AI Glossary
Decoding
What is Decoding?
The process by which an LLM generates output tokens one at a time, selecting each from a probability distribution over its vocabulary. Decoding strategies — greedy, beam search, sampling with temperature — determine the trade-off between output quality, diversity, and computational cost. Choosing the right decoding strategy is a key consideration in production LLM applications.
Example in practice
A developer building a code completion tool would choose greedy decoding for deterministic, reproducible outputs — while a creative brainstorming tool would use sampling-based decoding to generate diverse suggestions each run.
See also
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