How XTC Works: Probabilistically Excluding Top Token Choices to Boost Diversity

ziv_ravid · x · 2026-09-26

XTC (Exclude Top Choices) mechanism: when two or more tokens clear a probability threshold τ, with probability ρ it removes all of them except the least likely one and renormalizes. When the model is confident, it does nothing.

It deliberately excludes the most generic head tokens precisely when several continuations are equally plausible, forcing more diverse outputs.

Related event: XTC sampling paper accepted to NeurIPS, already available in llama.cpp and other local engines(5 posts)→

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