Daily Papers

Text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models have recently achieved impressive visual quality, yet most systems still generate silent clips and treat audio as a secondary concern. Existing audio-video generation pipelines typically decompose the task into cascaded stages, which accumulate errors across modalities and are trained under separate objectives. Recent joint audio-video generators alleviate this issue but often rely on dual-tower architectures with ad-hoc cross-modal bridges and static, single-shot text conditioning, making it difficult to both reuse T2V backbones and to reason about how audio, video and language interact over time. To address these challenges, we propose 3MDiT, a unified tri-modal diffusion transformer for text-driven synchronized audio-video generation. Our framework models video, audio and text as jointly evolving streams: an isomorphic audio branch mirrors a T2V backbone, tri-modal omni-blocks perform feature-level fusion across the three modalities, and an optional dynamic text conditioning mechanism updates the text representation as audio and video evidence co-evolve. The design supports two regimes: training from scratch on audio-video data, and orthogonally adapting a pretrained T2V model without modifying its backbone. Experiments show that our approach generates high-quality videos and realistic audio while consistently improving audio-video synchronization and tri-modal alignment across a range of quantitative metrics.

In 3D modeling, designers often use an existing 3D model as a reference to create new ones. This practice has inspired the development of Phidias, a novel generative model that uses diffusion for reference-augmented 3D generation. Given an image, our method leverages a retrieved or user-provided 3D reference model to guide the generation process, thereby enhancing the generation quality, generalization ability, and controllability. Our model integrates three key components: 1) meta-ControlNet that dynamically modulates the conditioning strength, 2) dynamic reference routing that mitigates misalignment between the input image and 3D reference, and 3) self-reference augmentations that enable self-supervised training with a progressive curriculum. Collectively, these designs result in a clear improvement over existing methods. Phidias establishes a unified framework for 3D generation using text, image, and 3D conditions with versatile applications.

This paper presents MedSegFactory, a versatile medical synthesis framework that generates high-quality paired medical images and segmentation masks across modalities and tasks. It aims to serve as an unlimited data repository, supplying image-mask pairs to enhance existing segmentation tools. The core of MedSegFactory is a dual-stream diffusion model, where one stream synthesizes medical images and the other generates corresponding segmentation masks. To ensure precise alignment between image-mask pairs, we introduce Joint Cross-Attention (JCA), enabling a collaborative denoising paradigm by dynamic cross-conditioning between streams. This bidirectional interaction allows both representations to guide each other's generation, enhancing consistency between generated pairs. MedSegFactory unlocks on-demand generation of paired medical images and segmentation masks through user-defined prompts that specify the target labels, imaging modalities, anatomical regions, and pathological conditions, facilitating scalable and high-quality data generation. This new paradigm of medical image synthesis enables seamless integration into diverse medical imaging workflows, enhancing both efficiency and accuracy. Extensive experiments show that MedSegFactory generates data of superior quality and usability, achieving competitive or state-of-the-art performance in 2D and 3D segmentation tasks while addressing data scarcity and regulatory constraints.

Camera control has been actively studied in text or image conditioned video generation tasks. However, altering camera trajectories of a given video remains under-explored, despite its importance in the field of video creation. It is non-trivial due to the extra constraints of maintaining multiple-frame appearance and dynamic synchronization. To address this, we present ReCamMaster, a camera-controlled generative video re-rendering framework that reproduces the dynamic scene of an input video at novel camera trajectories. The core innovation lies in harnessing the generative capabilities of pre-trained text-to-video models through a simple yet powerful video conditioning mechanism -- its capability often overlooked in current research. To overcome the scarcity of qualified training data, we construct a comprehensive multi-camera synchronized video dataset using Unreal Engine 5, which is carefully curated to follow real-world filming characteristics, covering diverse scenes and camera movements. It helps the model generalize to in-the-wild videos. Lastly, we further improve the robustness to diverse inputs through a meticulously designed training strategy. Extensive experiments tell that our method substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches and strong baselines. Our method also finds promising applications in video stabilization, super-resolution, and outpainting. Project page: https://jianhongbai.github.io/ReCamMaster/

Text-to-video (T2V) generation has made significant strides with diffusion models. However, existing methods still struggle with accurately binding attributes, determining spatial relationships, and capturing complex action interactions between multiple subjects. To address these limitations, we propose MagicComp, a training-free method that enhances compositional T2V generation through dual-phase refinement. Specifically, (1) During the Conditioning Stage: We introduce the Semantic Anchor Disambiguation to reinforces subject-specific semantics and resolve inter-subject ambiguity by progressively injecting the directional vectors of semantic anchors into original text embedding; (2) During the Denoising Stage: We propose Dynamic Layout Fusion Attention, which integrates grounding priors and model-adaptive spatial perception to flexibly bind subjects to their spatiotemporal regions through masked attention modulation. Furthermore, MagicComp is a model-agnostic and versatile approach, which can be seamlessly integrated into existing T2V architectures. Extensive experiments on T2V-CompBench and VBench demonstrate that MagicComp outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its potential for applications such as complex prompt-based and trajectory-controllable video generation. Project page: https://hong-yu-zhang.github.io/MagicComp-Page/.

Personalized image generation has made significant strides in adapting content to novel concepts. However, a persistent challenge remains: balancing the accurate reconstruction of unseen concepts with the need for editability according to the prompt, especially when dealing with the complex nuances of facial features. In this study, we delve into the temporal dynamics of the text-to-image conditioning process, emphasizing the crucial role of stage partitioning in introducing new concepts. We present PersonaMagic, a stage-regulated generative technique designed for high-fidelity face customization. Using a simple MLP network, our method learns a series of embeddings within a specific timestep interval to capture face concepts. Additionally, we develop a Tandem Equilibrium mechanism that adjusts self-attention responses in the text encoder, balancing text description and identity preservation, improving both areas. Extensive experiments confirm the superiority of PersonaMagic over state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Moreover, its robustness and flexibility are validated in non-facial domains, and it can also serve as a valuable plug-in for enhancing the performance of pretrained personalization models.

We introduce DynaSent ('Dynamic Sentiment'), a new English-language benchmark task for ternary (positive/negative/neutral) sentiment analysis. DynaSent combines naturally occurring sentences with sentences created using the open-source Dynabench Platform, which facilities human-and-model-in-the-loop dataset creation. DynaSent has a total of 121,634 sentences, each validated by five crowdworkers, and its development and test splits are designed to produce chance performance for even the best models we have been able to develop; when future models solve this task, we will use them to create DynaSent version 2, continuing the dynamic evolution of this benchmark. Here, we report on the dataset creation effort, focusing on the steps we took to increase quality and reduce artifacts. We also present evidence that DynaSent's Neutral category is more coherent than the comparable category in other benchmarks, and we motivate training models from scratch for each round over successive fine-tuning.

Test-time prompt tuning enhances zero-shot generalization of vision-language models but tends to ignore the relatedness among test samples during inference. Online test-time prompt tuning provides a simple way to leverage the information in previous test samples, albeit with the risk of prompt collapse due to error accumulation. To enhance test-time prompt tuning, we propose DynaPrompt, short for dynamic test-time prompt tuning, exploiting relevant data distribution information while reducing error accumulation. Built on an online prompt buffer, DynaPrompt adaptively selects and optimizes the relevant prompts for each test sample during tuning. Specifically, we introduce a dynamic prompt selection strategy based on two metrics: prediction entropy and probability difference. For unseen test data information, we develop dynamic prompt appending, which allows the buffer to append new prompts and delete the inactive ones. By doing so, the prompts are optimized to exploit beneficial information on specific test data, while alleviating error accumulation. Experiments on fourteen datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of dynamic test-time prompt tuning.

3D Human motion generation is pivotal across film, animation, gaming, and embodied intelligence. Traditional 3D motion synthesis relies on costly motion capture, while recent work shows that 2D videos provide rich, temporally coherent observations of human behavior. Existing approaches, however, either map high-level text descriptions to motion or rely solely on video conditioning, leaving a gap between generated dynamics and real-world motion statistics. We introduce MotionDuet, a multimodal framework that aligns motion generation with the distribution of video-derived representations. In this dual-conditioning paradigm, video cues extracted from a pretrained model (e.g., VideoMAE) ground low-level motion dynamics, while textual prompts provide semantic intent. To bridge the distribution gap across modalities, we propose Dual-stream Unified Encoding and Transformation (DUET) and a Distribution-Aware Structural Harmonization (DASH) loss. DUET fuses video-informed cues into the motion latent space via unified encoding and dynamic attention, while DASH aligns motion trajectories with both distributional and structural statistics of video features. An auto-guidance mechanism further balances textual and visual signals by leveraging a weakened copy of the model, enhancing controllability without sacrificing diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionDuet generates realistic and controllable human motions, surpassing strong state-of-the-art baselines.

We present methodology for using dynamic evaluation to improve neural sequence models. Models are adapted to recent history via a gradient descent based mechanism, causing them to assign higher probabilities to re-occurring sequential patterns. Dynamic evaluation outperforms existing adaptation approaches in our comparisons. Dynamic evaluation improves the state-of-the-art word-level perplexities on the Penn Treebank and WikiText-2 datasets to 51.1 and 44.3 respectively, and the state-of-the-art character-level cross-entropies on the text8 and Hutter Prize datasets to 1.19 bits/char and 1.08 bits/char respectively.

Despite recent advances in natural language generation, it remains challenging to control attributes of generated text. We propose DExperts: Decoding-time Experts, a decoding-time method for controlled text generation that combines a pretrained language model with "expert" LMs and/or "anti-expert" LMs in a product of experts. Intuitively, under the ensemble, tokens only get high probability if they are considered likely by the experts, and unlikely by the anti-experts. We apply DExperts to language detoxification and sentiment-controlled generation, where we outperform existing controllable generation methods on both automatic and human evaluations. Moreover, because DExperts operates only on the output of the pretrained LM, it is effective with (anti-)experts of smaller size, including when operating on GPT-3. Our work highlights the promise of tuning small LMs on text with (un)desirable attributes for efficient decoding-time steering.

A world model enables an intelligent agent to imagine, predict, and reason about how the world evolves in response to its actions, and accordingly to plan and strategize. While recent video generation models produce realistic visual sequences, they typically operate in the prompt-to-full-video manner without causal control, interactivity, or long-horizon consistency required for purposeful reasoning. Existing world modeling efforts, on the other hand, often focus on restricted domains (e.g., physical, game, or 3D-scene dynamics) with limited depth and controllability, and struggle to generalize across diverse environments and interaction formats. In this work, we introduce PAN, a general, interactable, and long-horizon world model that predicts future world states through high-quality video simulation conditioned on history and natural language actions. PAN employs the Generative Latent Prediction (GLP) architecture that combines an autoregressive latent dynamics backbone based on a large language model (LLM), which grounds simulation in extensive text-based knowledge and enables conditioning on language-specified actions, with a video diffusion decoder that reconstructs perceptually detailed and temporally coherent visual observations, to achieve a unification between latent space reasoning (imagination) and realizable world dynamics (reality). Trained on large-scale video-action pairs spanning diverse domains, PAN supports open-domain, action-conditioned simulation with coherent, long-term dynamics. Extensive experiments show that PAN achieves strong performance in action-conditioned world simulation, long-horizon forecasting, and simulative reasoning compared to other video generators and world models, taking a step towards general world models that enable predictive simulation of future world states for reasoning and acting.

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled impressive progress in vision-language understanding, yet their high computational cost limits deployment in resource-constrained scenarios such as robotic manipulation, personal assistants, and smart cameras. Most existing methods rely on Transformer-based cross-attention, whose quadratic complexity hinders efficiency. Moreover, small vision-language models often struggle to precisely capture fine-grained, task-relevant visual regions, leading to degraded performance on fine-grained reasoning tasks that limit their effectiveness in the real world. To address these issues, we introduce Viper-F1, a Hybrid State-Space Vision-Language Model that replaces attention with efficient Liquid State-Space Dynamics. To further enhance visual grounding, we propose a Token-Grid Correlation Module, which computes lightweight correlations between text tokens and image patches and modulates the state-space dynamics via FiLM conditioning. This enables the model to selectively emphasize visual regions relevant to the textual prompt while maintaining linear-time inference. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that Viper-F1 achieves accurate, fine-grained understanding with significantly improved efficiency.

Controllable text generation is a growing field within natural language generation (NLG) that focuses on producing text that meets specific constraints in real-world applications. Previous approaches, such as plug-and-play controllers (PPCs), aimed to steer the properties of generated text in a flexible manner. However, these methods often compromised the integrity of the language model's decoding process, resulting in less smooth text generation. Alternatively, other techniques utilized multiple attribute prompts to align the generated text with desired attributes, but this approach required prompt design for each attribute and was dependent on the size of the language model. This paper introduces a novel method for flexible attribute control in text generation using pre-trained language models (PLMs). The proposed approach aims to enhance the fluency of generated text by guiding the generation process with PPCs. The key idea is to dynamically adjust the distribution of generated text by modifying prompts, effectively constraining the output space of the language model and influencing the desired attribute. To enable smooth cooperation between the PLM and the PPC, our work innovatively proposes a new model fine-tuning method: Reinforcement Learning with Dynamic Adjust Feedback (RLDAF).This fine-tuning process adapts a small subset of the language model's parameters based on the generating actions taken during the PPC control process. The resulting harmonious collaboration between the PLM and PPC leads to improved smoothness in text generation during inference. Extensive experiments were conducted on the SST2 dataset, and the proposed method outperformed previous approaches in various evaluation metrics, including text fluency and attribute consistency.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly required to generate text that is both factually accurate and diverse across various open-ended applications. However, current stochastic decoding methods struggle to balance such objectives. We introduce Dynamic Focus Decoding (DFD), a novel plug-and-play stochastic approach that resolves this trade-off without requiring additional data, knowledge, or models. DFD adaptively adjusts the decoding focus based on distributional differences across layers, leveraging the modular and hierarchical nature of factual knowledge within LLMs. This dynamic adjustment improves factuality in knowledge-intensive decoding steps and promotes diversity in less knowledge-reliant steps. DFD can be easily integrated with existing decoding methods, enhancing both factuality and diversity with minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments across seven datasets demonstrate that DFD significantly improves performance, providing a scalable and efficient solution for open-ended text generation.

Recent advances in pre-trained language models have improved the performance for text classification tasks. However, little attention is paid to the priority scheduling strategy on the samples during training. Humans acquire knowledge gradually from easy to complex concepts, and the difficulty of the same material can also vary significantly in different learning stages. Inspired by this insights, we proposed a novel self-paced dynamic curriculum learning (SPDCL) method for imbalanced text classification, which evaluates the sample difficulty by both linguistic character and model capacity. Meanwhile, rather than using static curriculum learning as in the existing research, our SPDCL can reorder and resample training data by difficulty criterion with an adaptive from easy to hard pace. The extensive experiments on several classification tasks show the effectiveness of SPDCL strategy, especially for the imbalanced dataset.

We consider the task of data-to-text generation, which aims to create textual output from non-linguistic input. We focus on generating long-form text, i.e., documents with multiple paragraphs, and propose a neural model enhanced with a planning component responsible for organizing high-level information in a coherent and meaningful way. We infer latent plans sequentially with a structured variational model, while interleaving the steps of planning and generation. Text is generated by conditioning on previous variational decisions and previously generated text. Experiments on two data-to-text benchmarks (RotoWire and MLB) show that our model outperforms strong baselines and is sample efficient in the face of limited training data (e.g., a few hundred instances).

Prefix-tuning is a powerful lightweight technique for adapting a large pre-trained language model to a downstream application. However, it uses the same dataset-level tuned prompt for all examples in the dataset. We extend this idea and propose a dynamic method, Control Prefixes, which allows for the inclusion of conditional input-dependent information, combining the benefits of prompt tuning and controlled generation. The method incorporates attribute-level learnable representations into different layers of a pre-trained transformer, allowing for the generated text to be guided in a particular direction. We provide a systematic evaluation of the technique and apply it to five datasets from the GEM benchmark for natural language generation (NLG). Although the aim is to develop a parameter-efficient model, we show Control Prefixes can even outperform full fine-tuning methods. We present state-of-the-art results on several data-to-text datasets, including WebNLG.

In this work, we address the problem of modifying textual attributes of sentences. Given an input sentence and a set of attribute labels, we attempt to generate sentences that are compatible with the conditioning information. To ensure that the model generates content compatible sentences, we introduce a reconstruction loss which interpolates between auto-encoding and back-translation loss components. We propose an adversarial loss to enforce generated samples to be attribute compatible and realistic. Through quantitative, qualitative and human evaluations we demonstrate that our model is capable of generating fluent sentences that better reflect the conditioning information compared to prior methods. We further demonstrate that the model is capable of simultaneously controlling multiple attributes.

A prevailing paradigm in neural text generation is one-shot generation, where text is produced in a single step. The one-shot setting is inadequate, however, when the constraints the user wishes to impose on the generated text are dynamic, especially when authoring longer documents. We address this limitation with an interactive text generation setting in which the user interacts with the system by issuing commands to edit existing text. To this end, we propose a novel text editing task, and introduce WikiDocEdits, a dataset of single-sentence edits crawled from Wikipedia. We show that our Interactive Editor, a transformer-based model trained on this dataset, outperforms baselines and obtains positive results in both automatic and human evaluations. We present empirical and qualitative analyses of this model's performance.

To enhance the controllability of text-to-image diffusion models, current ControlNet-like models have explored various control signals to dictate image attributes. However, existing methods either handle conditions inefficiently or use a fixed number of conditions, which does not fully address the complexity of multiple conditions and their potential conflicts. This underscores the need for innovative approaches to manage multiple conditions effectively for more reliable and detailed image synthesis. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, DynamicControl, which supports dynamic combinations of diverse control signals, allowing adaptive selection of different numbers and types of conditions. Our approach begins with a double-cycle controller that generates an initial real score sorting for all input conditions by leveraging pre-trained conditional generation models and discriminative models. This controller evaluates the similarity between extracted conditions and input conditions, as well as the pixel-level similarity with the source image. Then, we integrate a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to build an efficient condition evaluator. This evaluator optimizes the ordering of conditions based on the double-cycle controller's score ranking. Our method jointly optimizes MLLMs and diffusion models, utilizing MLLMs' reasoning capabilities to facilitate multi-condition text-to-image (T2I) tasks. The final sorted conditions are fed into a parallel multi-control adapter, which learns feature maps from dynamic visual conditions and integrates them to modulate ControlNet, thereby enhancing control over generated images. Through both quantitative and qualitative comparisons, DynamicControl demonstrates its superiority over existing methods in terms of controllability, generation quality and composability under various conditional controls.

Text-conditioned image generation has gained significant attention in recent years and are processing increasingly longer and comprehensive text prompt. In everyday life, dense and intricate text appears in contexts like advertisements, infographics, and signage, where the integration of both text and visuals is essential for conveying complex information. However, despite these advances, the generation of images containing long-form text remains a persistent challenge, largely due to the limitations of existing datasets, which often focus on shorter and simpler text. To address this gap, we introduce TextAtlas5M, a novel dataset specifically designed to evaluate long-text rendering in text-conditioned image generation. Our dataset consists of 5 million long-text generated and collected images across diverse data types, enabling comprehensive evaluation of large-scale generative models on long-text image generation. We further curate 3000 human-improved test set TextAtlasEval across 3 data domains, establishing one of the most extensive benchmarks for text-conditioned generation. Evaluations suggest that the TextAtlasEval benchmarks present significant challenges even for the most advanced proprietary models (e.g. GPT4o with DallE-3), while their open-source counterparts show an even larger performance gap. These evidences position TextAtlas5M as a valuable dataset for training and evaluating future-generation text-conditioned image generation models.

Text animation serves as an expressive medium, transforming static communication into dynamic experiences by infusing words with motion to evoke emotions, emphasize meanings, and construct compelling narratives. Crafting animations that are semantically aware poses significant challenges, demanding expertise in graphic design and animation. We present an automated text animation scheme, termed "Dynamic Typography", which combines two challenging tasks. It deforms letters to convey semantic meaning and infuses them with vibrant movements based on user prompts. Our technique harnesses vector graphics representations and an end-to-end optimization-based framework. This framework employs neural displacement fields to convert letters into base shapes and applies per-frame motion, encouraging coherence with the intended textual concept. Shape preservation techniques and perceptual loss regularization are employed to maintain legibility and structural integrity throughout the animation process. We demonstrate the generalizability of our approach across various text-to-video models and highlight the superiority of our end-to-end methodology over baseline methods, which might comprise separate tasks. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in generating coherent text animations that faithfully interpret user prompts while maintaining readability. Our code is available at: https://animate-your-word.github.io/demo/.

Recent advances in large-scale pre-training such as GPT-3 allow seemingly high quality text to be generated from a given prompt. However, such generation systems often suffer from problems of hallucinated facts, and are not inherently designed to incorporate useful external information. Grounded generation models appear to offer remedies, but their training typically relies on rarely-available parallel data where information-relevant documents are provided for context. We propose a framework that alleviates this data constraint by jointly training a grounded generator and document retriever on the language model signal. The model learns to reward retrieval of the documents with the highest utility in generation, and attentively combines them using a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) ensemble to generate follow-on text. We demonstrate that both generator and retriever can take advantage of this joint training and work synergistically to produce more informative and relevant text in both prose and dialogue generation.

Recent work has demonstrated that controlled pretraining experiments are a powerful tool for understanding learning, reasoning, and memorization in large language models (LLMs). However, the computational cost of pretraining presents a significant constraint. To overcome this constraint, we propose to conduct multiple pretraining experiments simultaneously during a single training run. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by conducting ten experiments during the training of a 1.5B parameter model on 210B tokens. Although we only train a single model, we can replicate the results from multiple previous works on data contamination, poisoning, and memorization. We also conduct novel investigations into knowledge acquisition, mathematical reasoning, and watermarking. For example, we dynamically update the training data until the model acquires a particular piece of knowledge. Remarkably, the influence of the ten experiments on the model's training dynamics and overall performance is minimal. However, interactions between different experiments may act as a potential confounder in our approach. We propose to test for interactions with continual pretraining experiments, finding them to be negligible in our setup. Overall, our findings suggest that performing multiple pretraining experiments in a single training run can enable rigorous scientific experimentation with large models on a compute budget.

Controlled Text Generation (CTG) aims to produce texts that exhibit specific desired attributes. In this study, we introduce a pluggable CTG framework for Large Language Models (LLMs) named Dynamic Attribute Graphs-based controlled text generation (DATG). This framework utilizes an attribute scorer to evaluate the attributes of sentences generated by LLMs and constructs dynamic attribute graphs. DATG modulates the occurrence of key attribute words and key anti-attribute words, achieving effective attribute control without compromising the original capabilities of the model. We conduct experiments across four datasets in two tasks: toxicity mitigation and sentiment transformation, employing five LLMs as foundational models. Our findings highlight a remarkable enhancement in control accuracy, achieving a peak improvement of 19.29% over baseline methods in the most favorable task across four datasets. Additionally, we observe a significant decrease in perplexity, markedly improving text fluency.

The pre-trained language models like BERT, though powerful in many natural language processing tasks, are both computation and memory expensive. To alleviate this problem, one approach is to compress them for specific tasks before deployment. However, recent works on BERT compression usually compress the large BERT model to a fixed smaller size. They can not fully satisfy the requirements of different edge devices with various hardware performances. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic BERT model (abbreviated as DynaBERT), which can flexibly adjust the size and latency by selecting adaptive width and depth. The training process of DynaBERT includes first training a width-adaptive BERT and then allowing both adaptive width and depth, by distilling knowledge from the full-sized model to small sub-networks. Network rewiring is also used to keep the more important attention heads and neurons shared by more sub-networks. Comprehensive experiments under various efficiency constraints demonstrate that our proposed dynamic BERT (or RoBERTa) at its largest size has comparable performance as BERT-base (or RoBERTa-base), while at smaller widths and depths consistently outperforms existing BERT compression methods. Code is available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Pretrained-Language-Model/tree/master/DynaBERT.

In this paper, we propose Dynamic Self-Attention (DSA), a new self-attention mechanism for sentence embedding. We design DSA by modifying dynamic routing in capsule network (Sabouretal.,2017) for natural language processing. DSA attends to informative words with a dynamic weight vector. We achieve new state-of-the-art results among sentence encoding methods in Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) dataset with the least number of parameters, while showing comparative results in Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST) dataset.

In many real-world applications, users rely on natural language instructions to guide large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. These instructions are often complex, diverse, and subject to frequent change. However, LLMs do not always attend to these instructions reliably, and users lack simple mechanisms to emphasize their importance beyond modifying prompt wording or structure. To address this, we present an inference-time method that enables users to emphasize specific parts of their prompt by steering the model's attention toward them, aligning the model's perceived importance of different prompt tokens with user intent. Unlike prior approaches that are limited to static instructions, require significant offline profiling, or rely on fixed biases, we dynamically update the proportion of model attention given to the user-specified parts--ensuring improved instruction following without performance degradation. We demonstrate that our approach improves instruction following across a variety of tasks involving multiple instructions and generalizes across models of varying scales.

Text-conditioned image generation models have recently achieved astonishing results in image quality and text alignment and are consequently employed in a fast-growing number of applications. Since they are highly data-driven, relying on billion-sized datasets randomly scraped from the web, they also reproduce inappropriate human behavior. Specifically, we demonstrate inappropriate degeneration on a large-scale for various generative text-to-image models, thus motivating the need for monitoring and moderating them at deployment. To this end, we evaluate mitigation strategies at inference to suppress the generation of inappropriate content. Our findings show that we can use models' representations of the world's ugliness to align them with human preferences.

Controllable text generation systems often leverage control codes to direct various properties of the output like style and length. Inspired by recent work on causal inference for NLP, this paper reveals a previously overlooked flaw in these control code-based conditional text generation algorithms. Spurious correlations in the training data can lead models to incorrectly rely on parts of the input other than the control code for attribute selection, significantly undermining downstream generation quality and controllability. We demonstrate the severity of this issue with a series of case studies and then propose two simple techniques to reduce these correlations in training sets. The first technique is based on resampling the data according to an example's propensity towards each linguistic attribute (IPS). The second produces multiple counterfactual versions of each example and then uses an additional feedback mechanism to remove noisy examples (feedback aware self-training, FAST). We evaluate on 3 tasks -- news headline, meta review, and search ads generation -- and demonstrate that FAST can significantly improve the controllability and language quality of generated outputs when compared to state-of-the-art controllable text generation approaches.

Recent advances in text-to-video generation have enabled high-quality synthesis from text and image prompts. While the personalization of dynamic concepts, which capture subject-specific appearance and motion from a single video, is now feasible, most existing methods require per-instance fine-tuning, limiting scalability. We introduce a fully zero-shot framework for dynamic concept personalization in text-to-video models. Our method leverages structured 2x2 video grids that spatially organize input and output pairs, enabling the training of lightweight Grid-LoRA adapters for editing and composition within these grids. At inference, a dedicated Grid Fill module completes partially observed layouts, producing temporally coherent and identity preserving outputs. Once trained, the entire system operates in a single forward pass, generalizing to previously unseen dynamic concepts without any test-time optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate high-quality and consistent results across a wide range of subjects beyond trained concepts and editing scenarios.

Real-world text applications often involve composing a wide range of text control operations, such as editing the text w.r.t. an attribute, manipulating keywords and structure, and generating new text of desired properties. Prior work typically learns/finetunes a language model (LM) to perform individual or specific subsets of operations. Recent research has studied combining operations in a plug-and-play manner, often with costly search or optimization in the complex sequence space. This paper proposes a new efficient approach for composable text operations in the compact latent space of text. The low-dimensionality and differentiability of the text latent vector allow us to develop an efficient sampler based on ordinary differential equations (ODEs) given arbitrary plug-in operators (e.g., attribute classifiers). By connecting pretrained LMs (e.g., GPT2) to the latent space through efficient adaption, we then decode the sampled vectors into desired text sequences. The flexible approach permits diverse control operators (sentiment, tense, formality, keywords, etc.) acquired using any relevant data from different domains. Experiments show that composing those operators within our approach manages to generate or edit high-quality text, substantially improving over previous methods in terms of generation quality and efficiency.

We introduce a new dynamic vocabulary for language models. It can involve arbitrary text spans during generation. These text spans act as basic generation bricks, akin to tokens in the traditional static vocabularies. We show that, the ability to generate multi-tokens atomically improve both generation quality and efficiency (compared to the standard language model, the MAUVE metric is increased by 25%, the latency is decreased by 20%). The dynamic vocabulary can be deployed in a plug-and-play way, thus is attractive for various downstream applications. For example, we demonstrate that dynamic vocabulary can be applied to different domains in a training-free manner. It also helps to generate reliable citations in question answering tasks (substantially enhancing citation results without compromising answer accuracy).

Text-conditioned image generation models have recently achieved astonishing results in image quality and text alignment and are consequently employed in a fast-growing number of applications. Since they are highly data-driven, relying on billion-sized datasets randomly scraped from the internet, they also suffer, as we demonstrate, from degenerated and biased human behavior. In turn, they may even reinforce such biases. To help combat these undesired side effects, we present safe latent diffusion (SLD). Specifically, to measure the inappropriate degeneration due to unfiltered and imbalanced training sets, we establish a novel image generation test bed-inappropriate image prompts (I2P)-containing dedicated, real-world image-to-text prompts covering concepts such as nudity and violence. As our exhaustive empirical evaluation demonstrates, the introduced SLD removes and suppresses inappropriate image parts during the diffusion process, with no additional training required and no adverse effect on overall image quality or text alignment.

Controlled text perturbation is useful for evaluating and improving model generalizability. However, current techniques rely on training a model for every target perturbation, which is expensive and hard to generalize. We present Tailor, a semantically-controlled text generation system. Tailor builds on a pretrained seq2seq model and produces textual outputs conditioned on control codes derived from semantic representations. We craft a set of operations to modify the control codes, which in turn steer generation towards targeted attributes. These operations can be further composed into higher-level ones, allowing for flexible perturbation strategies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these perturbations in multiple applications. First, we use Tailor to automatically create high-quality contrast sets for four distinct natural language processing (NLP) tasks. These contrast sets contain fewer spurious artifacts and are complementary to manually annotated ones in their lexical diversity. Second, we show that Tailor perturbations can improve model generalization through data augmentation. Perturbing just 2% of training data leads to a 5.8-point gain on an NLI challenge set measuring reliance on syntactic heuristics.

To interact with humans in the world, agents need to understand the diverse types of language that people use, relate them to the visual world, and act based on them. While current agents learn to execute simple language instructions from task rewards, we aim to build agents that leverage diverse language that conveys general knowledge, describes the state of the world, provides interactive feedback, and more. Our key idea is that language helps agents predict the future: what will be observed, how the world will behave, and which situations will be rewarded. This perspective unifies language understanding with future prediction as a powerful self-supervised learning objective. We present Dynalang, an agent that learns a multimodal world model that predicts future text and image representations and learns to act from imagined model rollouts. Unlike traditional agents that use language only to predict actions, Dynalang acquires rich language understanding by using past language also to predict future language, video, and rewards. In addition to learning from online interaction in an environment, Dynalang can be pretrained on datasets of text, video, or both without actions or rewards. From using language hints in grid worlds to navigating photorealistic scans of homes, Dynalang utilizes diverse types of language to improve task performance, including environment descriptions, game rules, and instructions.

Despite their impressive performance on complex tasks, current language models (LMs) typically operate in a vacuum: Each input query is processed separately, without retaining insights from previous attempts. Here, we present Dynamic Cheatsheet (DC), a lightweight framework that endows a black-box LM with a persistent, evolving memory. Rather than repeatedly re-discovering or re-committing the same solutions and mistakes, DC enables models to store and reuse accumulated strategies, code snippets, and general problem-solving insights at inference time. This test-time learning enhances performance substantially across a range of tasks without needing explicit ground-truth labels or human feedback. Leveraging DC, Claude 3.5 Sonnet's accuracy more than doubled on AIME math exams once it began retaining algebraic insights across questions. Similarly, GPT-4o's success rate on Game of 24 increased from 10% to 99% after the model discovered and reused a Python-based solution. In tasks prone to arithmetic mistakes, such as balancing equations, DC enabled GPT-4o and Claude to reach near-perfect accuracy by recalling previously validated code, whereas their baselines stagnated around 50%. Beyond arithmetic challenges, DC yields notable accuracy gains on knowledge-demanding tasks. Claude achieved a 9% improvement in GPQA-Diamond and an 8% boost on MMLU-Pro problems. Crucially, DC's memory is self-curated, focusing on concise, transferable snippets rather than entire transcript. Unlike finetuning or static retrieval methods, DC adapts LMs' problem-solving skills on the fly, without modifying their underlying parameters. Overall, our findings present DC as a promising approach for augmenting LMs with persistent memory, bridging the divide between isolated inference events and the cumulative, experience-driven learning characteristic of human cognition.

Activation steering methods were shown to be effective in conditioning language model generation by additively intervening over models' intermediate representations. However, the evaluation of these techniques has so far been limited to single conditioning properties and synthetic settings. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of various activation steering strategies, highlighting the property-dependent nature of optimal parameters to ensure a robust effect throughout generation. To address this issue, we propose Dynamic Activation Composition, an information-theoretic approach to modulate the steering intensity of one or more properties throughout generation. Our experiments on multi-property steering show that our method successfully maintains high conditioning while minimizing the impact of conditioning on generation fluency.

We introduce an Extended Textual Conditioning space in text-to-image models, referred to as P+. This space consists of multiple textual conditions, derived from per-layer prompts, each corresponding to a layer of the denoising U-net of the diffusion model. We show that the extended space provides greater disentangling and control over image synthesis. We further introduce Extended Textual Inversion (XTI), where the images are inverted into P+, and represented by per-layer tokens. We show that XTI is more expressive and precise, and converges faster than the original Textual Inversion (TI) space. The extended inversion method does not involve any noticeable trade-off between reconstruction and editability and induces more regular inversions. We conduct a series of extensive experiments to analyze and understand the properties of the new space, and to showcase the effectiveness of our method for personalizing text-to-image models. Furthermore, we utilize the unique properties of this space to achieve previously unattainable results in object-style mixing using text-to-image models. Project page: https://prompt-plus.github.io

While neural language models often perform surprisingly well on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, their strengths and limitations remain poorly understood. Controlled synthetic tasks are thus an increasingly important resource for diagnosing model behavior. In this work we focus on story understanding, a core competency for NLU systems. However, the main synthetic resource for story understanding, the bAbI benchmark, lacks such a systematic mechanism for controllable task generation. We develop Dyna-bAbI, a dynamic framework providing fine-grained control over task generation in bAbI. We demonstrate our ideas by constructing three new tasks requiring compositional generalization, an important evaluation setting absent from the original benchmark. We tested both special-purpose models developed for bAbI as well as state-of-the-art pre-trained methods, and found that while both approaches solve the original tasks (>99% accuracy), neither approach succeeded in the compositional generalization setting, indicating the limitations of the original training data. We explored ways to augment the original data, and found that though diversifying training data was far more useful than simply increasing dataset size, it was still insufficient for driving robust compositional generalization (with <70% accuracy for complex compositions). Our results underscore the importance of highly controllable task generators for creating robust NLU systems through a virtuous cycle of model and data development.

Two major sources of training data exist for post-training modern language models: online (model-generated rollouts) data, and offline (human or other-model demonstrations) data. These two types of data are typically used by approaches like Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), respectively. In this paper, we show that these approaches are not in contradiction, but are instances of a single optimization process. We derive a Unified Policy Gradient Estimator, and present the calculations of a wide spectrum of post-training approaches as the gradient of a common objective under different data distribution assumptions and various bias-variance tradeoffs. The gradient estimator is constructed with four interchangeable parts: stabilization mask, reference policy denominator, advantage estimate, and likelihood gradient. Motivated by our theoretical findings, we propose Hybrid Post-Training (HPT), an algorithm that dynamically selects different training signals. HPT is designed to yield both effective exploitation of demonstration and stable exploration without sacrificing learned reasoning patterns. We provide extensive experiments and ablation studies to verify the effectiveness of our unified theoretical framework and HPT. Across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks and two out-of-distribution suites, HPT consistently surpasses strong baselines across models of varying scales and families.

This paper presents Dynamic Context Prompting/Programming (DCP/P), a novel framework for interacting with LLMs to generate graph-based content with a dynamic context window history. While there is an existing study utilizing LLMs to generate a visual novel game, the previous study involved a manual process of output extraction and did not provide flexibility in generating a longer, coherent story. We evaluate DCP/P against our baseline, which does not provide context history to an LLM and only relies on the initial story data. Through objective evaluation, we show that simply providing the LLM with a summary leads to a subpar story compared to additionally providing the LLM with the proper context of the story. We also provide an extensive qualitative analysis and discussion. We qualitatively examine the quality of the objectively best-performing generated game from each approach. In addition, we examine biases in word choices and word sentiment of the generated content. We find a consistent observation with previous studies that LLMs are biased towards certain words, even with a different LLM family. Finally, we provide a comprehensive discussion on opportunities for future studies.

In a controllable text generation dataset, there exist unannotated attributes that could provide irrelevant learning signals to models that use it for training and thus degrade their performance. We propose focused prefix tuning(FPT) to mitigate the problem and to enable the control to focus on the desired attribute. Experimental results show that FPT can achieve better control accuracy and text fluency than baseline models in single-attribute control tasks. In multi-attribute control tasks, FPT achieves comparable control accuracy with the state-of-the-art approach while keeping the flexibility to control new attributes without retraining existing models.

Recent years have seen remarkable progress of text generation in different contexts, such as the most common setting of generating text from scratch, and the emerging paradigm of retrieval-and-rewriting. Text infilling, which fills missing text portions of a sentence or paragraph, is also of numerous use in real life, yet is under-explored. Previous work has focused on restricted settings by either assuming single word per missing portion or limiting to a single missing portion to the end of the text. This paper studies the general task of text infilling, where the input text can have an arbitrary number of portions to be filled, each of which may require an arbitrary unknown number of tokens. We study various approaches for the task, including a self-attention model with segment-aware position encoding and bidirectional context modeling. We create extensive supervised data by masking out text with varying strategies. Experiments show the self-attention model greatly outperforms others, creating a strong baseline for future research.

Text-conditioned human motion generation, which allows for user interaction through natural language, has become increasingly popular. Existing methods typically generate short, isolated motions based on a single input sentence. However, human motions are continuous and can extend over long periods, carrying rich semantics. Creating long, complex motions that precisely respond to streams of text descriptions, particularly in an online and real-time setting, remains a significant challenge. Furthermore, incorporating spatial constraints into text-conditioned motion generation presents additional challenges, as it requires aligning the motion semantics specified by text descriptions with geometric information, such as goal locations and 3D scene geometry. To address these limitations, we propose DartControl, in short DART, a Diffusion-based Autoregressive motion primitive model for Real-time Text-driven motion control. Our model effectively learns a compact motion primitive space jointly conditioned on motion history and text inputs using latent diffusion models. By autoregressively generating motion primitives based on the preceding history and current text input, DART enables real-time, sequential motion generation driven by natural language descriptions. Additionally, the learned motion primitive space allows for precise spatial motion control, which we formulate either as a latent noise optimization problem or as a Markov decision process addressed through reinforcement learning. We present effective algorithms for both approaches, demonstrating our model's versatility and superior performance in various motion synthesis tasks. Experiments show our method outperforms existing baselines in motion realism, efficiency, and controllability. Video results are available on the project page: https://zkf1997.github.io/DART/.

Conditional Text Generation has drawn much attention as a topic of Natural Language Generation (NLG) which provides the possibility for humans to control the properties of generated contents. Current conditional generation models cannot handle emerging conditions due to their joint end-to-end learning fashion. When a new condition added, these techniques require full retraining. In this paper, we present a new framework named Pre-train and Plug-in Variational Auto-Encoder (PPVAE) towards flexible conditional text generation. PPVAE decouples the text generation module from the condition representation module to allow "one-to-many" conditional generation. When a fresh condition emerges, only a lightweight network needs to be trained and works as a plug-in for PPVAE, which is efficient and desirable for real-world applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of PPVAE against the existing alternatives with better conditionality and diversity but less training effort.

Algorithms for text-generation in dialogue can be misguided. For example, in task-oriented settings, reinforcement learning that optimizes only task-success can lead to abysmal lexical diversity. We hypothesize this is due to poor theoretical understanding of the objectives in text-generation and their relation to the learning process (i.e., model training). To this end, we propose a new theoretical framework for learning to generate text in dialogue. Compared to existing theories of learning, our framework allows for analysis of the multi-faceted goals inherent to text-generation. We use our framework to develop theoretical guarantees for learners that adapt to unseen data. As an example, we apply our theory to study data-shift within a cooperative learning algorithm proposed for the GuessWhat?! visual dialogue game. From this insight, we propose a new algorithm, and empirically, we demonstrate our proposal improves both task-success and human-likeness of the generated text. Finally, we show statistics from our theory are empirically predictive of multiple qualities of the generated dialogue, suggesting our theory is useful for model-selection when human evaluations are not available.

Traditional benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) typically rely on static evaluations through storytelling or opinion expression, which fail to capture the dynamic requirements of real-time information processing in contemporary applications. To address this limitation, we present DynamicBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the proficiency of LLMs in storing and processing up-to-the-minute data. DynamicBench utilizes a dual-path retrieval pipeline, integrating web searches with local report databases. It necessitates domain-specific knowledge, ensuring accurate responses report generation within specialized fields. By evaluating models in scenarios that either provide or withhold external documents, DynamicBench effectively measures their capability to independently process recent information or leverage contextual enhancements. Additionally, we introduce an advanced report generation system adept at managing dynamic information synthesis. Our experimental results confirm the efficacy of our approach, with our method achieving state-of-the-art performance, surpassing GPT4o in document-free and document-assisted scenarios by 7.0% and 5.8%, respectively. The code and data will be made publicly available.

The decoding algorithm is critical for open-ended text generation, transforming latent representations into coherent and meaningful outputs. This paper investigates the self-reinforcement effect in text generation and the effectiveness of a repetition penalty to mitigate it. However, determining the optimal repetition penalty value is challenging. To tackle this, we propose a forgetting mechanism that disregards distant tokens, reducing the burden of penalty selection. In addition, we introduce a length penalty to address overly short sentences caused by excessive penalties. Our penalty decoding approach incorporating three strategies helps resolve issues with sampling methods deviating from factual information. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in generating high-quality sentences resembling human output.

LLMs are often trained with RL from human or AI feedback, yet such methods typically compress nuanced feedback into scalar rewards, discarding much of their richness and inducing scale imbalance. We propose treating verbal feedback as a conditioning signal. Inspired by language priors in text-to-image generation, which enable novel outputs from unseen prompts, we introduce the feedback-conditional policy (FCP). FCP learns directly from response-feedback pairs, approximating the feedback-conditional posterior through maximum likelihood training on offline data. We further develop an online bootstrapping stage where the policy generates under positive conditions and receives fresh feedback to refine itself. This reframes feedback-driven learning as conditional generation rather than reward optimization, offering a more expressive way for LLMs to directly learn from verbal feedback. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/feedback-conditional-policy.

This paper surveys and organizes research works in a new paradigm in natural language processing, which we dub "prompt-based learning". Unlike traditional supervised learning, which trains a model to take in an input x and predict an output y as P(y|x), prompt-based learning is based on language models that model the probability of text directly. To use these models to perform prediction tasks, the original input x is modified using a template into a textual string prompt x' that has some unfilled slots, and then the language model is used to probabilistically fill the unfilled information to obtain a final string x, from which the final output y can be derived. This framework is powerful and attractive for a number of reasons: it allows the language model to be pre-trained on massive amounts of raw text, and by defining a new prompting function the model is able to perform few-shot or even zero-shot learning, adapting to new scenarios with few or no labeled data. In this paper we introduce the basics of this promising paradigm, describe a unified set of mathematical notations that can cover a wide variety of existing work, and organize existing work along several dimensions, e.g.the choice of pre-trained models, prompts, and tuning strategies. To make the field more accessible to interested beginners, we not only make a systematic review of existing works and a highly structured typology of prompt-based concepts, but also release other resources, e.g., a website http://pretrain.nlpedia.ai/ including constantly-updated survey, and paperlist.

Existing text simplification or paraphrase datasets mainly focus on sentence-level text generation in a general domain. These datasets are typically developed without using domain knowledge. In this paper, we release a novel dataset, VTechAGP, which is the first academic-to-general-audience text paraphrase dataset consisting of 4,938 document-level these and dissertation academic and general-audience abstract pairs from 8 colleges authored over 25 years. We also propose a novel dynamic soft prompt generative language model, DSPT5. For training, we leverage a contrastive-generative loss function to learn the keyword vectors in the dynamic prompt. For inference, we adopt a crowd-sampling decoding strategy at both semantic and structural levels to further select the best output candidate. We evaluate DSPT5 and various state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) from multiple perspectives. Results demonstrate that the SOTA LLMs does not provide satisfactory outcomes, while the lightweight DSPT5 can achieve competitive results. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to build a benchmark dataset and solutions for academic-to-general-audience text paraphrase dataset.

This open access book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in research and applications of Foundation Models and is intended for readers familiar with basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) concepts. Over the recent years, a revolutionary new paradigm has been developed for training models for NLP. These models are first pre-trained on large collections of text documents to acquire general syntactic knowledge and semantic information. Then, they are fine-tuned for specific tasks, which they can often solve with superhuman accuracy. When the models are large enough, they can be instructed by prompts to solve new tasks without any fine-tuning. Moreover, they can be applied to a wide range of different media and problem domains, ranging from image and video processing to robot control learning. Because they provide a blueprint for solving many tasks in artificial intelligence, they have been called Foundation Models. After a brief introduction to basic NLP models the main pre-trained language models BERT, GPT and sequence-to-sequence transformer are described, as well as the concepts of self-attention and context-sensitive embedding. Then, different approaches to improving these models are discussed, such as expanding the pre-training criteria, increasing the length of input texts, or including extra knowledge. An overview of the best-performing models for about twenty application areas is then presented, e.g., question answering, translation, story generation, dialog systems, generating images from text, etc. For each application area, the strengths and weaknesses of current models are discussed, and an outlook on further developments is given. In addition, links are provided to freely available program code. A concluding chapter summarizes the economic opportunities, mitigation of risks, and potential developments of AI.

Large Language Models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various language tasks but may produce content that misaligns with human expectations, raising ethical and legal concerns. Therefore, it is important to explore the limitations and implement restrictions on the models to ensure safety and compliance, with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) being the primary method. Due to challenges in stability and scalability with the RLHF stages, researchers are exploring alternative methods to achieve effects comparable to those of RLHF. However, these methods often depend on large high-quality datasets and inefficiently utilize generated data. To deal with this problem, we propose PSLE, i.e., Progressively Selective Label Enhancement for Language Model Alignment, a framework that fully utilizes all generated data by guiding the model with principles to align outputs with human expectations. Using a dynamically updated threshold, our approach ensures efficient data utilization by incorporating all generated responses and weighting them based on their corresponding reward scores. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PSLE compared to existing language model alignment methods.

Recent research on dialogue state tracking (DST) focuses on methods that allow few- and zero-shot transfer to new domains or schemas. However, performance gains heavily depend on aggressive data augmentation and fine-tuning of ever larger language model based architectures. In contrast, general purpose language models, trained on large amounts of diverse data, hold the promise of solving any kind of task without task-specific training. We present preliminary experimental results on the ChatGPT research preview, showing that ChatGPT achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot DST. Despite our findings, we argue that properties inherent to general purpose models limit their ability to replace specialized systems. We further theorize that the in-context learning capabilities of such models will likely become powerful tools to support the development of dedicated and dynamic dialogue state trackers.

Task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems are designed to help users achieve specific goals through natural language interaction. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved linguistic fluency and contextual understanding, building effective and emotionally intelligent ToD systems remains a complex challenge. Effective ToD systems must optimise for task success, emotional understanding and responsiveness, and precise information conveyance, all within inherently noisy and ambiguous conversational environments. In this work, we investigate architectural, representational, optimisational as well as emotional considerations of ToD systems. We set up systems covering these design considerations with a challenging evaluation environment composed of a natural-language user simulator coupled with an imperfect natural language understanding module. We propose LUSTER, an LLM-based Unified System for Task-oriented dialogue with End-to-end Reinforcement learning with both short-term (user sentiment) and long-term (task success) rewards. Our findings demonstrate that combining LLM capability with structured reward modelling leads to more resilient and emotionally responsive ToD systems, offering a practical path forward for next-generation conversational agents.

Recently, multi-aspect controllable text generation that controls the generated text in multiple aspects (e.g., sentiment, topic, and keywords) has attracted increasing attention. Although methods based on parameter efficient tuning like prefix-tuning could achieve multi-aspect controlling in a plug-and-play way, the mutual interference of multiple prefixes leads to significant degeneration of constraints and limits their extensibility to training-time unseen aspect combinations. In this work, we provide a theoretical lower bound for the interference and empirically found that the interference grows with the number of layers where prefixes are inserted. Based on these analyses, we propose using trainable gates to normalize the intervention of prefixes to restrain the growing interference. As a result, controlling training-time unseen combinations of aspects can be realized by simply concatenating corresponding plugins such that new constraints can be extended at a lower cost. In addition, we propose a unified way to process both categorical and free-form constraints. Experiments on text generation and machine translation demonstrate the superiority of our approach over baselines on constraint accuracy, text quality, and extensibility.

While large-scale neural language models, such as GPT2 and BART, have achieved impressive results on various text generation tasks, they tend to get stuck in undesirable sentence-level loops with maximization-based decoding algorithms (e.g., greedy search). This phenomenon is counter-intuitive since there are few consecutive sentence-level repetitions in human corpora (e.g., 0.02\% in Wikitext-103). To investigate the underlying reasons for generating consecutive sentence-level repetitions, we study the relationship between the probabilities of the repetitive tokens and their previous repetitions in the context. Through our quantitative experiments, we find that 1) Language models have a preference to repeat the previous sentence; 2) The sentence-level repetitions have a self-reinforcement effect: the more times a sentence is repeated in the context, the higher the probability of continuing to generate that sentence; 3) The sentences with higher initial probabilities usually have a stronger self-reinforcement effect. Motivated by our findings, we propose a simple and effective training method DITTO (PseuDo-RepetITion PenalizaTiOn), where the model learns to penalize probabilities of sentence-level repetitions from pseudo repetitive data. Although our method is motivated by mitigating repetitions, experiments show that DITTO not only mitigates the repetition issue without sacrificing perplexity, but also achieves better generation quality. Extensive experiments on open-ended text generation (Wikitext-103) and text summarization (CNN/DailyMail) demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of our method.

Pretrained Transformer-based language models (LMs) display remarkable natural language generation capabilities. With their immense potential, controlling text generation of such LMs is getting attention. While there are studies that seek to control high-level attributes (such as sentiment and topic) of generated text, there is still a lack of more precise control over its content at the word- and phrase-level. Here, we propose Content-Conditioner (CoCon) to control an LM's output text with a content input, at a fine-grained level. In our self-supervised approach, the CoCon block learns to help the LM complete a partially-observed text sequence by conditioning with content inputs that are withheld from the LM. Through experiments, we show that CoCon can naturally incorporate target content into generated texts and control high-level text attributes in a zero-shot manner.

The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their potential to accelerate scientific discovery, particularly in automating the process of research ideation. LLM-based systems have shown promise in generating hypotheses and research ideas. However, current approaches predominantly rely on prompting-based pre-trained models, limiting their ability to optimize generated content effectively. Moreover, they also lack the capability to deal with the complex interdependence and inherent restrictions among novelty, feasibility, and effectiveness, which remains challenging due to the inherent trade-offs among these dimensions, such as the innovation-feasibility conflict. To address these limitations, we for the first time propose fine-tuning LLMs to be better idea proposers and introduce a novel framework that employs a two-stage approach combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and controllable Reinforcement Learning (RL). In the SFT stage, the model learns foundational patterns from pairs of research papers and follow-up ideas. In the RL stage, multi-dimensional reward modeling, guided by fine-grained feedback, evaluates and optimizes the generated ideas across key metrics. Dimensional controllers enable dynamic adjustment of generation, while a sentence-level decoder ensures context-aware emphasis during inference. Our framework provides a balanced approach to research ideation, achieving high-quality outcomes by dynamically navigating the trade-offs among novelty, feasibility, and effectiveness.

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for generation, obtaining strong performance in various domains with continuous-valued inputs. Despite the promises of fully non-autoregressive text generation, applying diffusion models to natural language remains challenging due to its discrete nature. In this work, we propose Text-to-text Self-conditioned Simplex Diffusion (TESS), a text diffusion model that is fully non-autoregressive, employs a new form of self-conditioning, and applies the diffusion process on the logit simplex space rather than the typical learned embedding space. Through extensive experiments on natural language understanding and generation tasks including summarization, text simplification, paraphrase generation, and question generation, we demonstrate that TESS outperforms state-of-the-art non-autoregressive models and is competitive with pretrained autoregressive sequence-to-sequence models.

We present a simple yet theoretically motivated improvement to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for the Large Language Model (LLM), addressing its limited generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). Through mathematical analysis, we reveal that standard SFT gradients implicitly encode a problematic reward structure that may severely restrict the generalization capabilities of model. To rectify this, we propose Dynamic Fine-Tuning (DFT), stabilizing gradient updates for each token by dynamically rescaling the objective function with the probability of this token. Remarkably, this single-line code change significantly outperforms standard SFT across multiple challenging benchmarks and base models, demonstrating greatly improved generalization. Additionally, our approach shows competitive results in offline RL settings, offering an effective yet simpler alternative. This work bridges theoretical insight and practical solutions, substantially advancing SFT performance. The code will be available at https://github.com/yongliang-wu/DFT.

We present Speakerly, a new real-time voice-based writing assistance system that helps users with text composition across various use cases such as emails, instant messages, and notes. The user can interact with the system through instructions or dictation, and the system generates a well-formatted and coherent document. We describe the system architecture and detail how we address the various challenges while building and deploying such a system at scale. More specifically, our system uses a combination of small, task-specific models as well as pre-trained language models for fast and effective text composition while supporting a variety of input modes for better usability.

Diffusion models have garnered considerable interest in the field of text generation. Several studies have explored text diffusion models with different structures and applied them to various tasks, including named entity recognition and summarization. However, there exists a notable disparity between the "easy-first" text generation process of current diffusion models and the "keyword-first" natural text generation process of humans, which has received limited attention. To bridge this gap, we propose InfoDiffusion, a non-autoregressive text diffusion model. Our approach introduces a "keyinfo-first" generation strategy and incorporates a noise schedule based on the amount of text information. In addition, InfoDiffusion combines self-conditioning with a newly proposed partially noising model structure. Experimental results show that InfoDiffusion outperforms the baseline model in terms of generation quality and diversity, as well as exhibiting higher sampling efficiency.

Neural text decoding is important for generating high-quality texts using language models. To generate high-quality text, popular decoding algorithms like top-k, top-p (nucleus), and temperature-based sampling truncate or distort the unreliable low probability tail of the language model. Though these methods generate high-quality text after parameter tuning, they are ad hoc. Not much is known about the control they provide over the statistics of the output, which is important since recent reports show text quality is highest for a specific range of likelihoods. Here, first we provide a theoretical analysis of perplexity in top-k, top-p, and temperature sampling, finding that cross-entropy behaves approximately linearly as a function of p in top-p sampling whereas it is a nonlinear function of k in top-k sampling, under Zipfian statistics. We use this analysis to design a feedback-based adaptive top-k text decoding algorithm called mirostat that generates text (of any length) with a predetermined value of perplexity, and thereby high-quality text without any tuning. Experiments show that for low values of k and p in top-k and top-p sampling, perplexity drops significantly with generated text length, which is also correlated with excessive repetitions in the text (the boredom trap). On the other hand, for large values of k and p, we find that perplexity increases with generated text length, which is correlated with incoherence in the text (confusion trap). Mirostat avoids both traps: experiments show that cross-entropy has a near-linear relation with repetition in generated text. This relation is almost independent of the sampling method but slightly dependent on the model used. Hence, for a given language model, control over perplexity also gives control over repetitions. Experiments with human raters for fluency, coherence, and quality further verify our findings.

Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shifted from pre-training scaling to post-training and test-time scaling. Across these developments, a key unified paradigm has arisen: Learning from Rewards, where reward signals act as the guiding stars to steer LLM behavior. It has underpinned a wide range of prevalent techniques, such as reinforcement learning (in RLHF, DPO, and GRPO), reward-guided decoding, and post-hoc correction. Crucially, this paradigm enables the transition from passive learning from static data to active learning from dynamic feedback. This endows LLMs with aligned preferences and deep reasoning capabilities. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview of the paradigm of learning from rewards. We categorize and analyze the strategies under this paradigm across training, inference, and post-inference stages. We further discuss the benchmarks for reward models and the primary applications. Finally we highlight the challenges and future directions. We maintain a paper collection at https://github.com/bobxwu/learning-from-rewards-llm-papers.

The task of scene text editing is to modify or add texts on images while maintaining the fidelity of newly generated text and visual coherence with the background. Recent works based on latent diffusion models (LDM) show improved text editing results, yet still face challenges and often generate inaccurate or unrecognizable characters, especially for non-Latin ones (\eg, Chinese), which have complex glyph structures. To address these issues, we present FLUX-Text, a simple and advanced multilingual scene text editing framework based on FLUX-Fill. Specifically, we carefully investigate glyph conditioning, considering both visual and textual modalities. To retain the original generative capabilities of FLUX-Fill while enhancing its understanding and generation of glyphs, we propose lightweight glyph and text embedding modules. Owning to the lightweight design, FLUX-Text is trained only with 100K training examples compared to current popular methods trained with 2.9M ones. With no bells and whistles, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on text editing tasks. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on the public datasets demonstrate that our method surpasses previous works in text fidelity.

In Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated high text generation quality. However, in real-world applications, LLMs must meet increasingly complex requirements. Beyond avoiding misleading or inappropriate content, LLMs are also expected to cater to specific user needs, such as imitating particular writing styles or generating text with poetic richness. These varied demands have driven the development of Controllable Text Generation (CTG) techniques, which ensure that outputs adhere to predefined control conditions--such as safety, sentiment, thematic consistency, and linguistic style--while maintaining high standards of helpfulness, fluency, and diversity. This paper systematically reviews the latest advancements in CTG for LLMs, offering a comprehensive definition of its core concepts and clarifying the requirements for control conditions and text quality. We categorize CTG tasks into two primary types: content control and attribute control. The key methods are discussed, including model retraining, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, prompt engineering, latent space manipulation, and decoding-time intervention. We analyze each method's characteristics, advantages, and limitations, providing nuanced insights for achieving generation control. Additionally, we review CTG evaluation methods, summarize its applications across domains, and address key challenges in current research, including reduced fluency and practicality. We also propose several appeals, such as placing greater emphasis on real-world applications in future research. This paper aims to offer valuable guidance to researchers and developers in the field. Our reference list and Chinese version are open-sourced at https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/CTGSurvey.

We present a dynamic model in which the weights are conditioned on an input sample x and are learned to match those that would be obtained by finetuning a base model on x and its label y. This mapping between an input sample and network weights is approximated by a denoising diffusion model. The diffusion model we employ focuses on modifying a single layer of the base model and is conditioned on the input, activations, and output of this layer. Since the diffusion model is stochastic in nature, multiple initializations generate different networks, forming an ensemble, which leads to further improvements. Our experiments demonstrate the wide applicability of the method for image classification, 3D reconstruction, tabular data, speech separation, and natural language processing. Our code is available at https://github.com/ShaharLutatiPersonal/OCD

Diffusion models have demonstrated exceptional capability in generating high-quality images, videos, and audio. Due to their adaptiveness in iterative refinement, they provide a strong potential for achieving better non-autoregressive sequence generation. However, existing text diffusion models still fall short in their performance due to a challenge in handling the discreteness of language. This paper thoroughly analyzes text diffusion models and uncovers two significant limitations: degradation of self-conditioning during training and misalignment between training and sampling. Motivated by our findings, we propose a novel Text Diffusion model called TREC, which mitigates the degradation with Reinforced Conditioning and the misalignment by Time-Aware Variance Scaling. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the competitiveness of TREC against autoregressive, non-autoregressive, and diffusion baselines. Moreover, qualitative analysis shows its advanced ability to fully utilize the diffusion process in refining samples.

Although the vision-and-language pretraining (VLP) equipped cross-modal image-text retrieval (ITR) has achieved remarkable progress in the past two years, it suffers from a major drawback: the ever-increasing size of VLP models restricts its deployment to real-world search scenarios (where the high latency is unacceptable). To alleviate this problem, we present a novel plug-in dynamic contrastive distillation (DCD) framework to compress the large VLP models for the ITR task. Technically, we face the following two challenges: 1) the typical uni-modal metric learning approach is difficult to directly apply to the cross-modal tasks, due to the limited GPU memory to optimize too many negative samples during handling cross-modal fusion features. 2) it is inefficient to static optimize the student network from different hard samples, which have different effects on distillation learning and student network optimization. We try to overcome these challenges from two points. First, to achieve multi-modal contrastive learning, and balance the training costs and effects, we propose to use a teacher network to estimate the difficult samples for students, making the students absorb the powerful knowledge from pre-trained teachers, and master the knowledge from hard samples. Second, to dynamic learn from hard sample pairs, we propose dynamic distillation to dynamically learn samples of different difficulties, from the perspective of better balancing the difficulty of knowledge and students' self-learning ability. We successfully apply our proposed DCD strategy to two state-of-the-art vision-language pretrained models, i.e. ViLT and METER. Extensive experiments on MS-COCO and Flickr30K benchmarks show the effectiveness and efficiency of our DCD framework. Encouragingly, we can speed up the inference at least 129times compared to the existing ITR models.

Plug-and-play language models (PPLMs) enable topic-conditioned natural language generation by pairing large pre-trained generators with attribute models used to steer the predicted token distribution towards the selected topic. Despite their computational efficiency, PPLMs require large amounts of labeled texts to effectively balance generation fluency and proper conditioning, making them unsuitable for low-resource settings. We present ETC-NLG, an approach leveraging topic modeling annotations to enable fully-unsupervised End-to-end Topic-Conditioned Natural Language Generation over emergent topics in unlabeled document collections. We first test the effectiveness of our approach in a low-resource setting for Italian, evaluating the conditioning for both topic models and gold annotations. We then perform a comparative evaluation of ETC-NLG for Italian and English using a parallel corpus. Finally, we propose an automatic approach to estimate the effectiveness of conditioning on the generated utterances.

Personalized text generation is an emerging research area that has attracted much attention in recent years. Most studies in this direction focus on a particular domain by designing bespoke features or models. In this work, we propose a general approach for personalized text generation using large language models (LLMs). Inspired by the practice of writing education, we develop a multistage and multitask framework to teach LLMs for personalized generation. In writing instruction, the task of writing from sources is often decomposed into multiple steps that involve finding, evaluating, summarizing, synthesizing, and integrating information. Analogously, our approach to personalized text generation consists of multiple stages: retrieval, ranking, summarization, synthesis, and generation. In addition, we introduce a multitask setting that helps the model improve its generation ability further, which is inspired by the observation in education that a student's reading proficiency and writing ability are often correlated. We evaluate our approach on three public datasets, each of which covers a different and representative domain. Our results show significant improvements over a variety of baselines.

Controllable text generation (CTG) aims to generate text with desired attributes, and decoding-time-based methods have shown promising performance on this task. However, in this paper, we identify the phenomenon of Attribute Collapse for the first time. It causes the fluency of generated text to rapidly decrease when the control strength exceeds a critical value, rendering the text completely unusable. This limitation hinders the effectiveness of decoding methods in achieving high levels of controllability. To address this problem, we propose a novel lightweight decoding framework named Air-Decoding. Its main idea is reconstructing the attribute distributions to balance the weights between attribute words and non-attribute words to generate more fluent text. Specifically, we train prefixes by prefix-tuning to obtain attribute distributions. Then we design a novel attribute distribution reconstruction method to balance the obtained distributions and use the reconstructed distributions to guide language models for generation, effectively avoiding the issue of Attribute Collapse. Experiments on multiple CTG tasks prove that our method achieves a new state-of-the-art control performance.

We propose a Distributional Approach for addressing Controlled Text Generation from pre-trained Language Models (LMs). This approach permits to specify, in a single formal framework, both "pointwise" and "distributional" constraints over the target LM -- to our knowledge, the first model with such generality -- while minimizing KL divergence from the initial LM distribution. The optimal target distribution is then uniquely determined as an explicit EBM (Energy-Based Model) representation. From that optimal representation we then train a target controlled Autoregressive LM through an adaptive distributional variant of Policy Gradient. We conduct a first set of experiments over pointwise constraints showing the advantages of our approach over a set of baselines, in terms of obtaining a controlled LM balancing constraint satisfaction with divergence from the initial LM. We then perform experiments over distributional constraints, a unique feature of our approach, demonstrating its potential as a remedy to the problem of Bias in Language Models. Through an ablation study, we show the effectiveness of our adaptive technique for obtaining faster convergence. (Code available at https://github.com/naver/gdc)

While large language models have proven effective in a huge range of downstream applications, they often generate text that is problematic or lacks a desired attribute. In this paper, we introduce Reward-Augmented Decoding (RAD), a text generation procedure that uses a small unidirectional reward model to encourage a language model to generate text that has certain properties. Specifically, RAD uses the reward model to score generations as they are produced and rescales sampling probabilities to favor high-reward tokens. By using a unidirectional reward model, RAD can cache activations from prior generation steps to decrease computational overhead. Through experiments on generating non-toxic and sentiment-controlled text, we demonstrate that RAD performs best among methods that change only the generation procedure and matches the performance of state-of-the-art methods that involve re-training the language model. We further validate that RAD is effective on very large language models while incurring a minimal computational overhead.

Large-scale text-to-image generative models have been a ground-breaking development in generative AI, with diffusion models showing their astounding ability to synthesize convincing images following an input text prompt. The goal of image editing research is to give users control over the generated images by modifying the text prompt. Current image editing techniques are susceptible to unintended modifications of regions outside the targeted area, such as on the background or on distractor objects which have some semantic or visual relationship with the targeted object. According to our experimental findings, inaccurate cross-attention maps are at the root of this problem. Based on this observation, we propose Dynamic Prompt Learning (DPL) to force cross-attention maps to focus on correct noun words in the text prompt. By updating the dynamic tokens for nouns in the textual input with the proposed leakage repairment losses, we achieve fine-grained image editing over particular objects while preventing undesired changes to other image regions. Our method DPL, based on the publicly available Stable Diffusion, is extensively evaluated on a wide range of images, and consistently obtains superior results both quantitatively (CLIP score, Structure-Dist) and qualitatively (on user-evaluation). We show improved prompt editing results for Word-Swap, Prompt Refinement, and Attention Re-weighting, especially for complex multi-object scenes.

Personalized dialogue systems aim to endow the chatbot agent with more anthropomorphic traits for human-like interactions. Previous approaches have explored explicitly user profile modeling using text descriptions, implicit derivation of user embeddings, or utilizing handicraft prompts for ChatGPT-like models. However, textual personas are limited in describing multi-faceted attributes (e.g., language style, inner character nuances), implicit embedding suffers from personality sparsity, and handicraft prompts lack fine-grained and stable controllability. Hence, these approaches may struggle with complex personalized dialogue generation tasks that require generating controllable responses with multiple personal attributes. To this end, we propose \textsc{Miracle}, a novel personalized dialogue generation method through MultIple PeRsonal Attributes Control within Latent-Space Energy-based Models. ttributes Control within Latent-Space Energy-based Models. Specifically, our approach first disentangles complex personality into multi-faceted attributes. Subsequently, we employ a conditional variational auto-encoder to align with the dense personalized responses within a latent joint attribute space. We have also tailored a dedicated energy function and customized the ordinary differential equations sampling method to offer flexible attribute composition and precise attribute control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Miracle outperforms several strong baselines in terms of personality controllability and response generation quality. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/LZY-the-boys/MIRACLE

Large-scale language models often learn behaviors that are misaligned with user expectations. Generated text may contain offensive or toxic language, contain significant repetition, or be of a different sentiment than desired by the user. We consider the task of unlearning these misalignments by fine-tuning the language model on signals of what not to do. We introduce Quantized Reward Konditioning (Quark), an algorithm for optimizing a reward function that quantifies an (un)wanted property, while not straying too far from the original model. Quark alternates between (i) collecting samples with the current language model, (ii) sorting them into quantiles based on reward, with each quantile identified by a reward token prepended to the language model's input, and (iii) using a standard language modeling loss on samples from each quantile conditioned on its reward token, while remaining nearby the original language model via a KL-divergence penalty. By conditioning on a high-reward token at generation time, the model generates text that exhibits less of the unwanted property. For unlearning toxicity, negative sentiment, and repetition, our experiments show that Quark outperforms both strong baselines and state-of-the-art reinforcement learning methods like PPO (Schulman et al. 2017), while relying only on standard language modeling primitives.

Multimodal foundation models, such as Gemini and ChatGPT, have revolutionized human-machine interactions by seamlessly integrating various forms of data. Developing a universal spoken language model that comprehends a wide range of natural language instructions is critical for bridging communication gaps and facilitating more intuitive interactions. However, the absence of a comprehensive evaluation benchmark poses a significant challenge. We present Dynamic-SUPERB Phase-2, an open and evolving benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of instruction-based universal speech models. Building upon the first generation, this second version incorporates 125 new tasks contributed collaboratively by the global research community, expanding the benchmark to a total of 180 tasks, making it the largest benchmark for speech and audio evaluation. While the first generation of Dynamic-SUPERB was limited to classification tasks, Dynamic-SUPERB Phase-2 broadens its evaluation capabilities by introducing a wide array of novel and diverse tasks, including regression and sequence generation, across speech, music, and environmental audio. Evaluation results indicate that none of the models performed well universally. SALMONN-13B excelled in English ASR, while WavLLM demonstrated high accuracy in emotion recognition, but current models still require further innovations to handle a broader range of tasks. We will soon open-source all task data and the evaluation pipeline.

Reasoning large language models (LLMs) excel in complex tasks, which has drawn significant attention to reinforcement learning (RL) for LLMs. However, existing approaches allocate an equal number of rollouts to all questions during the RL process, which is inefficient. This inefficiency stems from the fact that training on simple questions yields limited gains, whereas more rollouts are needed for challenging questions to sample correct answers. Furthermore, while RL improves response precision, it limits the model's exploration ability, potentially resulting in a performance cap below that of the base model prior to RL. To address these issues, we propose a mechanism for dynamically allocating rollout budgets based on the difficulty of the problems, enabling more efficient RL training. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive dynamic temperature adjustment strategy to maintain the entropy at a stable level, thereby encouraging sufficient exploration. This enables LLMs to improve response precision while preserving their exploratory ability to uncover potential correct pathways. The code and data is available on: https://github.com/LiaoMengqi/E3-RL4LLMs

Modern Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) reduce the cost of customizing large language models (LLMs), yet still require a separate optimization run for every downstream dataset. We introduce Drag-and-Drop LLMs (\textit{DnD)}, a prompt-conditioned parameter generator that eliminates per-task training by mapping a handful of unlabeled task prompts directly to LoRA weight updates. A lightweight text encoder distills each prompt batch into condition embeddings, which are then transformed by a cascaded hyper-convolutional decoder into the full set of LoRA matrices. Once trained in a diverse collection of prompt-checkpoint pairs, DnD produces task-specific parameters in seconds, yielding i) up to 12,000times lower overhead than full fine-tuning, ii) average gains up to 30\% in performance over the strongest training LoRAs on unseen common-sense reasoning, math, coding, and multimodal benchmarks, and iii) robust cross-domain generalization despite never seeing the target data or labels. Our results demonstrate that prompt-conditioned parameter generation is a viable alternative to gradient-based adaptation for rapidly specializing LLMs. Our project is available at https://jerryliang24.github.io/DnD{https://jerryliang24.github.io/DnD}.

We study the pre-train + fine-tune strategy for data-to-text tasks. Our experiments indicate that text-to-text pre-training in the form of T5, enables simple, end-to-end transformer based models to outperform pipelined neural architectures tailored for data-to-text generation, as well as alternative language model based pre-training techniques such as BERT and GPT-2. Importantly, T5 pre-training leads to better generalization, as evidenced by large improvements on out-of-domain test sets. We hope our work serves as a useful baseline for future research, as transfer learning becomes ever more prevalent for data-to-text tasks.

Test-Time Scaling (TTS) enhances the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) by allocating additional computation during inference. However, existing approaches primarily rely on output-level sampling while overlooking the role of model architecture. In mainstream Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs, we observe that varying the number of activated experts yields complementary solution sets with stable accuracy, revealing a new and underexplored source of diversity. Motivated by this observation, we propose Dynamic Experts Search (DES), a TTS strategy that elevates expert activation into a controllable dimension of the search space. DES integrates two key components: (1) Dynamic MoE, which enables direct control of expert counts during inference to generate diverse reasoning trajectories without additional cost; and (2) Expert Configuration Inheritance, which preserves consistent expert counts within a reasoning path while varying them across runs, thereby balancing stability and diversity throughout the search. Extensive experiments across MoE architectures, verifiers and reasoning benchmarks (i.e., math, code and knowledge) demonstrate that DES reliably outperforms TTS baselines, enhancing accuracy and stability without additional cost. These results highlight DES as a practical and scalable form of architecture-aware TTS, illustrating how structural flexibility in modern LLMs can advance reasoning.

Diffusion-based scene text synthesis has progressed rapidly, yet existing methods commonly rely on additional visual conditioning modules and require large-scale annotated data to support multilingual generation. In this work, we revisit the necessity of complex auxiliary modules and further explore an approach that simultaneously ensures glyph accuracy and achieves high-fidelity scene integration, by leveraging diffusion models' inherent capabilities for contextual reasoning. To this end, we introduce TextFlux, a DiT-based framework that enables multilingual scene text synthesis. The advantages of TextFlux can be summarized as follows: (1) OCR-free model architecture. TextFlux eliminates the need for OCR encoders (additional visual conditioning modules) that are specifically used to extract visual text-related features. (2) Strong multilingual scalability. TextFlux is effective in low-resource multilingual settings, and achieves strong performance in newly added languages with fewer than 1,000 samples. (3) Streamlined training setup. TextFlux is trained with only 1% of the training data required by competing methods. (4) Controllable multi-line text generation. TextFlux offers flexible multi-line synthesis with precise line-level control, outperforming methods restricted to single-line or rigid layouts. Extensive experiments and visualizations demonstrate that TextFlux outperforms previous methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

Recently, video generation has attracted massive attention and yielded noticeable outcomes. Concerning the characteristics of video, multi-text conditioning incorporating sequential events is necessary for next-step video generation. In this work, we propose a novel multi-text video generation~(MTVG) by directly utilizing a pre-trained diffusion-based text-to-video~(T2V) generation model without additional fine-tuning. To generate consecutive video segments, visual consistency generated by distinct prompts is necessary with diverse variations, such as motion and content-related transitions. Our proposed MTVG includes Dynamic Noise and Last Frame Aware Inversion which reinitialize the noise latent to preserve visual coherence between videos of different prompts and prevent repetitive motion or contents. Furthermore, we present Structure Guiding Sampling to maintain the global appearance across the frames in a single video clip, where we leverage iterative latent updates across the preceding frame. Additionally, our Prompt Generator allows for arbitrary format of text conditions consisting of diverse events. As a result, our extensive experiments, including diverse transitions of descriptions, demonstrate that our proposed methods show superior generated outputs in terms of semantically coherent and temporally seamless video.Video examples are available in our project page: https://kuai-lab.github.io/mtvg-page.

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only one reward for the entire generation. This sparsity of rewards can lead to inefficient and unstable learning. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework leveraging the critique ability of LLMs to produce dense rewards throughout the learning process. Our approach incorporates a critic language model alongside the policy model. This critic is prompted with the task description, question, policy model's output, and environment's reward signal as input, and provides token or span-level dense rewards that reflect the quality of each segment of the output. We assess our approach on three text generation tasks: sentiment control, language model detoxification, and summarization. Experimental results show that incorporating artificial dense rewards in training yields consistent performance gains over the PPO baseline with holistic rewards. Furthermore, in a setting where the same model serves as both policy and critic, we demonstrate that "self-critique" rewards also boost learning efficiency.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a powerful ability for text generation. However, achieving optimal results with a given prompt or instruction can be challenging, especially for billion-sized models. Additionally, undesired behaviors such as toxicity or hallucinations can manifest. While much larger models (e.g., ChatGPT) may demonstrate strength in mitigating these issues, there is still no guarantee of complete prevention. In this work, we propose formalizing text generation as a future-constrained generation problem to minimize undesirable behaviors and enforce faithfulness to instructions. The estimation of future constraint satisfaction, accomplished using LLMs, guides the text generation process. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach across three distinct text generation tasks: keyword-constrained generation (Lin et al., 2020), toxicity reduction (Gehman et al., 2020), and factual correctness in question-answering (Gao et al., 2023).

Open-ended text generation tasks, such as dialogue generation and story completion, require models to generate a coherent continuation given limited preceding context. The open-ended nature of these tasks brings new challenges to the neural auto-regressive text generators nowadays. Despite these neural models are good at producing human-like text, it is difficult for them to arrange causalities and relations between given facts and possible ensuing events. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel two-stage method which explicitly arranges the ensuing events in open-ended text generation. Our approach can be understood as a specially-trained coarse-to-fine algorithm, where an event transition planner provides a "coarse" plot skeleton and a text generator in the second stage refines the skeleton. Experiments on two open-ended text generation tasks demonstrate that our proposed method effectively improves the quality of the generated text, especially in coherence and diversity. The code is available at: https://github.com/qtli/EventPlanforTextGen.

Text-conditioned image generation models are a prevalent use of AI image synthesis, yet intuitively controlling output guided by an artist remains challenging. Current methods require multiple images and textual prompts for each object to specify them as concepts to generate a single customized image. On the other hand, our work, \verb|DiffMorph|, introduces a novel approach that synthesizes images that mix concepts without the use of textual prompts. Our work integrates a sketch-to-image module to incorporate user sketches as input. \verb|DiffMorph| takes an initial image with conditioning artist-drawn sketches to generate a morphed image. We employ a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model and fine-tune it to reconstruct each image faithfully. We seamlessly merge images and concepts from sketches into a cohesive composition. The image generation capability of our work is demonstrated through our results and a comparison of these with prompt-based image generation.

During language model decoding, it is known that using higher temperature sampling gives more creative responses, while lower temperatures are more factually accurate. However, such models are commonly applied to general instruction following, which involves both creative and fact seeking tasks, using a single fixed temperature across all examples and tokens. In this work, we introduce Adaptive Decoding, a layer added to the model to select the sampling temperature dynamically at inference time, at either the token or example level, in order to optimize performance. To learn its parameters we introduce Latent Preference Optimization (LPO) a general approach to train discrete latent variables such as choices of temperature. Our method outperforms all fixed decoding temperatures across a range of tasks that require different temperatures, including UltraFeedback, Creative Story Writing, and GSM8K.

Finetuning pre-trained language models (LMs) enhances the models' capabilities. Prior techniques fine-tune a pre-trained LM on input-output pairs (e.g., instruction fine-tuning), or with numerical rewards that gauge the quality of its outputs (e.g., reinforcement learning from human feedback). We explore LMs' potential to learn from textual interactions (LeTI) that not only check their correctness with binary labels, but also pinpoint and explain errors in their outputs through textual feedback. Our investigation focuses on the code generation task, where the model produces code pieces in response to natural language instructions. This setting invites a natural and scalable way to acquire the textual feedback: the error messages and stack traces from code execution using a Python interpreter. LeTI iteratively fine-tunes the model, using the LM objective, on a concatenation of natural language instructions, LM-generated programs, and textual feedback, which is only provided when the generated program fails to solve the task. Prepended to this fine-tuning text, a binary reward token is used to differentiate correct and buggy solutions. On MBPP, a code generation dataset, LeTI substantially improves the performance of two base LMs of different scales. LeTI requires no ground-truth outputs for training and even outperforms a fine-tuned baseline that does. LeTI's strong performance generalizes to other datasets. Trained on MBPP, it achieves comparable or better performance than the base LMs on unseen problems in HumanEval. Furthermore, compared to binary feedback, we observe that textual feedback leads to improved generation quality and sample efficiency, achieving the same performance with fewer than half of the gradient steps. LeTI is equally applicable in natural language tasks when they can be formulated as code generation, which we empirically verified on event argument extraction.

Although reward models have been successful in improving multimodal large language models, the reward models themselves remain brutal and contain minimal information. Notably, existing reward models only mimic human annotations by assigning only one binary feedback to any text, no matter how long the text is. In the realm of multimodal language models, where models are required to process both images and texts, a naive reward model may learn implicit biases toward texts and become less grounded in images. In this paper, we propose a Token-Level Detective Reward Model (TLDR) to provide fine-grained annotations to each text token. We first introduce a perturbation-based method to generate synthetic hard negatives and their token-level labels to train TLDR models. Then we show the rich usefulness of TLDR models both in assisting off-the-shelf models to self-correct their generations, and in serving as a hallucination evaluation tool. Finally, we show that TLDR models can significantly speed up human annotation by 3 times to acquire a broader range of high-quality vision language data.

Large language models generate fluent texts and can follow natural language instructions to solve a wide range of tasks without task-specific training. Nevertheless, it is notoriously difficult to control their generation to satisfy the various constraints required by different applications. In this work, we present InstructCTG, a controlled text generation framework that incorporates different constraints by conditioning on natural language descriptions and demonstrations of the constraints. In particular, we first extract the underlying constraints of natural texts through a combination of off-the-shelf NLP tools and simple heuristics. We then verbalize the constraints into natural language instructions to form weakly supervised training data. By prepending natural language descriptions of the constraints and a few demonstrations, we fine-tune a pre-trained language model to incorporate various types of constraints. Compared to existing search-based or score-based methods, InstructCTG is more flexible to different constraint types and has a much smaller impact on the generation quality and speed because it does not modify the decoding procedure. Additionally, InstructCTG allows the model to adapt to new constraints without re-training through the use of few-shot task generalization and in-context learning abilities of instruction-tuned language models.

We present time vectors, a simple tool to customize language models to new time periods. Time vectors are created by finetuning a language model on data from a single time (e.g., a year or month), and then subtracting the weights of the original pretrained model. This vector specifies a direction in weight space that, as our experiments show, improves performance on text from that time period. Time vectors specialized to adjacent time periods appear to be positioned closer together in a manifold. Using this structure, we interpolate between time vectors to induce new models that perform better on intervening and future time periods, without any additional training. We demonstrate the consistency of our findings across different tasks, domains, model sizes, and time scales. Our results suggest that time is encoded in the weight space of finetuned models.

We present a novel approach to the problem of text style transfer. Unlike previous approaches requiring style-labeled training data, our method makes use of readily-available unlabeled text by relying on the implicit connection in style between adjacent sentences, and uses labeled data only at inference time. We adapt T5 (Raffel et al., 2020), a strong pretrained text-to-text model, to extract a style vector from text and use it to condition the decoder to perform style transfer. As our label-free training results in a style vector space encoding many facets of style, we recast transfers as "targeted restyling" vector operations that adjust specific attributes of the input while preserving others. We demonstrate that training on unlabeled Amazon reviews data results in a model that is competitive on sentiment transfer, even compared to models trained fully on labeled data. Furthermore, applying our novel method to a diverse corpus of unlabeled web text results in a single model capable of transferring along multiple dimensions of style (dialect, emotiveness, formality, politeness, sentiment) despite no additional training and using only a handful of exemplars at inference time.

Autoregressive decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) is inherently sequential, creating a latency bottleneck that scales linearly with output length. While ``Decomposition-and-Fill'' methods like Skeleton-of-Thought attempt to parallelize generation via external orchestration, they suffer from coherence drift due to the lack of cross-stream communication. In this work, we introduce the Parallel Decoder Transformer (PDT), a parameter-efficient architecture that embeds coordination primitives directly into the inference process of a frozen pre-trained model. Instead of retraining the base model, PDT injects lightweight Speculative Note Conditioning (SNC) adapters that allow parallel decoding streams to synchronize via a shared, dynamic latent space. We formulate coordination as a speculative consensus problem, where sibling streams broadcast semantic ``notes'' to a global bus, gated by a learned verification head. We validate our approach on a 50,000-step curriculum using a frozen 20B-parameter backbone. Our results demonstrate that PDT achieves effective self-correction, reaching 77.8\% precision in coverage prediction and recovering approximate serial semantics without modifying the trunk weights. This establishes PDT as a scalable, efficient alternative to full model fine-tuning for structured parallel generation.

Language models (LMs) often exhibit undesirable text generation behaviors, including generating false, toxic, or irrelevant outputs. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) - where human preference judgments on LM outputs are transformed into a learning signal - has recently shown promise in addressing these issues. However, such holistic feedback conveys limited information on long text outputs; it does not indicate which aspects of the outputs influenced user preference; e.g., which parts contain what type(s) of errors. In this paper, we use fine-grained human feedback (e.g., which sentence is false, which sub-sentence is irrelevant) as an explicit training signal. We introduce Fine-Grained RLHF, a framework that enables training and learning from reward functions that are fine-grained in two respects: (1) density, providing a reward after every segment (e.g., a sentence) is generated; and (2) incorporating multiple reward models associated with different feedback types (e.g., factual incorrectness, irrelevance, and information incompleteness). We conduct experiments on detoxification and long-form question answering to illustrate how learning with such reward functions leads to improved performance, supported by both automatic and human evaluation. Additionally, we show that LM behaviors can be customized using different combinations of fine-grained reward models. We release all data, collected human feedback, and codes at https://FineGrainedRLHF.github.io.

In text-to-image generation tasks, the advancements of diffusion models have facilitated the fidelity of generated results. However, these models encounter challenges when processing text prompts containing multiple entities and attributes. The uneven distribution of attention results in the issues of entity leakage and attribute misalignment. Training from scratch to address this issue requires numerous labeled data and is resource-consuming. Motivated by this, we propose an attribution-focusing mechanism, a training-free phase-wise mechanism by modulation of attention for diffusion model. One of our core ideas is to guide the model to concentrate on the corresponding syntactic components of the prompt at distinct timesteps. To achieve this, we incorporate a temperature control mechanism within the early phases of the self-attention modules to mitigate entity leakage issues. An object-focused masking scheme and a phase-wise dynamic weight control mechanism are integrated into the cross-attention modules, enabling the model to discern the affiliation of semantic information between entities more effectively. The experimental results in various alignment scenarios demonstrate that our model attain better image-text alignment with minimal additional computational cost.

Prior work in style-controlled text generation has focused on tasks such as emulating the style of prolific literary authors, producing formal or informal text, and the degree of toxicity of generated text. Plentiful demonstrations of these styles are available, and as a result modern language models are often able to emulate them, either via prompting or discriminative control. However, in applications such as writing assistants, it is desirable for language models to produce text in an author-specific style on the basis of a small writing sample. We find that instruction-tuned language models can struggle to reproduce author-specific style demonstrated in a prompt. Instead, we propose to guide a language model to generate text in a target style using contrastively-trained representations that capture stylometric features. A central challenge in doing so is that an author's writing is characterized by surprising token choices under a generic language model. To reconcile this tension, we combine generative re-scoring to achieve an author-specific model, with discriminative control to ensure style consistency at the sequence-level. The combination of these approaches is found to be particularly effective at adhering to an author-specific style in a variety of conditions, including unconditional generation and style transfer, and is applicable to any underlying language model without requiring fine-tuning.

Most existing neural-based text-to-speech methods rely on extensive datasets and face challenges under low-resource condition. In this paper, we introduce a novel semi-supervised text-to-speech synthesis model that learns from both paired and unpaired data to address this challenge. The key component of the proposed model is a dynamic quantized representation module, which is integrated into a sequential autoencoder. When given paired data, the module incorporates a trainable codebook that learns quantized representations under the supervision of the paired data. However, due to the limited paired data in low-resource scenario, these paired data are difficult to cover all phonemes. Then unpaired data is fed to expand the dynamic codebook by adding quantized representation vectors that are sufficiently distant from the existing ones during training. Experiments show that with less than 120 minutes of paired data, the proposed method outperforms existing methods in both subjective and objective metrics.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have made remarkable progress in text generation tasks via fine-tuning. While, it is challenging to fine-tune PLMs in a data-scarce situation. Therefore, it is non-trivial to develop a general and lightweight model that can adapt to various text generation tasks based on PLMs. To fulfill this purpose, the recent prompt-based learning offers a potential solution. In this paper, we improve this technique and propose a novel prompt-based method (PTG) for text generation in a transferable setting. First, PTG learns a set of source prompts for various source generation tasks and then transfers these prompts as target prompts to perform target generation tasks. To consider both task- and instance-level information, we design an adaptive attention mechanism to derive the target prompts. For each data instance, PTG learns a specific target prompt by attending to highly relevant source prompts. In extensive experiments, PTG yields competitive or better results than fine-tuning methods. We release our source prompts as an open resource, where users can add or reuse them to improve new text generation tasks for future research. Code and data can be available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Transfer-Prompts-for-Text-Generation.

We present VideoPoet, a language model capable of synthesizing high-quality video, with matching audio, from a large variety of conditioning signals. VideoPoet employs a decoder-only transformer architecture that processes multimodal inputs -- including images, videos, text, and audio. The training protocol follows that of Large Language Models (LLMs), consisting of two stages: pretraining and task-specific adaptation. During pretraining, VideoPoet incorporates a mixture of multimodal generative objectives within an autoregressive Transformer framework. The pretrained LLM serves as a foundation that can be adapted for a range of video generation tasks. We present empirical results demonstrating the model's state-of-the-art capabilities in zero-shot video generation, specifically highlighting VideoPoet's ability to generate high-fidelity motions. Project page: http://sites.research.google/videopoet/

Large language models (LLMs), while transformative for NLP, come with significant computational demands, underlining the need for efficient, training-free compression. Notably, the reliability of perplexity as a benchmark for compressed model efficacy is in question, as our tests using LLaMA-7B and OPT-6.7b reveal a significant performance drop in several realistic downstream tasks, underscoring the disparity between perplexity as a performance indicator and real-world performance. Investigation into the trade-off between resource-intensive post-compression re-training highlights the prospect of prompt-driven recovery as a lightweight adaption tool. However, existing studies, confined mainly to perplexity evaluations and simple tasks, fail to offer unequivocal confidence in the scalability and generalizability of prompting. We tackle this uncertainty in two key ways. First, we uncover the vulnerability of naive prompts in LLM compression as an over-reliance on a singular prompt per input. In response, we propose inference-time dynamic prompting (IDP), a mechanism that autonomously chooses from a set of curated prompts based on the context of each individual input. Second, we delve into a scientific understanding of why ``prompting might be all you need post-LLM compression". Our findings suggest that compression doesn't irretrievably erase LLM model knowledge but displace it, necessitating a new inference path. IDP effectively redirects this path, enabling the model to tap into its inherent yet displaced knowledge and thereby recover performance. Empirical tests affirm the value of IDP, demonstrating an average performance improvement of 1.24% across nine varied tasks spanning multiple knowledge domains.

Despite the recent progress in text-to-video generation, existing studies usually overlook the issue that only spatial contents but not temporal motions in synthesized videos are under the control of text. Towards such a challenge, this work presents a practical system, named LivePhoto, which allows users to animate an image of their interest with text descriptions. We first establish a strong baseline that helps a well-learned text-to-image generator (i.e., Stable Diffusion) take an image as a further input. We then equip the improved generator with a motion module for temporal modeling and propose a carefully designed training pipeline to better link texts and motions. In particular, considering the facts that (1) text can only describe motions roughly (e.g., regardless of the moving speed) and (2) text may include both content and motion descriptions, we introduce a motion intensity estimation module as well as a text re-weighting module to reduce the ambiguity of text-to-motion mapping. Empirical evidence suggests that our approach is capable of well decoding motion-related textual instructions into videos, such as actions, camera movements, or even conjuring new contents from thin air (e.g., pouring water into an empty glass). Interestingly, thanks to the proposed intensity learning mechanism, our system offers users an additional control signal (i.e., the motion intensity) besides text for video customization.

Traditional RLHF optimizes language models with coarse, scalar rewards that mask the fine-grained reasons behind success or failure, leading to slow and opaque learning. Recent work augments RL with textual critiques through prompting or reflection, improving interpretability but leaving model parameters untouched. We introduce Text2Grad, a reinforcement-learning paradigm that turns free-form textual feedback into span-level gradients. Given human (or programmatic) critiques, Text2Grad aligns each feedback phrase with the relevant token spans, converts these alignments into differentiable reward signals, and performs gradient updates that directly refine the offending portions of the model's policy. This yields precise, feedback-conditioned adjustments instead of global nudges. Text2Grad is realized through three components: (1) a high-quality feedback-annotation pipeline that pairs critiques with token spans; (2) a fine-grained reward model that predicts span-level reward on answer while generating explanatory critiques; and (3) a span-level policy optimizer that back-propagates natural-language gradients. Across summarization, code generation, and question answering, Text2Grad consistently surpasses scalar-reward RL and prompt-only baselines, providing both higher task metrics and richer interpretability. Our results demonstrate that natural-language feedback, when converted to gradients, is a powerful signal for fine-grained policy optimization. The code for our method is available at https://github.com/microsoft/Text2Grad

The ability to accurately represent sentences is central to language understanding. We describe a convolutional architecture dubbed the Dynamic Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) that we adopt for the semantic modelling of sentences. The network uses Dynamic k-Max Pooling, a global pooling operation over linear sequences. The network handles input sentences of varying length and induces a feature graph over the sentence that is capable of explicitly capturing short and long-range relations. The network does not rely on a parse tree and is easily applicable to any language. We test the DCNN in four experiments: small scale binary and multi-class sentiment prediction, six-way question classification and Twitter sentiment prediction by distant supervision. The network achieves excellent performance in the first three tasks and a greater than 25% error reduction in the last task with respect to the strongest baseline.

We present DiffusionBERT, a new generative masked language model based on discrete diffusion models. Diffusion models and many pre-trained language models have a shared training objective, i.e., denoising, making it possible to combine the two powerful models and enjoy the best of both worlds. On the one hand, diffusion models offer a promising training strategy that helps improve the generation quality. On the other hand, pre-trained denoising language models (e.g., BERT) can be used as a good initialization that accelerates convergence. We explore training BERT to learn the reverse process of a discrete diffusion process with an absorbing state and elucidate several designs to improve it. First, we propose a new noise schedule for the forward diffusion process that controls the degree of noise added at each step based on the information of each token. Second, we investigate several designs of incorporating the time step into BERT. Experiments on unconditional text generation demonstrate that DiffusionBERT achieves significant improvement over existing diffusion models for text (e.g., D3PM and Diffusion-LM) and previous generative masked language models in terms of perplexity and BLEU score.

Numerical reasoning over text (NRoT) presents unique challenges that are not well addressed by existing pre-training objectives. We explore five sequential training schedules that adapt a pre-trained T5 model for NRoT. Our final model is adapted from T5, but further pre-trained on three datasets designed to strengthen skills necessary for NRoT and general reading comprehension before being fine-tuned on the Discrete Reasoning over Text (DROP) dataset. The training improves DROP's adjusted F1 performance (a numeracy-focused score) from 45.90 to 70.83. Our model closes in on GenBERT (72.4), a custom BERT-Base model using the same datasets with significantly more parameters. We show that training the T5 multitasking framework with multiple numerical reasoning datasets of increasing difficulty, good performance on DROP can be achieved without manually engineering partitioned functionality between distributed and symbol modules.

In this work, we explore "prompt tuning", a simple yet effective mechanism for learning "soft prompts" to condition frozen language models to perform specific downstream tasks. Unlike the discrete text prompts used by GPT-3, soft prompts are learned through backpropagation and can be tuned to incorporate signal from any number of labeled examples. Our end-to-end learned approach outperforms GPT-3's "few-shot" learning by a large margin. More remarkably, through ablations on model size using T5, we show that prompt tuning becomes more competitive with scale: as models exceed billions of parameters, our method "closes the gap" and matches the strong performance of model tuning (where all model weights are tuned). This finding is especially relevant in that large models are costly to share and serve, and the ability to reuse one frozen model for multiple downstream tasks can ease this burden. Our method can be seen as a simplification of the recently proposed "prefix tuning" of Li and Liang (2021), and we provide a comparison to this and other similar approaches. Finally, we show that conditioning a frozen model with soft prompts confers benefits in robustness to domain transfer, as compared to full model tuning.

The recently introduced Controlled Text Reduction (CTR) task isolates the text generation step within typical summarization-style tasks. It does so by challenging models to generate coherent text conforming to pre-selected content within the input text (``highlights''). This framing enables increased modularity in summarization-like tasks, allowing to couple a single CTR model with various content-selection setups and modules. However, there are currently no reliable CTR models, while the performance of the existing baseline for the task is mediocre, falling short of practical utility. Here, we address this gap by introducing a high-quality, open-source CTR model that tackles two prior key limitations: inadequate enforcement of the content-preservation constraint, and suboptimal silver training data. Addressing these, we amplify the content-preservation constraint in both training, via RL, and inference, via a controlled decoding strategy. Further, we substantially improve the silver training data quality via GPT-4 distillation. Overall, pairing the distilled dataset with the highlight-adherence strategies yields marked gains over the current baseline, of up to 30 ROUGE-L points, providing a reliable CTR model for downstream use.

Language models (LMs) are pretrained to imitate internet text, including content that would violate human preferences if generated by an LM: falsehoods, offensive comments, personally identifiable information, low-quality or buggy code, and more. Here, we explore alternative objectives for pretraining LMs in a way that also guides them to generate text aligned with human preferences. We benchmark five objectives for pretraining with human feedback across three tasks and study how they affect the trade-off between alignment and capabilities of pretrained LMs. We find a Pareto-optimal and simple approach among those we explored: conditional training, or learning distribution over tokens conditional on their human preference scores given by a reward model. Conditional training reduces the rate of undesirable content by up to an order of magnitude, both when generating without a prompt and with an adversarially-chosen prompt. Moreover, conditional training maintains the downstream task performance of standard LM pretraining, both before and after task-specific finetuning. Pretraining with human feedback results in much better preference satisfaction than standard LM pretraining followed by finetuning with feedback, i.e., learning and then unlearning undesirable behavior. Our results suggest that we should move beyond imitation learning when pretraining LMs and incorporate human preferences from the start of training.

A primary concern regarding training large language models (LLMs) is whether they abuse copyrighted online text. With the increasing training data scale and the prevalence of LLMs in daily lives, two problems arise: 1) false positive membership inference results misled by similar examples; 2) membership inference methods are usually too complex for end users to understand and use. To address these issues, we propose an alternative insert-and-detect methodology, advocating that web users and content platforms employ \textit{unique identifiers} for reliable and independent membership inference. Users and platforms can create their identifiers, embed them in copyrighted text, and independently detect them in future LLMs. As an initial demonstration, we introduce \textbf{ghost sentences} and a user-friendly last-k words test, allowing end users to chat with LLMs for membership inference. Ghost sentences consist primarily of unique passphrases of random natural words, which can come with customized elements to bypass possible filter rules. The last-k words test requires a significant repetition time of ghost sentences~(ge10). For cases with fewer repetitions, we designed an extra perplexity test, as LLMs exhibit high perplexity when encountering unnatural passphrases. We also conduct a comprehensive study on the memorization and membership inference of ghost sentences, examining factors such as training data scales, model sizes, repetition times, insertion positions, wordlist of passphrases, alignment, etc. Our study shows the possibility of applying ghost sentences in real scenarios and provides instructions for the potential application.

Recent developments in generative AI have shone a spotlight on high-performance synthetic text generation technologies. The now wide availability and ease of use of such models highlights the urgent need to provide equally powerful technologies capable of identifying synthetic text. With this in mind, we draw inspiration from psychological studies which suggest that people can be driven by emotion and encode emotion in the text they compose. We hypothesize that pretrained language models (PLMs) have an affective deficit because they lack such an emotional driver when generating text and consequently may generate synthetic text which has affective incoherence i.e. lacking the kind of emotional coherence present in human-authored text. We subsequently develop an emotionally aware detector by fine-tuning a PLM on emotion. Experiment results indicate that our emotionally-aware detector achieves improvements across a range of synthetic text generators, various sized models, datasets, and domains. Finally, we compare our emotionally-aware synthetic text detector to ChatGPT in the task of identification of its own output and show substantial gains, reinforcing the potential of emotion as a signal to identify synthetic text. Code, models, and datasets are available at https: //github.com/alanagiasi/emoPLMsynth

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has inaugurated a transformative epoch in natural language processing, fostering unprecedented proficiency in text generation, comprehension, and contextual scrutiny. Nevertheless, effectively handling extensive contexts, crucial for myriad applications, poses a formidable obstacle owing to the intrinsic constraints of the models' context window sizes and the computational burdens entailed by their operations. This investigation presents an innovative framework that strategically tailors LLMs for streamlined context processing by harnessing the synergies among natural language summarization, soft prompt compression, and augmented utility preservation mechanisms. Our methodology, dubbed SoftPromptComp, amalgamates natural language prompts extracted from summarization methodologies with dynamically generated soft prompts to forge a concise yet semantically robust depiction of protracted contexts. This depiction undergoes further refinement via a weighting mechanism optimizing information retention and utility for subsequent tasks. We substantiate that our framework markedly diminishes computational overhead and enhances LLMs' efficacy across various benchmarks, while upholding or even augmenting the caliber of the produced content. By amalgamating soft prompt compression with sophisticated summarization, SoftPromptComp confronts the dual challenges of managing lengthy contexts and ensuring model scalability. Our findings point towards a propitious trajectory for augmenting LLMs' applicability and efficiency, rendering them more versatile and pragmatic for real-world applications. This research enriches the ongoing discourse on optimizing language models, providing insights into the potency of soft prompts and summarization techniques as pivotal instruments for the forthcoming generation of NLP solutions.

As the text generation capabilities of large language models become increasingly prominent, recent studies have focused on controlling particular aspects of the generated text to make it more personalized. However, most research on controllable text generation focuses on controlling the content or modeling specific high-level/coarse-grained attributes that reflect authors' writing styles, such as formality, domain, or sentiment. In this paper, we focus on controlling fine-grained attributes spanning multiple linguistic dimensions, such as lexical and syntactic attributes. We introduce a novel benchmark to train generative models and evaluate their ability to generate personalized text based on multiple fine-grained linguistic attributes. We systematically investigate the performance of various large language models on our benchmark and draw insights from the factors that impact their performance. We make our code, data, and pretrained models publicly available.

Paraphrase generation has benefited extensively from recent progress in the designing of training objectives and model architectures. However, previous explorations have largely focused on supervised methods, which require a large amount of labeled data that is costly to collect. To address this drawback, we adopt a transfer learning approach and propose a training pipeline that enables pre-trained language models to generate high-quality paraphrases in an unsupervised setting. Our recipe consists of task-adaptation, self-supervision, and a novel decoding algorithm named Dynamic Blocking (DB). To enforce a surface form dissimilar from the input, whenever the language model emits a token contained in the source sequence, DB prevents the model from outputting the subsequent source token for the next generation step. We show with automatic and human evaluations that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the Quora Question Pair (QQP) and the ParaNMT datasets and is robust to domain shift between the two datasets of distinct distributions. We also demonstrate that our model transfers to paraphrasing in other languages without any additional finetuning.

In Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), encoding information in a suboptimal or erroneous way can impact the quality of representations based on later elements in the sequence and subsequently lead to wrong predictions and a worse model performance. In humans, challenging cases like garden path sentences (an instance of this being the infamous "The horse raced past the barn fell") can lead their language understanding astray. However, they are still able to correct their representation accordingly and recover when new information is encountered. Inspired by this, I propose an augmentation to standard RNNs in form of a gradient-based correction mechanism: This way I hope to enable such models to dynamically adapt their inner representation of a sentence, adding a way to correct deviations as soon as they occur. This could therefore lead to more robust models using more flexible representations, even during inference time. I conduct different experiments in the context of language modeling, where the impact of using such a mechanism is examined in detail. To this end, I look at modifications based on different kinds of time-dependent error signals and how they influence the model performance. Furthermore, this work contains a study of the model's confidence in its predictions during training and for challenging test samples and the effect of the manipulation thereof. Lastly, I also study the difference in behavior of these novel models compared to a standard LSTM baseline and investigate error cases in detail to identify points of future research. I show that while the proposed approach comes with promising theoretical guarantees and an appealing intuition, it is only able to produce minor improvements over the baseline due to challenges in its practical application and the efficacy of the tested model variants.

While generative models produce high-quality images of concepts learned from a large-scale database, a user often wishes to synthesize instantiations of their own concepts (for example, their family, pets, or items). Can we teach a model to quickly acquire a new concept, given a few examples? Furthermore, can we compose multiple new concepts together? We propose Custom Diffusion, an efficient method for augmenting existing text-to-image models. We find that only optimizing a few parameters in the text-to-image conditioning mechanism is sufficiently powerful to represent new concepts while enabling fast tuning (~6 minutes). Additionally, we can jointly train for multiple concepts or combine multiple fine-tuned models into one via closed-form constrained optimization. Our fine-tuned model generates variations of multiple, new concepts and seamlessly composes them with existing concepts in novel settings. Our method outperforms several baselines and concurrent works, regarding both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, while being memory and computationally efficient.