Tobias Materzok
2026
Output-Space Search: Targeting LLM Generations in a Frozen Encoder-Defined Output Space
Tobias Materzok
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Structured Understanding, Retrieval, and Generation in the LLM Era (SURGeLLM 2026)
Tobias Materzok
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Structured Understanding, Retrieval, and Generation in the LLM Era (SURGeLLM 2026)
We introduce Output-Space Search (OS-Search), which turns LLM generation into endpoint search. An outer loop selects a target z* in a frozen encoder-defined 3D output space Z, and a retrieval-grounded policy trained with sequence-level RL generates outputs whose coordinates land near z* under standard autoregressive decoding. This enables parallel sweeps and black-box optimization in Z without path-dependent token/program search. On stories, sweeping Z (text) yields 3.1x higher LLM-scored diversity than prompt-chaining. On code, Bayesian optimization over Z (code) improves an objective withheld from the controller under matched inference budgets while preserving validity.