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Poster
A Causal Lens for Controllable Text Generation
Zhiting Hu · Li Erran Li

Tue Dec 07 08:30 AM -- 10:00 AM (PST) @
in Poster Session 1 »

Controllable text generation concerns two fundamental tasks of wide applications, namely generating text of given attributes (i.e., attribute-conditional generation), and minimally editing existing text to possess desired attributes (i.e., text attribute transfer). Extensive prior work has largely studied the two problems separately, and developed different conditional models which, however, are prone to producing biased text (e.g., various gender stereotypes). This paper proposes to formulate controllable text generation from a principled causal perspective which models the two tasks with a unified framework. A direct advantage of the causal formulation is the use of rich causality tools to mitigate generation biases and improve control. We treat the two tasks as interventional and counterfactual causal inference based on a structural causal model, respectively. We then apply the framework to the challenging practical setting where confounding factors (that induce spurious correlations) are observable only on a small fraction of data. Experiments show significant superiority of the causal approach over previous conditional models for improved control accuracy and reduced bias.

Keywords: Causality · Language

Author Information

Zhiting Hu (Carnegie Mellon University)
Li Erran Li (AWS AI, Amazon)

Li Erran Li is the head of machine learning at Scale and an adjunct professor at Columbia University. Previously, he was chief scientist at Pony.ai. Before that, he was with the perception team at Uber ATG and machine learning platform team at Uber where he worked on deep learning for autonomous driving, led the machine learning platform team technically, and drove strategy for company-wide artificial intelligence initiatives. He started his career at Bell Labs. Li’s current research interests are machine learning, computer vision, learning-based robotics, and their application to autonomous driving. He has a PhD from the computer science department at Cornell University. He’s an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow.

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