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Controlled Decoding from Language Models

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arxiv 2310.17022 v3 pith:VYWLUPAD submitted 2023-10-25 cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL

classification cs.LGcs.AIcs.CL
keywords controldecodinglanguagemodelpopularprefixalignmentbase
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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KL-regularized reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular alignment framework to control the language model responses towards high reward outcomes. We pose a tokenwise RL objective and propose a modular solver for it, called controlled decoding (CD). CD exerts control through a separate prefix scorer module, which is trained to learn a value function for the reward. The prefix scorer is used at inference time to control the generation from a frozen base model, provably sampling from a solution to the RL objective. We empirically demonstrate that CD is effective as a control mechanism on popular benchmarks. We also show that prefix scorers for multiple rewards may be combined at inference time, effectively solving a multi-objective RL problem with no additional training. We show that the benefits of applying CD transfer to an unseen base model with no further tuning as well. Finally, we show that CD can be applied in a blockwise decoding fashion at inference-time, essentially bridging the gap between the popular best-of-K strategy and tokenwise control through reinforcement learning. This makes CD a promising approach for alignment of language models.

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Cited by 12 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Selective Safety Steering via Value-Filtered Decoding

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

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    SLCD provably converges, under no-regret learning and a strong score-estimation assumption, to the KL-regularized optimal distribution using only supervised classification oracles.

  3. XGrammar-2: Dynamic and Efficient Structured Generation Engine for Agentic LLMs

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    XGrammar-2 makes dynamic, tag-triggered structured generation fast by dispatching to cached substructure grammars with an Earley-based adaptive token-mask cache.

  4. Simultaneous Multi-objective Alignment Across Verifiable and Non-verifiable Rewards

    cs.LG 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    MAHALO aligns LLMs to multiple objectives in one model via per-objective action heads and PRM-guided decoding, improving math, value, and tutoring metrics jointly.

  5. From Outcomes to Processes: Guiding PRM Learning from ORM for Inference-Time Alignment

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    SP-PRM trains process reward models from outcome reward models via score and preference consistency, improving reward-guided search on dialogue, summarization, and reasoning tasks.

  6. Bounded Rationality for LLMs: Satisficing Alignment at Inference-Time

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    SITAlign is an inference-time constrained decoder that maximizes a primary reward while enforcing thresholds on secondary rewards, and it reports better primary-reward win-tie rates than weighted-objective decoding.

  7. Safe Inference-Time Alignment via Lagrangian Reward Augmentation

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.5 of 10

    Dualizing Safe RLHF yields a one-dimensional convex calibration of λ that defines a drop-in safety-aware reward for Best-of-N and token-level inference-time decoders.

  8. Reward Guided Decoding for Generative Recommendation

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    Reward-guided decoding reweights generative recommender probabilities by a learned business-value score, log P + R/β, and is deployed at Kuaishou.

  9. Reward Shaping for (Inference-Time) Alignment: A Stackelberg Game Perspective

    cs.LG 2026-01 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    The optimal reward for KL-regularized LLM alignment is a threshold function—reward B above a prompt-dependent cutoff, 0 below—which can be estimated from base-model samples and integrated into decoding-time alignment.

  10. QueryBandits for Hallucination Mitigation: Exploiting Semantic Features for No-Regret Rewriting

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  11. Advancing Decoding Strategies: Enhancements in Locally Typical Sampling for LLMs

    cs.CL 2025-06 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    ASTS extends locally typical sampling with semantic scoring and dynamic thresholds, reporting improved perplexity, MAUVE, and diversity on story and summarization tasks.

  12. Safety Game: Inference-Time Alignment of Black-Box LLMs via Constrained Optimization

    cs.LG 2025-10 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    A linear-programming 'safety game' selects among LLM candidate answers to maximize helpfulness under a self-reported risk cap, improving safety-benchmark accuracy over reranking baselines in multiple-choice settings.

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