Controllable Text Generation via Probability Density Estimation in the Latent Space

Yuxuan Gu, Xiaocheng Feng, Sicheng Ma, Lingyuan Zhang, Heng Gong, Weihong Zhong, Bing Qin


Abstract
Previous work on controllable text generation has explored the idea of control from the latent space, such as optimizing a representation with attribute-specific classifiers or sampling one from relevant discrete samples. However, they cannot effectively model a complex space with diverse attributes, high dimensionality, and asymmetric structure, leaving subsequent controls unsatisfying. In this work, we propose a novel control framework using probability density estimation in the latent space. Our method utilizes an invertible transformation function, the Normalizing Flow, that maps the complex distributions in the latent space to simple Gaussian distributions in the prior space. Thus, we can perform sophisticated and flexible controls in the prior space and feed the control effects back into the latent space owing to the bijection property of invertible transformations. Experiments on single-attribute and multi-attribute control reveal that our method outperforms several strong baselines on attribute relevance and text quality, achieving a new SOTA. Further analysis of control strength adjustment demonstrates the flexibility of our control strategy.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.704
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12590–12616
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.704
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.704
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuxuan Gu, Xiaocheng Feng, Sicheng Ma, Lingyuan Zhang, Heng Gong, Weihong Zhong, and Bing Qin. 2023. Controllable Text Generation via Probability Density Estimation in the Latent Space. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 12590–12616, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Controllable Text Generation via Probability Density Estimation in the Latent Space (Gu et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.704.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.704.mp4