Hacking Generative Perplexity: Why Unconditional Text Evaluation Needs Distributional Metrics

Abstract:Diffusion and continuous flow-based language models have emerged as the leading non-autoregressive alternatives to language modeling. Progress in both paradigms is overwhelmingly tracked by generative perplexity (gen-PPL): the per-token negative log-likelihood of samples under a frozen autoregressive (AR) scorer such as gpt2-large, typically paired with an empirical-entropy guardrail to rule out low-entropy collapse. We argue that this metric is unsound. By construction, gen-PPL measures only predictability under the scoring AR, not grammaticality or semantic coherence -- and the set of predictable but still low-quality sequences is combinatorially large. To make this concrete, we construct a suite of zero-parameter, deliberately naive samplers that achieve state-of-the-art gen-PPL on LM1B and OpenWebText at non-degenerate entropy, surpassing recently published diffusion and continuous-flow models while producing text that is incoherent by construction. We recommend evaluation suites that directly quantify the distributional divergence between generated and reference text, and use such a suite to re-benchmark recent non-autoregressive models, recovering a more faithful picture of the current state of the art.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2606.08417 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2606.08417v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.08417 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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