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
arXiv:2603. 03305v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate executable outputs, JSON objects, and API calls, where a single syntax error can make the output unusable.
By Avinash Reddy, Thayne T. Walker, James S. Ide, Amrit Singh Bedi
arXiv:2606. 04816v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly translate natural-language optimization problems into executable solver code.
By Xizi Luo, Changhong He, Dongdong Geng, Chenggong Shi, Yu Mei
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: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
arXiv:2606. 08048v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion language models (DLMs) offer substantial speed advantages through parallel decoding, but the lack of token dependencies limits generation quality compared to autoregressive (AR) models.
By Juntong Shi, Brian L. Trippe, Jure Leskovec, Stefano Ermon, Minkai Xu
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.
Transduced language models (TLMs) combine a pretrained source language model with a finite‑state transducer to produce a language model over target strings. The paper introduces an unbiased stochastic estimator that resamples source prefixes without replacement and reweights them, allowing accurate estimation of target prefix probabilities while reducing computation compared to threshold‑pruned beam summing. Experiments on encyclopedic text, DNA, and DNA‑to‑amino‑acid transduction show improved compute–variance trade‑offs and significant runtime reductions, and the method also lowers estimated corpus surprisal in a reading‑time analysis without altering its conclusions.
By V\'esteinn Sn{\ae}bjarnarson, Samuel Kiegeland, Manuel de Prada Corral, Ryan Cotterell, Tim Vieira
ResiSpec is a framework that improves speculative decoding for large language models by reshaping the residual distribution during verification. It addresses the problem of residual drift, where rejected candidates cause the target distribution to diverge from the draft model’s predictions, rendering later candidates ineffective. By aligning the verification process with the draft model’s high‑confidence regions, ResiSpec prevents candidate obsolescence and achieves up to 1.92× speedup over existing multi‑candidate methods.
By Zhi-Kai Chen, Jun-Jie Tao, Wei-Xiang Mao, De-Chuan Zhan, Han-Jia Ye
Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by allowing a lightweight draft model to propose tokens that are subsequently verified in parallel by a larger target model. Recent approaches introduce lossy verification schemes to further improve efficiency by relaxing strict distributional matching.
The paper introduces Variance‑Calibrated Modulation (VCM), a training‑free pre‑decoding technique that reshapes language model probability distributions before truncation. VCM uses two dynamic mechanisms: a Contextual Searchlight via PMI to suppress stopwords and highlight context‑relevant tokens, and an Adaptive Self‑Debiasing that applies scale‑invariant penalization based on real‑time logit standard deviation. Experiments on open‑ended generation, factual QA, and mathematical reasoning show that VCM consistently reduces the likelihood trap, improving diversity, coherence, and reasoning accuracy with minimal computational cost.
By Yuanhao Ding, Meimingwei Li, Esteban Garces Arias, Matthias A{\ss}enmacher, Christian Heumann, Chongsheng Zhang