By Unite.AI
Publication Date: 2026-11-12 18:45:00
Perplexity released Decider v1.3 and Decider Flash v1.3 on November 12, 2026, adding verbatim text-span extraction and downloadable Apache-2.0 weights. The company reports 91.6% mean accuracy for the larger model across 63 query-classification tasks with references independently relabeled by a frontier LLM, 6.54 percentage points above its production classifiers.
The new Locate feature returns exact matching text with start and end character positions for named-entity recognition, personal-information detection and extractive question answering; no match produces an empty list. Both models are also available through OpenRouter and Perplexity’s Decisions API.
Decider returns probabilities for yes/no questions, custom choices or ordered scores instead of generating prose. An application can ask several questions about the same text, JSON or images and use the resulting numbers for classification, request routing, moderation, filtering, output evaluation and reranking. These are tasks that often need a decision threshold rather than free-form generation.
Architecture and Training Changes
Decider adapts generative backbones by replacing next-token output with a decision head read at a marker token. The head starts from only the base-model rows associated with answer-option tokens. In v1.3, Perplexity makes full-attention layers bidirectional and isolates questions from direct attention to one another, while allowing the shared input state to attend…
