Simon Willison’s Weblog

8th May 2023 - Link Blog

Jsonformer: A Bulletproof Way to Generate Structured JSON from Language Models. This is such an interesting trick. A common challenge with LLMs is getting them to output a specific JSON shape of data reliably, without occasionally messing up and generating invalid JSON or outputting other text.

Jsonformer addresses this in a truly ingenious way: it implements code that interacts with the logic that decides which token to output next, influenced by a JSON schema. If that code knows that the next token after a double quote should be a comma it can force the issue for that specific token.

This means you can get reliable, robust JSON output even for much smaller, less capable language models.

It’s built against Hugging Face transformers, but there’s no reason the same idea couldn’t be applied in other contexts as well.