Comment by suprjami

2 days ago

Temperature, top-up, top-k, min-p all control which token the model predicts next and how likely it is to select one token over the other.

You might understand this as "The capital of France is..." and the model isn't always going to select "Paris". Sometimes it will start a descriptive sentence or even get the answer wrong.

That selection of the next token is what these settings control, and lots of sub-optimal selections compound over time to produce a junk response.

I broadly knew that about temperature, but lack the background in machine learning/statistics to differentiate top-n-sigma from top-k/top-p.