guided

Definition

Marks generation or search steered by an external signal rather than left to the model alone. The canonical case is classifier-free guidance in diffusion, where a single scale trades sample fidelity against diversity by amplifying the conditional direction. The same word covers guided decoding, where a grammar, a verifier, or retrieved evidence constrains the token stream. What unites them is intervening during generation rather than filtering afterwards.

Explainers using this term

• Paper walkthrough: Hi-Q — splitting a question down to the granularity your corpus can actually retrieveHi-Q: Hierarchical Evidence-guided Query Refinement for Multi-Hop Question Answering
• Structured Output and Constrained Decoding — How to Stop an LLM from Breaking Your JSONEfficient Guided Generation for Large Language Models