Processing math: 100%
Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster

Controllable Generation via Locally Constrained Resampling

Kareem Ahmed · Kai-Wei Chang · Guy Van den Broeck

Hall 3 + Hall 2B #421
[ ]
Thu 24 Apr 7 p.m. PDT — 9:30 p.m. PDT

Abstract: Autoregressive models have demonstrated an unprecedented ability at modeling the intricaciesof natural language. However, they continue to struggle with generating complex outputs that adhere tological constraints. Sampling from a fully-independent distribution subject to a constraint is hard. Sampling from an autoregressive distribution subject to a constraint is doubly hard: We have to contend not only with the hardness of the constraint but also the distribution's lack of structure. We propose a tractable probabilistic approach that performs Bayesian conditioning to draw samples subject to a constraint. By factoring in information about the entire sequence, our approach offers better contextual awareness during constrained generation compared to current greedy approaches. Starting from a model sample, we induce a local, factorized distribution which we cantractably condition on the constraint. To generate samples that satisfy the constraint, we sample from the conditional distribution,correct for biases in the sample weights, and resample. The resulting samples closely approximate the target distribution and are guaranteed to satisfy the constraints. We evaluate our approach on several tasks, including LLM detoxification and solving Sudoku puzzles. We show that by disallowing a list of toxic expressions our approach is able to steer the model's outputs away from toxic generations, outperforming similar approaches to detoxification. We also show that our approach achieves a perfect accuracy on Sudoku, compared to less than 50% for GPT4-o and Gemini 1.5.

Live content is unavailable. Log in and register to view live content