# The End of Manual Decoding: Towards Truly End-to-End Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26697 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26697/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07974/) (2024)
- [MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task Language Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01574/) (2024)
- [Fast Inference from Transformers via Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17192/) (2022)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07911/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [Accelerating Large Language Model Decoding with Speculative Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01318/) (2023)
- [Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13837/) (2025)
- [Plug and Play Language Models: A Simple Approach to Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02164/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Decoding: Open-ended Text Generation as Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15097/) (2022)
- [Generating Sequences With Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.0850/) (2013)
- [DoLa: Decoding by Contrasting Layers Improves Factuality in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03883/) (2023)
- [Diverse Beam Search: Decoding Diverse Solutions from Neural Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02424/) (2016)
- [MathArena: Evaluating LLMs on Uncontaminated Math Competitions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23281/) (2025)
- [DeepMath-103K: A Large-Scale, Challenging, Decontaminated, and Verifiable Mathematical Dataset for Advancing Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11456/) (2025)
- [A Contrastive Framework for Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06417/) (2022)
- [Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00949/) (2025)
- [Pass@k Training for Adaptively Balancing Exploration and Exploitation of Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10751/) (2025)
- [On the Generalization of SFT: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective with Reward Rectification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05629/) (2025)
- [A Thorough Examination of Decoding Methods in the Era of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06925/) (2024)
- [Contrastive Search Is What You Need For Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14140/) (2022)
- [Trust, But Verify: A Self-Verification Approach to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13445/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Look Inward to Explore Outward: Learning Temperature Policy from LLM Internal States via Hierarchical RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13035/) (2026)
- [Learning Adaptive LLM Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09065/) (2026)
- [Decoding in Geometry: Alleviating Embedding-Space Crowding for Complex Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22536/) (2026)
- [SOLAR: A Self-Optimizing Open-Ended Autonomous Agent for Lifelong Learning and Continual Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20189/) (2026)
- [Fully Rotation-Equivariant Spectral-Spatial Learning for Multispectral Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05148/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The "end-to-end" label for LLMs is a misnomer. In practice, they depend on a non-differentiable decoding process that requires laborious, hand-tuning of hyperparameters like temperature and top-p. This paper introduces AutoDeco, a novel architecture that enables truly "end-to-end" generation by learning to control its own decoding strategy. We augment the standard transformer with lightweight heads that, at each step, dynamically predict context-specific temperature and top-p values alongside the next-token logits. This approach transforms decoding into a parametric, token-level process, allowing the model to self-regulate its sampling strategy within a single forward pass. Through extensive experiments on eight benchmarks, we demonstrate that AutoDeco not only significantly outperforms default decoding strategies but also achieves performance comparable to an oracle-tuned baseline derived from "hacking the test set"-a practical upper bound for any static method. Crucially, we uncover an emergent capability for instruction-based decoding control: the model learns to interpret natural language commands (e.g., "generate with low randomness") and adjusts its predicted temperature and top-p on a token-by-token basis, opening a new paradigm for steerable and interactive LLM decoding.