Controllable Text Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey

Xun Liang^1*, Hanyu Wang^1*, Yezhaohui Wang^2*,
Shichao Song¹, Jiawei Yang¹, Simin Niu¹, Jie Hu³, Dan Liu³, Shunyu Yao³, Feiyu Xiong², Zhiyu Li^2†

¹Renmin University of China
²Institute for Advanced Algorithms Research, Shanghai
³China Telecom Research Institute

^*Equal contribution.

^†Corresponding author: Zhiyu Li ([email protected]).

Important

🌟 Star Us! If you find our work helpful, please consider staring our GitHub to stay updated with the latest in Controllable Text Generation!🌟

📰 News

• [2024/08/26] We have updated our paper list, which can now be accessed on our GitHub page.
• [2024/08/23] Our paper is published on the arXiv platform: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12599.
• [2024/08/23] Our paper secured the second position on Hugging Face's Daily Papers module: https://huggingface.co/papers/2408.12599.

🔗 Introduction

Welcome to the GitHub repository for our survey paper titled "Controllable Text Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey." This repository includes all the resources, code, and references related to the paper. Our objective is to provide a thorough overview of the techniques and methodologies used to control text generation in large language models (LLMs), with an emphasis on both theoretical underpinnings and practical implementations.

Our survey explores the following key areas:

🎯 Demands of Controllable Text Generation

Controllable Text Generation (CTG) must meet two main requirements:

1. Meeting Predefined Control Conditions: Ensuring that the generated text adheres to specified criteria, such as thematic consistency, safety, and stylistic adherence.

2. Maintaining Text Quality: Ensuring that the text produced is fluent, helpful, and diverse while balancing control with overall quality.

📜 Formal Definition of Controllable Text Generation

We define CTG as follows:

1. Relationship with LLM Capabilities: CTG is an ability dimension that is orthogonal to the objective knowledge capabilities of LLMs, focusing on how information is presented to meet specific needs, such as style or sentiment.

2. Injection of Control Conditions: Control conditions can be integrated into the text generation process at various stages using resources like text corpora, graphs, or databases.

3. Quality of CTG: High-quality CTG strikes a balance between adherence to control conditions and maintaining fluency, coherence, and helpfulness in the generated text.

🗂️ Classification of Controllable Text Generation Tasks

CTG tasks are categorized into two main types:

1. Content Control (Linguistic Control/Hard Control): Focuses on managing content structure, such as format and vocabulary.

2. Attribute Control (Semantic Control/Soft Control): Focuses on managing attributes like sentiment, style, and safety.

🔧 Controllable Text Generation Method Classification

CTG methods are systematically categorized into two stages:

1. Training-Stage Methods: Techniques such as model retraining, fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning that occur during the training phase.

2. Inference-Stage Methods: Techniques such as prompt engineering, latent space manipulation, and decoding-time intervention applied during inference.

📊 Evaluation Methods and Applications

We review the evaluation methods and their applications in CTG:

1. Evaluation Methods: We introduce a range of automatic and human-based evaluation metrics, along with benchmarks that assess the effectiveness of CTG techniques, focusing on how well they balance control and text quality.

2. Applications: We explore CTG applications across both specialized vertical domains and general tasks.

🚀 Challenges and Future Directions

This survey addresses key challenges in CTG research and suggests future directions:

1. Key Challenges: Issues such as achieving precise control, maintaining fluency and coherence, and handling multi-attribute control in complex scenarios.

2. Proposed Appeals: We advocate for a greater focus on real-world applications and the development of robust evaluation frameworks to advance CTG techniques.

This paper aims to provide valuable insights and guidance for researchers and developers working in the field of Controllable Text Generation. All references, along with a Chinese version of this survey, are open-sourced and available at https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/CTGSurvey.

📚 Paper List

We’ve compiled a comprehensive spreadsheet of all the papers we reviewed, accessible here. A more user-friendly table format is in progress.

Below, you'll find a categorized list of papers from 2023 and 2024, organized by Type, Phase, and Classification.

Type: Method

Training Stage

Retraining

• CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation
  Salesforce Research, arxiv'19, 2019 [Paper]
• Parallel Refinements for Lexically Constrained Text Generation with BART
  HKU, EMNLP'20, 2020 [Paper]
• PAIR: Planning and Iterative Refinement in Pre-trained Transformers for Long Text Generation
  Northeastern University, EMNLP'20, 2020 [Paper]
• Pre-Training Based Personalized Dialogue Generation Model with Persona-sparse Data
  THU, AAAI'20, 2020 [Paper]
• POINTER: Constrained Progressive Text Generation via Insertion-based Generative Pre-training
  Microsoft, EMNLP'20, 2020 [Paper]
• CoCon: A Self-Supervised Approach for Controlled Text Generation
  NTU, ICLR'21, 2021 [Paper]
• A Simple and Efficient Multi-Task Learning Approach for Conditioned Dialogue Generation
  Universit´e de Montr´eal, NAACL'21, 2021 [Paper]
• CHAE: Fine-Grained Controllable Story Generation with Characters, Actions and Emotions
  Tongji University, COLING'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Director: Generator-Classifiers For Supervised Language Modeling
  McGill University, IJCNLP'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Emotional Text Generation with Hard Constraints
  Huaqiao University, ICFTIC'22, 2022 [Paper]
• FAST: Improving Controllability for Text Generation with Feedback Aware Self-Training
  Microsoft, arxiv'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Fine-Grained Controllable Text Generation Using Non-Residual Prompting
  Research Institutes of Sweden, ACL'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Genre-Controllable Story Generation via Supervised Contrastive Learning
  Sungkyunkwan University, WWW'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Fine-Grained Sentiment-Controlled Text Generation Approach Based on Pre-Trained Language Model
  Zhejiang University of Technology, Appl. Sci., 2023 [Paper]
• Lexical Complexity Controlled Sentence Generation for Language Learning
  BLCU, CCL'23, 2023 [Paper]
• Semantic Space Grounded Weighted Decoding for Multi-Attribute Controllable Dialogue Generation
  Shanghai Jiao Tong University, EMNLP'23, 2023 [Paper]
• SweCTRL-Mini: a data-transparent Transformer-based large language model for controllable text generation in Swedish
  KTH Royal Institute of Technology, arxiv'23, 2023 [Paper]

Fine-Tuning

• Technical Report: Auxiliary Tuning and its Application to Conditional Text Generation
  AI21, arxiv'20, 2020 [Paper]
• DisCup: Discriminator Cooperative Unlikelihood Prompt-tuning for Controllable Text Generation
  BIT, EMNLP'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Finetuned Language Models are Zero-Shot Learners
  Google, ICLR'22, 2022 [Paper]
• MReD: A Meta-Review Dataset for Structure-Controllable Text Generation
  Alibaba, ACL'22_findings, 2022 [Paper]
• Language Detoxification with Attribute-Discriminative Latent Space
  KAIST, ACL'23, 2023 [Paper]
• Controlled Text Generation with Hidden Representation Transformations
  UCLA, ACL'23_findings, 2023 [Paper]
• CLICK: Controllable Text Generation with Sequence Likelihood Contrastive Learning
  THU, ACL'24_findings, 2023 [Paper]
• Seen to Unseen: Exploring Compositional Generalization of Multi-Attribute Controllable Dialogue Generation
  BUPT, ACL'23, 2023 [Paper]
• DeepPress: guided press release topic-aware text generation using ensemble transformers
  Universite´ de Moncton,, Neural Computing and Applications, 2023 [Paper]
• DuNST: Dual Noisy Self Training for Semi-Supervised Controllable Text Generation
  The University of British Columbia, ACL'23, 2023 [Paper]
• Controlled text generation with natural language instructions
  ETH Zürich, ICML'23, 2023 [Paper]
• Controlling keywords and their positions in text generation
  Hitachi, Ltd. Research and Development Group, INLG'23, 2023 [Paper]
• Toward Unified Controllable Text Generation via Regular Expression Instruction
  ISCAS, IJCNLP-AACL'23, 2023 [Paper]
• Controllable Text Generation with Residual Memory Transformer
  BIT, arxiv'23, 2023 [Paper]
• Continuous Language Model Interpolation for Dynamic and Controllable Text Generation
  Harvard University, arxiv'24, 2024 [Paper]
• CoDa: Constrained Generation based Data Augmentation for Low-Resource NLP
  UMD, arxiv'24, 2024 [Paper]
• Contrastive Perplexity for Controlled Generation: An Application in Detoxifying Large Language Models
  SAP, arxiv'24, 2024 [Paper]
• CTGGAN: Controllable Text Generation with Generative Adversarial Network
  JIUTIAN Team, China Mobile Research, Appl. Sci., 2024 [Paper]
• ECCRG: A Emotion- and Content-Controllable Response Generation Model
  TJU, Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 2024 [Paper]
• LiFi: Lightweight Controlled Text Generation with Fine-Grained Control Codes
  THU, arxiv'24, 2024 [Paper]

Reinforcement Learning

• Learning to summarize with human feedback
  OpenAI, NeurIPS'20, 2020 [Paper]
• A Distributional Approach to Controlled Text Generation
  Muhammad Khalifa, ICLR'21, 2021 [Paper]
• Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Unsupervised Controlled Text Generation
  agaralabs, arxiv'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback
  openAI, NeurIPS'22, 2022 [Paper]
• STEER: Unified Style Transfer with Expert Reinforcement
  University of Washington, EMNLP'23_findings, 2023 [Paper]
• Prompt-Based Length Controlled Generation with Multiple Control Types
  NWPU, ACL'24_findings, 2024 [Paper]
• Reinforcement Learning with Dynamic Multi-Reward Weighting for Multi-Style Controllable Generation
  University of Minnesota, arxiv'24, 2024 [Paper]
• Safe RLHF: Safe Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
  PKU, ICLR'24_spotlight, 2024 [Paper]
• Token-level Direct Preference Optimization
  IACAS, arxiv'24, 2024 [Paper]
• Reinforcement Learning with Token-level Feedback for Controllable Text Generation
  HUST, NAACL'24, 2024 [Paper]

Inference Stage

Prompt Engineering

• AutoPrompt: Eliciting Knowledge from Language Models with Automatically Generated Prompts
  UCI&UCB, EMNLP'20, 2020 [Paper]
• Attribute Alignment: Controlling Text Generation from Pre-trained Language Models
  University of California, EMNLP'21_findings, 2021 [Paper]
• GPT Understands, Too
  THU, arxiv'21, 2021 [Paper]
• Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation
  University of California, Santa Barbara, ACL'21, 2021 [Paper]
• The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning
  Google, EMNLP'21, 2021 [Paper]
• Controllable Natural Language Generation with Contrastive Prefixes
  UCSB, ACL'22_findings, 2022 [Paper]
• A Distributional Lens for Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation
  HIT, EMNLP'22_oral, 2022 [Paper]
• P-Tuning v2: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Across Scales and Tasks
  THU, ACL'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Controlled Text Generation using T5 based Encoder-Decoder Soft Prompt Tuning and Analysis of the Utility of Generated Text in AI
  Queen Mary University of London, arxiv'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Controllable Generation of Dialogue Acts for Dialogue Systems via Few-Shot Response Generation and Ranking
  University of California Santa Cruz, SIGDIAL'23, 2023 [Paper]
• PCFG-based Natural Language Interface Improves Generalization for Controlled Text Generation
  Johns Hopkins University, SEM'23, 2023 [Paper]
• Harnessing the Plug-and-Play Controller by Prompting
  BUAA, GEM'23, 2023 [Paper]
• An Extensible Plug-and-Play Method for Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation
  THU&Meituan, ACL'23, 2023 [Paper]
• Tailor: A Soft-Prompt-Based Approach to Attribute-Based Controlled Text Generation
  Alibaba, ACL'23, 2023 [Paper]
• InstructCMP: Length Control in Sentence Compression through Instruction-based Large Language Models
  CNU, ACL'24_findings, 2024 [Paper]
• Topic-Oriented Controlled Text Generation for Social Networks
  WHU, Journal of Signal Processing Systems, 2024 [Paper]
• Plug and Play with Prompts: A Prompt Tuning Approach for Controlling Text Generation
  University of Toronto, AAAI'24_workshop, 2024 [Paper]
• TrustAgent: Towards Safe and Trustworthy LLM-based Agents through Agent Constitution
  UCSB, arxiv'24, 2024 [Paper]

Latent Space Manipulation

• Deep Extrapolation for Attribute-Enhanced Generation
  Salesforce Research, NeurIPS'21, 2021 [Paper]
• Extracting Latent Steering Vectors from Pretrained Language Models
  Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, ACL'22_findings, 2022 [Paper]
• Activation Addition: Steering Language Models Without Optimization
  UC Berkeley, arxiv'23, 2023 [Paper]
• Evaluating, Understanding, and Improving Constrained Text Generation for Large Language Models
  PKU, arxiv'23, 2023 [Paper]
• In-context Vectors: Making In Context Learning More Effective and Controllable Through Latent Space Steering
  Stanford University, arxiv'23, 2023 [Paper]
• MacLaSa: Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation via Efficient Sampling from Compact Latent Space
  ICT CAS, EMNLP'23_findings, 2023 [Paper]
• Miracle: Towards Personalized Dialogue Generation with Latent-Space Multiple Personal Attribute Control
  HUST, EMNLP'23_findings, 2023 [Paper]
• Controllable Text Generation via Probability Density Estimation in the Latent Space
  HIT, EMNLP'23, 2023 [Paper]
• Self-Detoxifying Language Models via Toxification Reversal
  The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, EMNLP'23, 2023 [Paper]
• DESTEIN: Navigating Detoxification of Language Models via Universal Steering Pairs and Head-wise Activation Fusion
  Tongji University, arxiv'24, 2024 [Paper]
• FreeCtrl: Constructing Control Centers with Feedforward Layers for Learning-Free Controllable Text Generation
  NTU, ACL'24, 2024 [Paper]
• InferAligner: Inference-Time Alignment for Harmlessness through Cross-Model Guidance
  FuDan, arxiv'24, 2024 [Paper]
• Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation with Disentangled Counterfactual Augmentation
  NJU, ACL'24, 2024 [Paper]
• Style Vectors for Steering Generative Large Language Models
  German Aerospace Center (DLR), EACL'24_findings, 2024 [Paper]

Decoding-time Intervention

• Generalization through Memorization: Nearest Neighbor Language Models
  Urvashi Khandelwal, ICLR'20, 2020 [Paper]
• MEGATRON-CNTRL: Controllable Story Generation with External Knowledge Using Large-Scale Language Models
  USTHK, EMNLP'20, 2020 [Paper]
• Plug-and-Play Conversational Models
  USTHK, EMNLP'20 findings, 2020 [Paper]
• Plug and Play Language Models: A Simple Approach to Controlled Text Generation
  California Institute of Technology, ICLR'20, 2020 [Paper]
• DExperts: Decoding-Time Controlled Text Generation with Experts and Anti-Experts
  University of Washington, ACL'21, 2021 [Paper]
• FUDGE: Controlled Text Generation With Future Discriminators
  UC Berkeley, NAACL'21, 2021 [Paper]
• GeDi: Generative Discriminator Guided Sequence Generation
  Salesforce Research, EMNLP'21, 2021 [Paper]
• Controllable Generation from Pre-trained Language Models via Inverse Prompting
  THU, KDD'21, 2021 [Paper]
• A Plug-and-Play Method for Controlled Text Generation
  ETH Zürich, EMNLP'21 findings, 2021 [Paper]
• Controlled Text Generation as Continuous Optimization with Multiple Constraints
  CMU, NeurIPS'21, 2021 [Paper]
• NeuroLogic Decoding: (Un)supervised Neural Text Generation with Predicate Logic Constraints
  Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, NAACL'21, 2021 [Paper]
• Plug-and-Blend: A Framework for Controllable Story Generation with Blended Control Codes
  Georgia Institute of Technology, Workshop on Narrative Understanding'21, 2021 [Paper]
• A Causal Lens for Controllable Text Generation
  UC San Diego, NeurIPS'21, 2021 [Paper]
• Self-Diagnosis and Self-Debiasing: A Proposal for Reducing Corpus-Based Bias in NLP
  LMU Munich, TACL'21, 2021 [Paper]
• Controllable Text Generation for All Ages: Evaluating a Plug-and-Play Approach to Age-Adapted Dialogue
  University of Amsterdam, GEM'22, 2022 [Paper]
• BeamR: Beam Reweighing with Attribute Discriminators for Controllable Text Generation
  Vanguard, AACL'22_findings, 2022 [Paper]
• Classifiers are Better Experts for Controllable Text Generation
  Tinkoff, NeurIPS'22 workshop Transfer Learning for Natural Language Processing, 2022 [Paper]
• Improving Controllable Text Generation with Position-Aware Weighted Decoding
  HIT, ACL'22_findings, 2022 [Paper]
• Controllable Text Generation with Language Constraints
  Princeton University, arxiv, 2022 [Paper]
• COLD Decoding: Energy-based Constrained Text Generation with Langevin Dynamics
  University of Washington, NeurIPS'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Collocation2Text: Controllable Text Generation from Guide Phrases in Russian
  Vyatka State University, Dialogue-2022 conference, 2022 [Paper]
• CounterGeDi: A Controllable Approach to Generate Polite, Detoxified and Emotional Counterspeech
  Indian Institute of Technology, IJCAI'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Bridging the Gap Between Training and Inference of Bayesian Controllable Language Models
  THU, arxiv'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Nearest Neighbor Language Models for Stylistic Controllable Generation
  University of Marburg, GEM'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Mix and Match: Learning-free Controllable Text Generationusing Energy Language Models
  University of California San Diego, ACL'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Gradient-based Constrained Sampling from Language Models
  CMU, EMNLP'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Controllable Text Generation with Neurally-Decomposed Oracle
  UCLA, NeruIPS'22, 2022 [Paper]
• NeuroLogic A*esque Decoding: Constrained Text Generation with Lookahead Heuristics
  Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, NAACL'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Plug-and-Play Recipe Generation with Content Planning
  University of Cambridge, EMNLP 2022 GEM workshop, 2022 [Paper]
• Sequentially Controlled Text Generation
  University of Southern California, EMNLP'22, 2022 [Paper]
• Air-Decoding: Attribute Distribution Reconstruction for Decoding-Time Controllable Text Generation
  USTC, EMNLP'23, 2023 [Paper]
• A Block Metropolis-Hastings Sampler for Controllable Energy-based Text Generation
  UCSD, CoNLL'23, 2023 [Paper]
• BOLT: Fast Energy-based Controlled Text Generation with Tunable Biases
  University of Michigan, ACL'23_short, 2023 [Paper]
• Controlled Decoding from Language Models
  Google, NeurIPS_SoLaR'23, 2023 [Paper]
• Focused Prefix Tuning for Controllable Text Generation
  Tokyo Institute of Technology, ACL'23_short, 2023 [Paper]
• Focused Prefix Tuning for Controllable Text Generation
  Tokyo Tech, ACL'23_short, 2023 [Paper]
• Goodtriever: Adaptive Toxicity Mitigation with Retrieval-augmented Models
  Cohere For AI, EMNLP'23_findings, 2023 [Paper]
• GRACE: Gradient-guided Controllable Retrieval for Augmenting Attribute-based Text Generation
  National University of Defense Technology, ACL'23_findings, 2023 [Paper]
• An Invariant Learning Characterization of Controlled Text Generation
  Columbia University, ACL'23, 2023 [Paper]
• Style Locality for Controllable Generation with kNN Language Models
  University of Marburg, SIGDIAL'23_TamingLLM workshop, 2023 [Paper]
• Detoxifying Text with MaRCo: Controllable Revision with Experts and Anti-Experts
  University of Washington&CMU, ACL'23_short, 2023 [Paper]
• MIL-Decoding: Detoxifying Language Models at Token-Level via Multiple Instance Learning
  PKU, ACL'23, 2023 [Paper]
• Controllable Story Generation Based on Perplexity Minimization
  Vyatka State University, AIST 2023, 2023 [Paper]
• PREADD: Prefix-Adaptive Decoding for Controlled Text Generation
  UC Berkeley, ACL'23_findings, 2023 [Paper]
• Reward-Augmented Decoding: Efficient Controlled Text Generation With a Unidirectional Reward Model
  UNC-Chapel Hill, EMNLP'23_short, 2023 [Paper]
• Controlled Text Generation for Black-box Language Models via Score-based Progressive Editor
  Seoul National University, ACL'24, 2023 [Paper]
• Successor Features for Efficient Multisubject Controlled Text Generation
  Microsoft, arxiv'23, 2023 [Paper]
• Controlled Text Generation via Language Model Arithmetic
  ETH Zurich, ICLR'24_spotlight, 2024 [Paper]
• COLD-Attack: Jailbreaking LLMs with Stealthiness and Controllability
  UIUC, arxiv'24, 2024 [Paper]
• Controlled Text Generation for Large Language Model with Dynamic Attribute Graphs
  RUC, arxiv'24, 2024 [Paper]
• DECIDER: A Rule-Controllable Decoding Strategy for Language Generation by Imitating Dual-System Cognitive Theory
  BIT, TKDE_submitted, 2024 [Paper]
• Word Embeddings Are Steers for Language Models
  UIUC, ACL'24, 2024 [Paper]
• RAIN: Your Language Models Can Align Themselves without Finetuning
  PKU, ICLR'24, 2024 [Paper]
• ROSE Doesn't Do That: Boosting the Safety of Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models with Reverse Prompt Contrastive Decoding
  WHU, arxiv'24, 2024 [Paper]
• Uncertainty is Fragile: Manipulating Uncertainty in Large Language Models
  Rutgers, arxiv'24, 2024 [Paper]

Type: Survey

• Exploring Controllable Text Generation Techniques
  CMU, COLING'20, 2023 [Paper]
• Conditional Text Generation for Harmonious Human-Machine Interaction
  NWPT, TIST'21, 2021 [Paper]
• How to Control Sentiment in Text Generation: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art in Sentiment-Control Techniques
  DCU, WASSA'23, 2023 [Paper]
• A Survey of Controllable Text Generation using Transformer-based Pre-trained Language Models
  BIT, ACM CSUR, 2023 [Paper]
• A Recent Survey on Controllable Text Generation: A Causal Perspective
  Tongji, Fundamental Research, 2024 [Paper]