Official PyTorch implementation of PCAE: A Framework of Plug-in Conditional Auto-Encoder for Controllable Text Generation, published in Knowledge-Based Systems. We provide PCAE as well as all implemented baselines (PPVAE and Optimus) under pre-trained BART.

• [2023-02-02] We are sharing fine-tuned BART VAE here now!
• [2022-10-10] Our paper is available on arXiv now.
• [2022-09-27] Our paper is now in this paper list, which aims at collecting all kinds of latent variational auto-encoders that controllably generate texts. Feel free to check it out and contribute!
• [2022-09-27] We release our PCAE and baseline codes under the setup of pre-trained BART.
• [2022-09-06] Our work PCAE is available online.
• [2022-08-21] Our paper PCAE is accepted to Knowledge-Based Systems.

Make sure you have installed

transformers
tqdm
torch
numpy

We conduct five tasks span from three datasets: Yelp review, Titles and Yahoo Question.

We provide our full processed datasets in:

• BaiduPan (password bx81)
• GoogleDrive

Please download data.zip and unzip it to the current folder.

You can also try your own data, follow the split in data folder. Note that, for PPVAE, you have to manually split negative samples for every control signal.

You can download full checkpoints folder from here, unzip the checkpoints.zip to the current folder.

Or you can train the BART VAE from the scratch:

Finetuning on three datasets. (choose DATA from yelp, yahoo, titles, and EPOCH from 8, 10, 10):

DATA=yelp
EPOCH=8
python train.py --run_mode vae_ft --dataset $DATA --zmanner hidden\
--gpu 0 1 --dim_z 128 --per_gpu_train_batch_size 64\
--train_epochs $EPOCH --fb_mode 1 --lr 1e-4 --first_token_pooling --eval_every 500

Plug-in training of PCAE. Choose arguments below:

• TASK: [sentiment, tense, topics, quess_s, quess]

  (topics, quess_s, quess corresponds to $topics_S,topics_M, topics_L$ in the paper respectively)

• SAMPLE_N: [100, 300, 500, 800, 1000]

• NUM_LAYER: int number from 8 to 15 is fine

• EPOCH: 10 to 20 is fine, less SAMPLE_N means less EPOCH required

TASK=sentiment
EPOCH=10
SAMPLE_N=100
NUM_LAYER=10

python train.py --run_mode pcae --task $TASK --zmanner hidden\
--gpu 0 --dim_z 128 --per_gpu_train_batch_size 5\
--plugin_train_epochs $EPOCH --fb_mode 1 --sample_n $SAMPLE_N\
--layer_num $NUM_LAYER --lr 1e-4 --use_mean

Plug-in training of PPVAE BART. Choose arguments below:

• TASK: [sentiment, tense, topics, quess_s, quess]
• SAMPLE_N: [100, 300, 500, 800, 1000]
• TASK_LABEL: [pos, neg] for sentiment task; [present, past] for tense task; [0, 1, 2, 3, 4] for topics task; [0, 1, 2, 3, ..., 9] for quess task
• EPOCH: 10 to 20 is fine, less SAMPLE_N means less EPOCH required

For example, if you want to train PPVAE to generate positive sentences in sentiment task with 100 training samples per class, run:

TASK=sentiment
EPOCH=10
SAMPLE_N=100
TASK_LABEL=pos

python train.py --run_mode ppvae --task $TASK --zmanner hidden\
--gpu 0 --dim_z 128 --per_gpu_train_batch_size 5\
--plugin_train_epochs $EPOCH --fb_mode 1 --sample_n $SAMPLE_N\
--task_label $TASK_LABEL --lr 1e-4 --ppvae_dim_bottle 25

Plug-in finetuning of Optimus under BART setup. Choose arguments below:

• TASK: [sentiment, tense, topics, quess_s, quess]
• SAMPLE_N: [100, 300, 500, 800, 1000]
• EPOCH: 10 to 20 is fine, less SAMPLE_N means less EPOCH required

TASK=sentiment
EPOCH=10
SAMPLE_N=100

python train.py --run_mode optimus --task $TASK --zmanner hidden\
--gpu 0 --dim_z 128 --per_gpu_train_batch_size 5\
--plugin_train_epochs $EPOCH --fb_mode 1 --sample_n $SAMPLE_N\
--lr 1e-4

Please email me or open an issue if you have further questions.

if you find our work useful, please cite the paper and star the repo~ :)

@article{tu2022pcae,
  title={PCAE: A framework of plug-in conditional auto-encoder for controllable text generation},
  author={Tu, Haoqin and Yang, Zhongliang and Yang, Jinshuai and Zhang, Siyu and Huang, Yongfeng},
  journal={Knowledge-Based Systems},
  volume={256},
  pages={109766},
  year={2022},
  publisher={Elsevier}
}

We thank open sourced codes related to VAEs and plug-and-play models, which inspired our work!!