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Abstract - Constrained Decoding for Diffusion Language Models via Efficient Inference over Finite Automata
Constrained decoding is essential for serving LLMs, ensuring that generated outputs follow specific structures such as JSON schema-formatted function calls. Existing systems are designed for autoregressive models and assume left-to-right generation, masking out invalid next tokens at each step. Diffusion language models, however, break this assumption: they sample multiple positions simultaneously from a fully-factorized mean-field distribution at each denoising step. In this paper, we present an exact and tractable algorithm for sampling from the constrained mean-field posterior under any constraint expressible as a finite automaton. Viewing finite automata as graphical models, we obtain tractable representations of the constrained distribution that enable efficient inference. The approach guarantees constraint satisfaction by construction, supports both greedy and sampling-based decoding, and is compatible with parallel and block-wise decoding under arbitrary remasking schedules. Applying depth-reduction techniques from arithmetic circuit theory, we further reduce sampling depth from linear to logarithmic in the sequence length. Empirical evaluations on Dream-7B and LLaDA-8B show substantial accuracy gains across various tasks including function calling (xLAM, BFCL), planning (Sudoku, Countdown), text-to-SQL (Spider), and math reasoning (GSM-Symbolic), with little inference overhead relative to unconstrained decoding. For example, on BFCL-Live, our approach improves Dream-7B's greedy decoding accuracy from 63.9% to 71.5%, and stochastic sampling accuracy from 22.3% to 69.0%, where the unconstrained baseline collapses, with under 5% wall-clock overhead.
通过有限自动机高效推理实现扩散语言模型的约束解码 /
Constrained Decoding for Diffusion Language Models via Efficient Inference over Finite Automata
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文提出了一种针对扩散语言模型的高效约束解码方法,通过将约束条件编码为有限自动机并利用图模型与算术电路理论,在保证输出严格符合指定结构(如JSON格式、SQL语句等)的同时,大幅提升了模型在函数调用、规划推理、文本转SQL和数学推理等任务上的准确率,且计算开销极小。