LLM Inference Reproducibility in Production: Controlling Output Drift with Batch Invariance, Fixed Seeds, and Configuration Fingerprints
This article dissects why LLM inference can still produce drifting outputs even at zero temperature, and provides production-grade methods including fixed seeds, Batch Invariance, environment fingerprints, replay matrices, and tiered determinism gates to stabilize evaluations, audits, caching, and regression tests.