Beam search is a Sampling alternative inherited from classical NLP: at each step it keeps the top-K candidate sequences alive in parallel, eventually picking the highest-scoring complete sequence. It originated in 1970s speech-recognition research, became the default in 2010s neural machine translation and dominated tasks where a deterministic, single-answer output was wanted. In open-ended generative text it tends to produce repetitive, formulaic and low-diversity output, so modern LLMs prefer stochastic methods like Top-P and Top-K instead. It still earns its keep in pipelines that genuinely want a single 'best' answer — translation, summarisation, OCR.
MEVZU N°124ISTANBULYEAR I — VOL. III
Glossary · Intermediate · 1976
Beam Search
A decoding algorithm that keeps the K most-likely candidate sequences alive in parallel during generation.
- EN — English term
- Beam Search
- TR — Turkish term
- Işın Araması (Beam Search)