feat: repetition detector for degenerate token loops

[janhilgard]

Summary

• Adds a lightweight repetition detector to the scheduler that monitors the last 32 generated tokens per request
• Stops generation with finish_reason="stop" when degenerate patterns are detected:
  • Single-token repetition (8+ identical tokens, e.g. 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0)
  • Short sequence repetition (2-4 token patterns repeated 6+ times, e.g. ab ab ab ab ab ab)
• Ring buffer per UID with automatic cleanup on request finish/abort
• Zero overhead when no repetition occurs (simple list append + periodic check)

Split out from PR #53 per review feedback — this touches the scheduler hot path and is independent of the GPT-OSS reasoning parser.

Test plan

• 15 unit tests covering all detection patterns and edge cases (tests/test_repetition_detector.py)
• Manual testing with models known to produce degenerate output
• Verify no performance regression on normal generation

pytest tests/test_repetition_detector.py -v

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[TomLucidor]

How is this different from repetition penalties or DRY?

[janhilgard]

Good question! They solve different problems:

Repetition penalty / DRY are preventative — they modify logits during sampling to discourage repetition before it happens. They work well most of the time.

This detector is a safety net — it doesn't touch sampling at all. It monitors output and terminates generation when degenerate loops have already formed. Think of it as a circuit breaker for the server.

Why both are needed:

• Repetition penalties don't always prevent loops, especially with aggressively quantized models (4-bit, 6-bit) or certain MoE architectures where expert routing can get stuck
• Without a detector, a stuck request burns compute indefinitely until max_tokens — potentially hundreds of seconds of wasted GPU time on a serving endpoint
• vllm-mlx is an inference server, not a chat frontend — we can't rely on users configuring sampling params correctly. This catches the cases where penalties fail or aren't set

The overhead is near-zero (list append + periodic check on a 32-token window), so it's cheap insurance.