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COMPEL Glossary / structured-output

Structured output

Output formatted to match a declared schema — JSON with a JSON Schema, function-call arguments, or grammar-constrained text — rather than free text.

What this means in practice

Makes model output safely consumable by downstream software without brittle parsing; modern provider APIs (OpenAI Structured Outputs, Anthropic tool-use) and open-source libraries (Outlines, Instructor) guarantee conformance.

Synonyms

schema-constrained output , JSON-mode output , typed output

See also

  • Constrained decoding — A decoding-time technique forcing model outputs to conform to a grammar, JSON Schema, or regular language by masking invalid next-token probabilities.
  • Tool use / function calling — A prompt pattern authorizing the model to request named functions with structured arguments — searching the web, reading a database, calling a calculator, triggering an API — rather than generating all answers from its weights.