Papers › Plug-and-Blend: A Framework for Controllable Story Generation with Blended Control Codes

Plug-and-Blend: A Framework for Controllable Story Generation with Blended Control Codes

23 Mar 2021NAACL (NUSE) 2021 6arXiv:2104.04039archive 2025-07-28

Zhiyu Lin, Mark Riedl

Large pre-trained neural language models (LM) have very powerful text generation capabilities. However, in practice, they are hard to control for creative purposes. We describe a Plug-and-Play controllable language generation framework, Plug-and-Blend, that allows a human user to input multiple control codes (topics). In the context of automated story generation, this allows a human user loose or fine-grained control of the topics and transitions between them that will appear in the generated story, and can even allow for overlapping, blended topics. Automated evaluations show our framework, working with different generative LMs, controls the generation towards given continuous-weighted control codes while keeping the generated sentences fluent, demonstrating strong blending capability. A human participant evaluation shows that the generated stories are observably transitioning between two topics.

PaperPDFConference PDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2104.04039")

Code

Syntology Ran 3 of 7 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 4 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 2 ran · our draft was wrong; 1 ran with no contract checked.

By repository: official repository: 7 samples from 1 repository, 3 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

xxbidiao/plug-and-blend officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

7 samples harvested; 3 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 4 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

2ran · our draft was wrong
1ran
4unverified

Licence: 0 of the 7 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from xxbidiao/plug-and-blend. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

gelu xxbidiao/plug-and-blend/gedi_helpers/modeling_gpt2.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 8d23fbe2b99b840b · report
prune_linear_layer xxbidiao/plug-and-blend/gedi_helpers/modeling_utils.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · d30d6c3098df2c42 · report
top_k_top_p_filtering xxbidiao/plug-and-blend/gedi_helpers/modeling_utils.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 49f3df5f44c69b6f · report
SharedDropout2 xxbidiao/plug-and-blend/gedi_helpers/modeling_gpt2.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 464d483ca9073ea6 · report
calc_banned_ngram_tokens xxbidiao/plug-and-blend/gedi_helpers/modeling_utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 35214bf3a3709500 · report
cut_into_sentences xxbidiao/plug-and-blend/gedi_skill.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · a4d7da98da6cd7ff · report
load_tf_weights_in_gpt2 xxbidiao/plug-and-blend/gedi_helpers/modeling_gpt2.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · c4bac98236c1fc2c · report

Tasks

Story GenerationText Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections