{"paper":{"title":"Token Constraint Decoding Improves Robustness on Question Answering for Large Language Models","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI"],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Bing-Cheng Xie, Bing-Jia Tan, Hao-Yuan Chen, Jui-Ming Yao, Sheng-Wei Peng, Shun-Feng Su, Zi-Xian Tang","submitted_at":"2025-06-11T05:33:56Z","abstract_excerpt":"Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) benchmarks, yet they remain highly vulnerable to minor input perturbations. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate Token Constraint Decoding (TCD). This simple yet effective inference-time algorithm enforces alignment between token-level predictions to enhance robustness in noisy settings. Through extensive experiments on CommonsenseQA, MMLU, and MMLU-Pro, we show that TCD, especially when paired with prompt engineering (PE) fixes, significantly restores performance degraded by "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2506.09408","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2506.09408/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}