Control prefixes for parameter-efficient text generation
File(s)2022.gem-1.31.pdf (917.74 KB)
Published version
Author(s)
Clive, Jordan
Cao, Kris
Rei, Marek
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Prefix-tuning is a parameter-efficient and powerful technique for adapting a pre-trained language model to a downstream application. However, it uses the same dataset-level tuned set of parameters for all examples in the dataset. We extend the framework with a dynamic method, Control Prefixes, which allows for the effective inclusion of input-dependent information, thereby demonstrating how prefix-tuning can be used for controlled text generation tasks. The method incorporates attribute-level learnable representations into different layers of a pre-trained Transformer, enabling 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). Using only 0.1–2% additional trainable parameters, we show Control Prefixes can even outperform full fine-tuning methods, and present state-of-the-art results on several data-to-text datasets, including WebNLG. We also examine the common case where input-dependent information is unavailable at test time and show Control Prefixes can excel in this setting also.
Date Issued
2022
Date Acceptance
2022-12-07
Citation
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM), 2022, pp.363-382
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Start Page
363
End Page
382
Journal / Book Title
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM)
Copyright Statement
ACL materials are Copyright © 1963–2024 ACL; other materials are copyrighted by their respective copyright holders. Materials prior to 2016 here are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License. Permission is granted to make copies for the purposes of teaching and research. Materials published in or after 2016 are licensed on a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
License URL
Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.gem-1.31
Source
The 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM)
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2022-12-07
Finish Date
2022-12-07
Coverage Spatial
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Date Publish Online
2022