Beam Search

In depth

A decoding strategy that tracks several candidate sequences (beams) at once and returns the one with the highest overall probability. Unlike greedy decoding, it can keep a sequence whose first tokens were less likely if it leads somewhere better. In Hugging Face Transformers you enable it by setting num_beams above 1. It suits input-grounded tasks like translation, captioning, or speech recognition more than open-ended chat, and costs more compute per output.

Primary source: huggingface.co