SimpleStrat: Diversifying Language Model Generation with Stratification

Generating diverse responses from large language models (LLMs) is crucial for applications such as adversarial testing, search, and synthetic data generation, where diversity provides distinct answers across generations. Previous approaches rely solely on increasing the temperature, sacrificing quality. Furthermore, the model's next-token probabilities may not be representative of the true answer distribution. To combat these challenges, we propose SimpleStrat, an alternative that uses the language sample. To model measure itself resampling to partition divers the ity solution, we introduce space int Co o verageQA, strata from a dataset which of to underspecified questions with multiple equally plausible answers. We propose measuring resampling diversity as the KLDivergence between the response distribution and the uniform distribution over valid ground truth answers and use recall as an alternative when assessing proprietary models. On CoverageQA, SimpleStrat improves diversity across all temperatures, showing orthogonal benefits. Quantifiably, we achieve as much as 4X better recall when applied to GPT-4o, and an average reLineduction in KL divergence by 0.36 when applied to Llama 3. Furthermore, we showthat SimpleStrat achieves more resampling diversity at temperature T=0 than scaling and temperature dataset available to T=1 at on https://github.com/j