Fine-Grained Controllable Text Generation Using Non-Residual Prompting

Fredrik Carlsson, Joey Öhman, Fangyu Liu, Severine Verlinden, Joakim Nivre, Magnus Sahlgren

Abstract: The introduction of immensely large Causal Language Models (CLMs) has rejuvenated the interest in open-ended text generation. However, controlling the generative process for these Transformer-based models is at large an unsolved problem. Earlier work has explored either plug-and-play decoding strategies, or more powerful but blunt approaches such as prompting. There hence currently exists a trade-off between fine-grained control, and the capability for more expressive high-level instructions. To alleviate this trade-off, we propose an encoder-decoder architecture that enables intermediate text prompts at arbitrary time steps. We propose a resource-efficient method for converting a pre-trained CLM into this architecture, and demonstrate its potential on various experiments, including the novel task of contextualized word inclusion. Our method provides strong results on multiple experimental settings, proving itself to be both expressive and versatile.