Autoregressive Decoding as a Martingale: Characterizing the Stochastic Dynamics of LLM Generation

2026-10-15 · ArXiv

arXiv:2610.16041v1 Announce Type: cross

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of language tasks. At their core, autoregressive LLMs are conditional probability models that learn to approximate the next-token distribution given the preceding context. Despite this probabilistic nature, the stochastic dynamics of autoregressive decoding have rarely been investigated from a rigorous probabilistic perspective. In this work, we define the per-step prediction error as the difference between the sampled token indicator and the model's conditional predictive distribution, and prove that the cumulative error process is a martingale with respect to the decoding filtration, implying that its conditional first-order moment is identically zero. Beyond this first-order property, we derive a closed-form expression for the second-order behavior of the martingale sequence: its predictable quadratic variation reduces to $\sum_t\left(1-p(y_t\mid y_{

原文链接:https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16041

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