The Constraint Tax: Measuring Validity-Correctness Tradeoffs in Structured Outputs for Small Language Models

arXiv:2605.26128v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production LLM systems increasingly require machine-readable outputs: JSON objects, typed traces, regex-constrained fields, and tool-call schemas. This paper targets on-device and low-cost small language model (SLM) deployments, where sub-3B models are attractive for privacy, latency, and commodity hardware but have limited capacity to satisfy schemas while solving tasks. The usual engineering assumption is that hard output constraints improve reliability without changing the underlying answer. We show that this assumption is unsafe for small mod

Source: arXiv cs.LG — read the full report at the original publisher.

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