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arXiv · 2601.21169

Output-Space Search: Targeting LLM Generations in a Frozen Encoder-Defined Output Space

Tobias Materzok
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Abstract

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.

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Tobias Materzok. 2026-01-29. Output-Space Search: Targeting LLM Generations in a Frozen Encoder-Defined Output Space. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1%2F2026.surgellm-1.4

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