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Comment by ant6n | Hacker News Reader

What’s perplexity?

Perplexity is a measure of how certain the model is of the next token. It's calculated by looking at the probabilities that the model calculates for the next token in a stream. If there are several choices for the next token with similar probabilities, that's telling you that the model is having a hard time telling what the right answer should be: the model is more perplexed, perplexity is higher. If there's a single option with a much higher implied probability than any other, that means the model is more certain, and perplexity is lower.

Note that this has nothing to do with whether the answer is objectively correct. It's just measuring how confident it is.

Thank you!

Reading this could make people believe it is computed from the probability distribution of the model alone.

To be clearer, it is the exponent of the average negative log probability that the model gives to the real tokens of a sample text[0]. Roughly, it relates to how strongly the model can predict the sample text. A perfect model would have perplexity one; a random model has a perplexity equal to the number of possible tokens; the worst model has infinite perplexity.

[0]: https://github.com/pytorch/torcheval/blob/3faf19c060b8a7c074...

I think what you describe ("confidence about the next token") is the entropy of the model's output. A model can be very certain about the next token (its output has low entropy) but if it is usually wrong on the text you measure it against, it will have high perplexity. (For example when the model was trained only on children's books and you measure it on Wikipedia.)

Perplexity is measured by testing a language model on a known text. The model's output is a probability for every possible next word/token. The model is highly perplexed if it gave a low probability to the actual next token.

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