# Control, Generate, Augment: A Scalable Framework for Multi-Attribute Text Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14983 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14983/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

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- [Attributes as Textual Genes: Leveraging LLMs as Genetic Algorithm Simulators for Conditional Synthetic Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02040/) (2025)
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- [Disentangling Active and Passive Cosponsorship in the U.S. Congress](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09674/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Human Evaluation for Relative Model Comparisons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08048/) (2021)
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- [UPB @ ACTI: Detecting Conspiracies using fine tuned Sentence Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16275/) (2023)
- [Controlled Attribute-Specific Summarization of Interrogative Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28004/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce CGA, a conditional VAE architecture, to control, generate, and augment text. CGA is able to generate natural English sentences controlling multiple semantic and syntactic attributes by combining adversarial learning with a context-aware loss and a cyclical word dropout routine. We demonstrate the value of the individual model components in an ablation study. The scalability of our approach is ensured through a single discriminator, independently of the number of attributes. We show high quality, diversity and attribute control in the generated sentences through a series of automatic and human assessments. As the main application of our work, we test the potential of this new NLG model in a data augmentation scenario. In a downstream NLP task, the sentences generated by our CGA model show significant improvements over a strong baseline, and a classification performance often comparable to adding same amount of additional real data.
