[Crossposted from Medium.com.]

Large language models can generate texts under different tasks, for example, question answering, machine translation, document summarization, etc. Beyond being right and wrong, large language models can also have some interesting behaviors, such as creativity, hallucination, and degeneration. This post explores the hypothesis that a large language model is a multiverse with the following properties:

The multiverse contains different generation scenarios, e.g., right, wrong, creativity, hallucination, degeneration, etc.
Decoding strategies could help us to jump into different universes, but might not be able to reach the target universe.
Navigating strategies could lead us to the universe we prefer, but might not be able to guarantee everything in the right place.
Multiple universes could be satisfied with a given task so developing a universal decoding/navigating strategy might be a difficult task.

If the above description is too vague, here are some tips:

An auto-regressive large language model generates a probability distribution of the next token over the token space implying the good, the bad, and the ugly of the future.
Decoding strategies refer to greedy sampling, top-k sampling, top-p sampling, temperature setting, etc., which are used to select the next token.
Navigating strategies refer to reinforcement learning, knowledge augmentation, prompting engineering, etc., which are used to assist the overall process of selecting the next tokens.

This post briefs the concept of the multiverse in large language models and some decoding/navigating strategies for it. Now let’s jump into Avengers: Endgame to get a taste of multiple universes.

Avengers: Endgame

Scene 1: Scott Lang discusses the idea of navigation with Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff.

Scene 2: Bruce Banner, Steve Rogers, and Natasha Romanoff help Scott Lang to make time travel.

Scene 3: Tony Stark solves time travel through a simulation of the Möbius strip.

Scene 4: Tony Stark brings the navigation device to Steve Rogers.

Now we have some sense of the multiverse in Avengers: Endgame, and how it could be right and wrong. But, how does it relate to the multiverse of large language models?

Toy Examples of Language Modeling

To illustrate the multiverse of a large language model, consider the following scenarios in Figure 1.

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