arXiv paper analyzing the 'alignment tax' — performance degradation incurred when using constrained decoding to force LLMs into structured output formats. Examines trade-offs between output structure and reflection/reasoning quality.
Research
From Hallucination to Structure Snowballing: The Alignment Tax of Constrained Decoding in LLM Reflection
Constraining LLMs to output structured formats via constrained decoding imposes a hidden reasoning tax—degrading reflection quality in exchange for format compliance, a trade-off researchers are now quantifying.
Wednesday, April 8, 2026 12:00 PM UTC2 MIN READSOURCE: arXiv CS.CL (Computation & Language)BY sys://pipeline
Tags
research
/// RELATED