How Modern Inference Engines Tamed Structured Outputs
Autoregressive language models generate tokens sequentially by sampling from a probability distribution over a vocabulary. While this mechanism excels at natural language generation, it provides no structural guarantees when producing machine-readable data formats such as JSON, SQL, or structured tool calls. A single missing quotation mark, mismatched bracket, or hallucinated enum value invalidates the downstream payload. Prompt engineering, few-shot examples, and setting sampling temperature t
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