Glossary · Term

argmax

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Definition

Plain language

Picking the single option a model rates highest.

As stated in the literature

The decoding operation that selects the token with maximum probability from a model's output distribution, equivalent to greedy decoding at each step.

Why it matters: It's the simplest possible decoding strategy and the reference point against which sampling, beam search, and other methods are compared.

For example, with greedy decoding the model takes argmax over its output distribution and emits whichever single token had the highest probability.

Heard on the show

“That is the model's argmax.”
Episode 070 — When Models Know the Answer But Say the Wrong Thing Anyway

Mentioned in 3 episodes

  1. 070
    When Models Know the Answer But Say the Wrong Thing Anyway
  2. 055
    Why LLM Judges Flip Their Verdicts When You Change the Question Format
  3. 032
    A Sticky-Note for Every Layer: Letting Transformers Remember What They Were Just Thinking

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