Top-H Decoding: Adapting the Creativity and Coherence with Bounded Entropy in Text Generation

Erfan Baghaei Potraghloo, Seyedarmin Azizi, Souvik Kundu, Massoud Pedram

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

Large language models (LLMs), despite their impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, often struggle to balance two competing objectives in open-ended text generation: fostering diversity and creativity while preserving logical coherence. Existing truncated sampling techniques, including temperature scaling, top-p (nucleus) sampling, and min-p sampling, aim to manage this trade-off. However, they exhibit limitations, particularly in the effective incorporation of the confidence of the model into the corresponding sampling strategy. For example, min-p sampling relies on a single top token as a heuristic for confidence, eventually underutilizing the information of the probability distribution. To effectively incorporate the model confidence, this paper presents top-H decoding. We first establish the theoretical foundation of the interplay between creativity and coherence in truncated sampling by formulating an entropy-constrained minimum divergence problem. We then prove this minimization problem to be equivalent to an entropy-constrained mass maximization (ECMM) problem, which is NP-hard. Finally, we present top-H decoding, a computationally efficient greedy algorithm to solve the ECMM problem. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that top-H outperforms the state-of-the-art (SoTA) alternative of min-p sampling by up to 25.63% on creative writing benchmarks, while maintaining robustness on question-answering datasets such as GPQA, GSM8K, and MT-Bench. Additionally, an LLM-as-judge evaluation confirms that top-H indeed produces coherent outputs even at higher temperatures, where creativity is especially critical. In summary, top-H advances SoTA in open-ended text generation and can be easily integrated into creative writing applications. The code is available at https://github.com/ErfanBaghaei/Top-H-Decoding.