# CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.05858 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/

## Key facts

- Cited by 762 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 762)

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- [Model Merging in LLMs, MLLMs, and Beyond: Methods, Theories, Applications and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07666/) (2024)
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- [Automatically Correcting Large Language Models: Surveying the landscape of diverse self-correction strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03188/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale language models show promising text generation capabilities, but users cannot easily control particular aspects of the generated text. We release CTRL, a 1.63 billion-parameter conditional transformer language model, trained to condition on control codes that govern style, content, and task-specific behavior. Control codes were derived from structure that naturally co-occurs with raw text, preserving the advantages of unsupervised learning while providing more explicit control over text generation. These codes also allow CTRL to predict which parts of the training data are most likely given a sequence. This provides a potential method for analyzing large amounts of data via model-based source attribution. We have released multiple full-sized, pretrained versions of CTRL at https://github.com/salesforce/ctrl.