Suffix-Constrained Greedy Search Algorithms for Causal Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01243v1
• Date: Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:46:00 GMT
• Title: Suffix-Constrained Greedy Search Algorithms for Causal Language Models
• Authors: Ayoub Hammal, Pierre Zweigenbaum, Caio Corro,
• Abstract summary: Large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools that have found applications beyond human-machine interfaces and chatbots.<n>Unfortunately, extracting the final answer in an LLM free-form output is difficult, as it is an information extraction problem on its own.<n>We introduce suffix- generation, that aims to produce well-constrained LLM responses in which final answers follow strict templates and are guaranteed to be trivially parseable.
• Score: 6.949966663998242
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools that have found applications beyond human-machine interfaces and chatbots. In particular, their ability to generate reasoning traces motivated their use in many prediction tasks like math question answering. Unfortunately, extracting the final answer in an LLM free-form output is difficult, as it is an information extraction problem on its own. In this work, we introduce suffix-constrained generation, that aims to produce well-formed LLM responses in which final answers follow strict templates and are guaranteed to be trivially parseable. To this end, we introduce several algorithms that are based on greedy search procedures. We experiment on several datasets, and show that our approach allows to guarantee trivial deterministic extraction of the final answer from an LLM output without having a negative impact on results, and even improving them.

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