Guidance

Microsoft's programming paradigm for controlling LLM generation with constrained outputs

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Guidance is a programming paradigm from Microsoft Research that allows developers to constrain LLM generation with structured templates that interleave text, conditional logic, and generation calls, enabling deterministic control over output format while allowing the model to fill in the creative content. Its token healing and grammar-constrained generation capabilities ensure outputs conform to required formats without post-processing, making it particularly valuable for code generation and structured data extraction. Researchers and developers building AI applications requiring precise output control use Guidance to combine the flexibility of LLMs with the reliability of rule-based systems.

Key Features

• ✓Constrained generation
• ✓Structured templates
• ✓Grammar control
• ✓Token healing
• ✓Multi-model