Nondeterminism
The property of outputs not being uniquely reproducible under the same logical input and nominal inference settings because of run-time or execution-environment conditions.
Example
Even with a fixed temperature setting and random seed, differences in GPU batching or the order of numerical computations can lead to different final outputs.
Distinctions and cautions
Nondeterminism is distinguished here from stochasticity intentionally introduced through sampling. Output differences can arise without intentional randomness, for example through parallel execution, batch-dependent computation, or floating-point operation order.
Open questions and cautions
The dedicated evidence currently available depends on particular inference infrastructures and hardware configurations. The same causes therefore may not predominate across all LLM execution environments.
Evidence
View evidence →
CoRun: Padding is Simple and Efficient for Deterministic LLM Inference
- Title
- CoRun: Padding is Simple and Efficient for Deterministic LLM Inference
- Author / organization
- Zhao et al.
- Year
- 2026
- Source type / publication status
- Direct technical preprint; preprint
- Supported concepts / claim context
- Nondeterminism; batch-dependent numerical execution.
- Scope and limitations
- System evidence from a particular serving/hardware stack.
- Access / version note
- August 2026 preprint explicitly included; NOT a published-version substitute.
- Recorded official URL / DOI / identifier
- Preprint reference:
arXiv:2608.14376
LEPO: Latent Reasoning Policy Optimization for Large Language Models
- Title
- LEPO: Latent Reasoning Policy Optimization for Large Language Models
- Author / organization
- Zhou et al.
- Year
- 2026
- Source type / publication status
- Findings ACL peer-reviewed research; published
- Supported concepts / claim context
- Stochasticity as deliberately introduced sampling/randomness.
- Scope and limitations
- A particular latent-reasoning method using stochasticity; not the sole authority for the general definition.
- Access / version note
- Published ACL Findings.
- Recorded official URL / DOI / identifier
- DOI:
10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.707(DOI resolver)