Papers › Controlled Text Generation as Continuous Optimization with Multiple Constraints

Controlled Text Generation as Continuous Optimization with Multiple Constraints

4 Aug 2021NeurIPS 2021 12arXiv:2108.01850archive 2025-07-28

Sachin Kumar, Eric Malmi, Aliaksei Severyn, Yulia Tsvetkov

As large-scale language model pretraining pushes the state-of-the-art in text generation, recent work has turned to controlling attributes of the text such models generate. While modifying the pretrained models via fine-tuning remains the popular approach, it incurs a significant computational cost and can be infeasible due to lack of appropriate data. As an alternative, we propose MuCoCO -- a flexible and modular algorithm for controllable inference from pretrained models. We formulate the decoding process as an optimization problem which allows for multiple attributes we aim to control to be easily incorporated as differentiable constraints to the optimization. By relaxing this discrete optimization to a continuous one, we make use of Lagrangian multipliers and gradient-descent based techniques to generate the desired text. We evaluate our approach on controllable machine translation and style transfer with multiple sentence-level attributes and observe significant improvements over baselines.

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