The paper investigates how increasing inference-time computation—via wider beam search or sample‑plus‑vote—affects performance on grammar‑constrained text‑to‑SQL tasks for small language models. Using the Qwen2.5‑Instruct family (0.5B–7B parameters) on the Spider benchmark, the authors find that larger models consistently outperform higher inference compute on the same model size, and that beam search yields better accuracy than sample‑plus‑vote under matched budgets. These results suggest that, unlike unconstrained settings, scaling inference compute does not compensate for smaller model size when strict grammar constraints are applied.
By Ty Chermsirivatana, John MacCormick
arXiv:2607. 07026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constrained decoding is essential for serving LLMs, ensuring that generated outputs follow specific structures such as JSON schema-formatted function calls.
By Meihua Dang, Stefano Ermon
arXiv:2606. 00722v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Controlling language model outputs is essential for ensuring structural validity, reliability, and downstream usability, and diffusion language models are no exception.
By Hyundong Jin, Yo-Sub Han
arXiv:2603.01243v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools that have found applications beyond human-machine interfaces and chatbots. Beside free-form generat...
By Ayoub Hammal, Pierre Zweigenbaum, Caio Corro
arXiv:2606. 10621v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern retrieval increasingly relies on dense and learned-sparse neural models that are effective but require encoding the entire corpus into a specialized index, rebuilt whenever the model changes.
By Arthur Satouf, Giulio D'Erasmo, Yuxuan Zong, Habiboulaye Amadou Boubacar, Pablo Piantanida, Benjamin Piwowarski
arXiv:2608. 05493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models (LMs) are increasingly used to interact with external services via programs written in domain-specific languages (DSLs).
By Kevin Cheang, Geoff Hulette, Rahul Kumar, Felipe R. Monteiro, Federico Mora, Robin Salkeld, Lin Tan, Serdar Tasiran
arXiv:2605.29986v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: To guarantee that an LLM's outputs conform to a specified structure, context-free grammar (CFG) decoding engines force the selection of next tokens...
By Michael Sullivan, Alexander Koller
GrammarRL introduces a label‑free reinforcement learning approach that adapts language models to grammar constraints without annotated data. It optimizes two self‑supervised rewards—direct and reverse—using a Reinforce Leave‑One‑Out objective over grammar‑constrained rollouts, and regularizes toward a frozen base model. Experiments on sign‑language gloss translation, hierarchical text classification, and named entity recognition with Llama models show consistent gains over constrained greedy decoding and competitive performance to beam search while keeping inference cost low.
By Gabriele Tuccio, Antonino Furnari, Aldo Gangemi, Misael Mongiov\`{\i}
arXiv:2602.00612v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have demonstrated promising generative capabilities and are increasingly used to produce formal languages d...
By Yitong Zhang, Yongmin Li, Yuetong Liu, Jia Li, Xiaoran Jia, Zherui Li, Ge Li
Constrained decoding is essential for serving LLMs, ensuring that generated outputs follow specific structures such as JSON schema-formatted function calls. Existing systems are designed for autoregressive models and assume left-to-right generation, masking out invalid next tokens at each step.
The paper introduces Grammar‑Aligned Decoding (GAD), addressing the issue that conventional grammar‑constrained decoding (GCD) can distort a large language model’s probability distribution, yielding grammatical but low‑likelihood outputs. GAD proposes an adaptive sampling method, Approximate Expected Futures (ASAp), which uses prior samples to over‑approximate future grammaticality, ensuring outputs remain both grammatical and faithful to the model’s conditional probabilities. Experiments on code generation and structured NLP tasks demonstrate that ASAp often produces higher‑likelihood outputs than existing GCD techniques while still enforcing the required grammatical constraints.
By Kanghee Park, Jiayu Wang, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Nadia Polikarpova, Loris D'Antoni
arXiv:2608. 10137v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Grammar Constrained Decoding (GCD) forces Language Models (LMs) to produce syntactically valid outputs by masking out non-conforming tokens at each step.
By I\c{s}{\i}l \"Ozg\"u, Yaoxuan Wu, Guy Van den Broeck, Miryung Kim