Glossary
Temperature (sampling) — Glossary
A decoding parameter that controls how random or deterministic next-token sampling is.
Also known as: temperature
Full definition
Temperature rescales logits before softmax when sampling tokens. Lower values concentrate probability on the top tokens (more deterministic); higher values flatten the distribution (more diverse).
Temperature is not a truthfulness control. Factual tasks usually prefer low temperature plus grounding tools. Creative brainstorming may use higher values with later filtering.
Combine temperature with top-p/top-k settings carefully and evaluate on your task suite.