One Temperature to Rule Them All?

arXiv:2611.13077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inference-time sampling is a central mechanism for improving large language models, with temperature controlling the tradeoff between reliability and diversity. While recent work suggests that varying temperature across samples can improve multi-sample inference, simple fixed-temperature schemes remain the standard in practice. We investigate this discrepancy in the canonical pass@K setting, asking when temperature diversity is useful, and when a single tuned temperature suffices. To this end, we analyze per-question success probabilities across multiple models and datasets, tracking how they vary with sampling temperature.