Approximately Aligned Decoding · HackerPapers discussions

Approximately Aligned Decoding — mentioned by Der_Einzige

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:09:34 GMT

THIS IS LIES: https://blog.dottxt.ai/say-what-you-mean.html I will die on this hill and I have a bunch of other Arxiv links from better peer reviewed sources than yours to back my claim up (i.e. NeurIPS caliber papers with more citations than yours claiming it does harm the outputs) Any actual impact of structured/constrained generation on the outputs is a SAMPLER problem, and you can fix what little impact may exist with things like https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.01103 Decoding is intentionally nerfed/kept to top_k/top_p by model providers because of a conspiracy against high temperature…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Approximately Aligned Decoding — mentioned by Der_Einzige

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 17:51:14 GMT

To be fair, there is "real harm" from constraining LLM outputs related to, for example, forcing lipograms or the letter "E" and a model responding with misspellings of words (deleted E) rather than words that don't actually have the letter "E" at all. This is why some authors propose special decoders to fix that diversity problem. See this paper and most of what it cites around it for examples of this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.01103 This is independent from a "quality" or "reasoning" problem which simply does not exist/happen when using structured generation. Edit (to respond): I am…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Approximately Aligned Decoding — mentioned by Der_Einzige

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 17:46:36 GMT

Yup. I instantly linked these because the multiple papers who claim structured outputs harm quality are not just wrong, but fatally damaging to the whole AI ecosystem especially AI agents. There are places where structured outputs harms creativity, but usually that's a decoding time problem which is similarly solved with better sampling, like they talk about in this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.01103 Claims of harmed reasoning performance are really evidence that 1. Your structured generation backend is bad or 2. Some shenanigans/interactions with temperature/samplers (this is the most…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.