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Comment by time0ut

10 hours ago

What I mean is that, in general, constrained decoding can push model output off into less probable regimes. This is well studied; see for example https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.21619. The mask may only retain very improbable logits. In pathological cases, the constrained output may be little better than noise filtered through the constraint. When using existing structured output APIs, it may not be possible to even know.

You don't even bother text after the [a] at first place in this case

Your question is something like

anwser only a,b,c,d for following question a. b. c. d....

the model output possibility of next character a: 0.8 b: 0.7 c: 0.3 f: 0.2 d: 0.1

If the list contains option you did not provide. The model is confused anyway, it don't matter if you use grammer to filter out the bad option or not, the answer is screwed already.

  • Yes, agreed. I was speaking in general, of course. This particular topic is of interest to me, so thinking of the edge cases and confounds vs Jev.

    In your example, I would expect an LLM to do fine and if you have access to the raw logits you can measure whether or not it was confused and assign a confidence to the answer it gave.

    I do think that Jev handles more than this though and, in my early testing, does things that are not easily accomplished with guided decoding techniques.

    • The way jev actually internally work could be interesting though. I believe most llm are only tuned to return the first or second logits(or a few more) correctly as that is what the sampler would choose anyway. Do they alter existing model for better behavior across all options? Or they distilled one to have the proper behavior? We can only guess without the actual implementation.

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