Option marker

An option marker is Laya's mechanism for scoring answers defined at request time. Each option in a question is rendered as text and preceded by a [MASK] token. After the encoder and decision head have processed the whole sequence, the hidden state at each marker position is gathered and passed through a small scorer to produce one logit per option. A softmax over those logits is the answer.

How options are rendered

• choice: label or label: description for each criterion, in the order you send them.
• score: level 0: description, level 1: description, and so on.
• noul: always two options, false: … then true: …, defaulting to "no, the statement does not hold" and "yes, the statement holds" when you do not supply descriptions.

Why it matters

Because each marker attends bidirectionally to the question, the other options and the state, the model can compare an option against both the evidence and its competitors. New label sets need no new output layer or retraining, which is what makes zero-shot schemas possible at all.

Limits

All options share the head_max_len budget (192 tokens English, 256 multilingual), and each option is truncated to 48 tokens. With many options the budget is split thin: at 77 options each gets about 3–4 tokens, and Banking77 accuracy drops to 0.425. Keep descriptions short and distinctive, and split large label sets into a coarse-to-fine hierarchy.

The rendered option text also influences the answer. On noul questions the "false:"/"true:" labels can dominate the state (issue #156); a two-option choice with neutral keys is the documented workaround. See option-marker scoring.