In plain words: It guides a model's output word by word with a search that checks each step against rules spelling out required structure and meaning, forcing valid answers without retraining. Small models with it beat larger ones and top reasoning systems on JSON parsing and planning.
Abstract · $\texttt{SEM-CTRL}$: Semantically Controlled Decoding
Ensuring both syntactic and semantic correctness in Large Language Model (LLM) outputs remains a significant challenge, despite being critical for real-world deployment. In this paper, we introduce $\texttt{SEM-CTRL}$, a unified approach that allows for enforcing rich context-sensitive constraints, and task and instance specific semantics directly on the LLM decoder. Our approach integrates token-level MCTS which is guided by specific syntactic and semantic constraints. The constraints over desired outputs are expressed using Answer Set Grammars, which is a logic-based formalism that generalizes context sensitive grammars while incorporating background knowledge to represent task-specific semantics. We show that our approach helps guarantee valid completions for any off-the-shelf LLM without the need for fine-tuning. We evaluate $\texttt{SEM-CTRL}$ on a range of tasks, including synthetic grammar synthesis, combinatorial reasoning, JSON parsing, and planning. Our experimental results demonstrate that $\texttt{SEM-CTRL}$ allows even small pre-trained LLMs to efficiently outperform larger variants and state-of-the-art reasoning models (e.g., $\textit{o4-mini}$) while simultaneously guaranteeing semantic validity.
Mohammad Albinhassan, Pranava Madhyastha, Alessandra Russo
arXiv:2503.01804 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Mar 3, 2025 · updated Apr 9, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Published in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 03/2026