[itkovian_]

The fundamental distinction is usually made to contrastive approaches (i.e. make correct more likely, make everything else we just compared unlikely). Ebms are "only what is correct is more likely and the default for everything is unlikely"

This is obviously an extremely high level simplification, but that's the core of it.

[itkovian_]

And in this categorization auto regressive llms are contrastive due to the cross entropy loss.