Constrained Adaptive Rejection Sampling

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Parys, Paweł, Vaidya, Sairam, Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor, D'Antoni, Loris
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Parys, Paweł
Vaidya, Sairam
Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor
D'Antoni, Loris
author_facet Parys, Paweł
Vaidya, Sairam
Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor
D'Antoni, Loris
contents Language Models (LMs) are increasingly used in applications where generated outputs must satisfy strict semantic or syntactic constraints. Existing approaches to constrained generation fall along a spectrum: greedy constrained decoding methods enforce validity during decoding but distort the LM's distribution, while rejection sampling (RS) preserves fidelity but wastes computation by discarding invalid outputs. Both extremes are problematic in domains such as program fuzzing, where both validity and diversity of samples are essential. We present Constrained Adaptive Rejection Sampling (CARS), an approach that strictly improves the sample-efficiency of RS without distributional distortion. CARS begins with unconstrained LM sampling and adaptively rules out constraint-violating continuations by recording them in a trie and subtracting their probability mass from future draws. This adaptive pruning ensures that prefixes proven invalid are never revisited, acceptance rates improve monotonically, and the resulting samples exactly follow the constrained distribution. In experiments on a variety of domains -- e.g., program fuzzing and molecular generation -- CARS consistently achieves higher efficiency -- measured in the number of LM forward passes per valid sample -- while also producing stronger sample diversity than both GCD and methods that approximate the LM's distribution.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_01902
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Constrained Adaptive Rejection Sampling
Parys, Paweł
Vaidya, Sairam
Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor
D'Antoni, Loris
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Language Models (LMs) are increasingly used in applications where generated outputs must satisfy strict semantic or syntactic constraints. Existing approaches to constrained generation fall along a spectrum: greedy constrained decoding methods enforce validity during decoding but distort the LM's distribution, while rejection sampling (RS) preserves fidelity but wastes computation by discarding invalid outputs. Both extremes are problematic in domains such as program fuzzing, where both validity and diversity of samples are essential. We present Constrained Adaptive Rejection Sampling (CARS), an approach that strictly improves the sample-efficiency of RS without distributional distortion. CARS begins with unconstrained LM sampling and adaptively rules out constraint-violating continuations by recording them in a trie and subtracting their probability mass from future draws. This adaptive pruning ensures that prefixes proven invalid are never revisited, acceptance rates improve monotonically, and the resulting samples exactly follow the constrained distribution. In experiments on a variety of domains -- e.g., program fuzzing and molecular generation -- CARS consistently achieves higher efficiency -- measured in the number of LM forward passes per valid sample -- while also producing stronger sample diversity than both GCD and methods that approximate the LM's distribution.
title Constrained Adaptive Rejection Sampling
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01902