DMAP: A Distribution Map for Text

Tom Kempton, Julia Rozanova, Parameswaran Kamalaruban, Maeve Madigan, Karolina Wresilo, Yoann Launay, David Sutton, Stuart Burrell

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Large Language Models (LLMs) are a powerful tool for statistical text analysis, with derived sequences of next-token probability distributions offering a wealth of information. Extracting this signal typically relies on metrics such as perplexity, which do not adequately account for context; how one should interpret a given next-token probability is dependent on the number of reasonable choices encoded by the shape of the conditional distribution. In this work, we present DMAP, a mathematically grounded method that maps a text, via a language model, to a set of samples in the unit interval that jointly encode rank and probability information. This representation enables efficient, model-agnostic analysis and supports a range of applications. We illustrate its utility through three case studies: (i) validation of generation parameters to ensure data integrity, (ii) examining the role of probability curvature in machine-generated text detection, and (iii) a forensic analysis revealing statistical fingerprints left in downstream models that have been subject to post-training on synthetic data. Our results demonstrate that DMAP offers a unified statistical view of text that is simple to compute on consumer hardware, widely applicable, and provides a foundation for further research into text analysis with LLMs.