arxivcs.LGcs.DSstat.MEstat.ML2026-07-21
Total Variation Distance Estimation in Autoregressive Models
Eric Price, Kevin Tian, Zhiyang Xun, Yusong Zhu
Modern LLM deployments use a number of implementation choices and inference optimizations (e.g., batching, custom kernels, and quantization) on top of fixed weights, so two engines serving "the same model" can produce meaningfully different distributions. We study the problem of…