Controllable Text Generation (CTG) aims to modify the output of a Language Model (LM) to meet specific constraints. For example, in a customer service conversation, responses from the agent should ideally be soothing and address the user’s dissatisfaction or complaints. This imposes significant demands on controlling language model output. However, demerits exist among traditional methods. Promoting and fine-tuning language models exhibit the “hallucination” phenomenon and cannot guarantee complete adherence to constraints. Conditional language models (CLM), which map control codes into LM representations or latent space, require training the modified language models from scratch and a high amount of customized dataset is demanded. Decoding-time methods employ Bayesian Rules to modify the output of the LM or model constraints as a combination of energy functions and update the output along the low-energy direction. Both methods are confronted with the efficiency sampling problem. Moreover, there are no methods that consider the relation between constraints weights and the contexts, as is essential in actual applications such as customer service scenarios. To alleviate the problems mentioned above, we propose Controllable Text Generation with Generative Adversarial Networks (CTGGAN), which utilizes a language model with logits bias as the Generator to produce constrained text and employs the Discriminator with learnable constraint weight combinations to score and update the generation. We evaluate the method in the text completion task and Chinese customer service dialogues scenario, and our method shows superior performance in metrics such as PPL and Dist-3. In addition, CTGGAN also exhibits efficient decoding compared to other methods.

Zhe Yang, Yi Huang, Yaqin Chen, XiaotingWu XiaotingWu, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Zhe Yang, Yi Huang, Yaqin Chen, Xiaoting Wu, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024. 2024.

Recent advancements in large language models have revolutionized text generation with their remarkable capabilities. These models can produce controlled texts that closely adhere to specific requirements when prompted appropriately. However, designing an optimal prompt to control multiple attributes simultaneously can be challenging. A common approach is to linearly combine single-attribute models, but this strategy often overlooks attribute overlaps and can lead to conflicts. Therefore, we propose a novel combination strategy inspired by the Law of Total Probability and Conditional Mutual Information Minimization on generative language models. This method has been adapted for single-attribute control scenario and is termed the Palette of Language Models due to its theoretical linkage between attribute strength and generation style, akin to blending colors on an artist's palette. Moreover, positive correlation and attribute enhancement are advanced as theoretical properties to guide a rational combination strategy design. We conduct experiments on both single control and multiple control settings, and achieve surpassing results.