Structured outputs

Overview

For many applications, such as chatbots, models need to respond to users directly in natural language. However, there are scenarios where we need models to output in a structured format. For example, we might want to store the model output in a database and ensure that the output conforms to the database schema. This need motivates the concept of structured output, where models can be instructed to respond with a particular output structure.

Key concepts

(1) Schema definition: The output structure is represented as a schema, which can be defined in several ways. (2) Returning structured output: The model is given this schema, and is instructed to return output that conforms to it.

Recommended usage

This pseudo-code illustrates the recommended workflow when using structured output. LangChain provides a method, with_structured_output(), that automates the process of binding the schema to the model and parsing the output. This helper function is available for all model providers that support structured output.

# Define schema
schema = {"foo": "bar"}
# Bind schema to model
model_with_structure = model.with_structured_output(schema)
# Invoke the model to produce structured output that matches the schema
structured_output = model_with_structure.invoke(user_input)

Schema definition

The central concept is that the output structure of model responses needs to be represented in some way. While types of objects you can use depend on the model you're working with, there are common types of objects that are typically allowed or recommended for structured output in Python.

The simplest and most common format for structured output is a JSON-like structure, which in Python can be represented as a dictionary (dict) or list (list). JSON objects (or dicts in Python) are often used directly when the tool requires raw, flexible, and minimal-overhead structured data.

{
  "answer": "The answer to the user's question",
  "followup_question": "A followup question the user could ask"
}

As a second example, Pydantic is particularly useful for defining structured output schemas because it offers type hints and validation. Here's an example of a Pydantic schema:

from pydantic import BaseModel, Field
class ResponseFormatter(BaseModel):
    """Always use this tool to structure your response to the user."""
    answer: str = Field(description="The answer to the user's question")
    followup_question: str = Field(description="A followup question the user could ask")

Returning structured output

With a schema defined, we need a way to instruct the model to use it. While one approach is to include this schema in the prompt and ask nicely for the model to use it, this is not recommended. Several more powerful methods that utilizes native features in the model provider's API are available.

Using tool calling

Many model providers support tool calling, a concept discussed in more detail in our tool calling guide. In short, tool calling involves binding a tool to a model and, when appropriate, the model can decide to call this tool and ensure its response conforms to the tool's schema. With this in mind, the central concept is strightforward: simply bind our schema to a model as a tool! Here is an example using the ResponseFormatter schema defined above:

from langchain_openai import ChatOpenAI
model = ChatOpenAI(model="gpt-4o", temperature=0)
# Bind responseformatter schema as a tool to the model
model_with_tools = model.bind_tools([ResponseFormatter])
# Invoke the model
ai_msg = model_with_tools.invoke("What is the powerhouse of the cell?")

API Reference:ChatOpenAI

The arguments of the tool call are already extracted as a dictionary. This dictionary can be optionally parsed into a Pydantic object, matching our original ResponseFormatter schema.

# Get the tool call arguments
ai_msg.tool_calls[0]["args"]
{'answer': "The powerhouse of the cell is the mitochondrion. Mitochondria are organelles that generate most of the cell's supply of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is used as a source of chemical energy.",
 'followup_question': 'What is the function of ATP in the cell?'}
# Parse the dictionary into a pydantic object
pydantic_object = ResponseFormatter.model_validate(ai_msg.tool_calls[0]["args"])

JSON mode

In addition to tool calling, some model providers support a feature called JSON mode. This supports JSON schema definition as input and enforces the model to produce a conforming JSON output. You can find a table of model providers that support JSON mode here. Here is an example of how to use JSON mode with OpenAI:

from langchain_openai import ChatOpenAI
model = ChatOpenAI(model="gpt-4o", model_kwargs={ "response_format": { "type": "json_object" } })
ai_msg = model.invoke("Return a JSON object with key 'random_ints' and a value of 10 random ints in [0-99]")
ai_msg.content
'\n{\n  "random_ints": [23, 47, 89, 15, 34, 76, 58, 3, 62, 91]\n}'

API Reference:ChatOpenAI

One important point to flag: the model still returns a string, which needs to be parsed into a JSON object. This can, of course, simply use the json library or a JSON output parser if you need more adavanced functionality. See this how-to guide on the JSON output parser for more details.

import json
json_object = json.loads(ai_msg.content)
{'random_ints': [23, 47, 89, 15, 34, 76, 58, 3, 62, 91]}

Structured output method

There a few challenges when producing structured output with the above methods:

(1) If using tool calling, tool call arguments needs to be parsed from a dictionary back to the original schema.

(2) In addition, the model needs to be instructed to always use the tool when we want to enforce structured output, which is a provider specific setting.

(3) If using JSON mode, the output needs to be parsed into a JSON object.

With these challenges in mind, LangChain provides a helper function (with_structured_output()) to streamline the process.

This both binds the schema to the model as a tool and parses the output to the specified output schema.

# Bind the schema to the model
model_with_structure = model.with_structured_output(ResponseFormatter)
# Invoke the model
structured_output = model_with_structure.invoke("What is the powerhouse of the cell?")
# Get back the pydantic object
structured_output
ResponseFormatter(answer="The powerhouse of the cell is the mitochondrion. Mitochondria are organelles that generate most of the cell's supply of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is used as a source of chemical energy.", followup_question='What is the function of ATP in the cell?')

Further reading

For more details on usage, see our how-to guide.