What is temperature?

Beginners
1

I see the word “temperature” being used at various places like:

  1. in Models — transformers 4.12.4 documentation
  • temperature ( float , optional, defaults to 1.0) – The value used to module the next token probabilities.
  1. temperature scaling for calibration
  2. temperature of distillation

can anyone please explain what does it mean, or point me to a source with explanation?

2

This is very well explained in this Stackoverflow answer.

You can also check out our blog post on generating text with Transformers, that also includes a description of the temperature.

4 Likes
3

Thanks a lot @nielsr