Locate&Edit: Energy-based Text Editing for Efficient, Flexible, and Faithful Controlled Text Generation

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Auteurs principaux: Son, Hye Ryung, Lee, Jay-Yoon
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Son, Hye Ryung
Lee, Jay-Yoon
author_facet Son, Hye Ryung
Lee, Jay-Yoon
contents Recent approaches to controlled text generation (CTG) often involve manipulating the weights or logits of base language models (LMs) at decoding time. However, these methods are inapplicable to latest black-box LMs and ineffective at preserving the core semantics of the base LM's original generations. In this work, we propose Locate&Edit(L&E), an efficient and flexible energy-based approach to CTG, which edits text outputs from a base LM using off-the-shelf energy models. Given text outputs from the base LM, L&E first locates spans that are most relevant to constraints (e.g., toxicity) utilizing energy models, and then edits these spans by replacing them with more suitable alternatives. Importantly, our method is compatible with black-box LMs, as it requires only the text outputs. Also, since L&E doesn't mandate specific architecture for its component models, it can work with a diverse combination of available off-the-shelf models. Moreover, L&E preserves the base LM's original generations, by selectively modifying constraint-related aspects of the texts and leaving others unchanged. These targeted edits also ensure that L&E operates efficiently. Our experiments confirm that L&E achieves superior semantic preservation of the base LM generations and speed, while simultaneously obtaining competitive or improved constraint satisfaction. Furthermore, we analyze how the granularity of energy distribution impacts CTG performance and find that fine-grained, regression-based energy models improve constraint satisfaction, compared to conventional binary classifier energy models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_00740
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Locate&Edit: Energy-based Text Editing for Efficient, Flexible, and Faithful Controlled Text Generation
Son, Hye Ryung
Lee, Jay-Yoon
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Recent approaches to controlled text generation (CTG) often involve manipulating the weights or logits of base language models (LMs) at decoding time. However, these methods are inapplicable to latest black-box LMs and ineffective at preserving the core semantics of the base LM's original generations. In this work, we propose Locate&Edit(L&E), an efficient and flexible energy-based approach to CTG, which edits text outputs from a base LM using off-the-shelf energy models. Given text outputs from the base LM, L&E first locates spans that are most relevant to constraints (e.g., toxicity) utilizing energy models, and then edits these spans by replacing them with more suitable alternatives. Importantly, our method is compatible with black-box LMs, as it requires only the text outputs. Also, since L&E doesn't mandate specific architecture for its component models, it can work with a diverse combination of available off-the-shelf models. Moreover, L&E preserves the base LM's original generations, by selectively modifying constraint-related aspects of the texts and leaving others unchanged. These targeted edits also ensure that L&E operates efficiently. Our experiments confirm that L&E achieves superior semantic preservation of the base LM generations and speed, while simultaneously obtaining competitive or improved constraint satisfaction. Furthermore, we analyze how the granularity of energy distribution impacts CTG performance and find that fine-grained, regression-based energy models improve constraint satisfaction, compared to conventional binary classifier energy models.
title Locate&Edit: Energy-based Text Editing for Efficient, Flexible, and Faithful Controlled Text Generation
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.00740