numbers that will be generated. So if an LLM uses a seedable pseudo-random-number-generator for its random numbers, then it can be fully deterministic. | ||
▲ | lou1306 a day ago | parent [-] | |
There are subtle sources of nondeterminism in concurrent floating point operations, especially on GPU. So even with a fixed seed, if an LLM encounters two tokens with very close likelihoods, it may pick one or the other across different runs. This has been observed even with temperature=0, which in principle does not involve _any_ randomness (see arXiv paper cited earlier in this thread). |