# Prompt Compression and Contrastive Conditioning for Controllability and Toxicity Reduction in Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03162 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03162/

## Key facts

- Cited by 97 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompt and context compression, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 22 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Oct 2022.

## Placed in

- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [Prompt and context compression](https://mlsanity.com/inference/prompt-and-context-compression/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Learning to summarize from human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01325/) (2020)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11462/) (2020)
- [Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07187/) (2016)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [Plug and Play Language Models: A Simple Approach to Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02164/) (2019)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [Prompt Programming for Large Language Models: Beyond the Few-Shot Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07350/) (2021)
- [Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09977/) (2020)
- [DExperts: Decoding-Time Controlled Text Generation with Experts and Anti-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03023/) (2021)
- [GeDi: Generative Discriminator Guided Sequence Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06367/) (2020)
- [Word Embeddings Quantify 100 Years of Gender and Ethnic Stereotypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08412/) (2017)
- [Quark: Controllable Text Generation with Reinforced Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13636/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 97)

- [Learning to Compress Prompts with Gist Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08467/) (2023)
- [Adapting Language Models to Compress Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14788/) (2023)
- [LLMLingua-2: Data Distillation for Efficient and Faithful Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12968/) (2024)
- [LLMLingua: Compressing Prompts for Accelerated Inference of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05736/) (2023)
- [RECOMP: Improving Retrieval-Augmented LMs with Compression and Selective Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04408/) (2023)
- [TokenSkip: Controllable Chain-of-Thought Compression in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12067/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Efficient Inference for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14294/) (2024)
- [In-context Autoencoder for Context Compression in a Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06945/) (2023)
- [ReWOO: Decoupling Reasoning from Observations for Efficient Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18323/) (2023)
- [EASYTOOL: Enhancing LLM-based Agents with Concise Tool Instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06201/) (2024)
- [C3oT: Generating Shorter Chain-of-Thought without Compromising Effectiveness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11664/) (2024)
- [VoCo-LLaMA: Towards Vision Compression with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12275/) (2024)
- [Advancing Transformer Architecture in Long-Context Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12351/) (2023)
- [Prompt Compression for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12388/) (2024)
- [ChunkKV: Semantic-Preserving KV Cache Compression for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00299/) (2025)
- [Learning to Compress Prompt in Natural Language Formats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18700/) (2024)
- [Token Reduction Should Go Beyond Efficiency in Generative Models -- From Vision, Language to Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18227/) (2025)
- [DeciMamba: Exploring the Length Extrapolation Potential of Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14528/) (2024)
- [Efficient Prompting Methods for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01077/) (2024)
- [500xCompressor: Generalized Prompt Compression for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03094/) (2024)
- [Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Semantic Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09571/) (2023)
- [Compressed Context Memory For Online Language Model Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03414/) (2023)
- [Discrete Prompt Compression with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08758/) (2023)
- [KV Cache Compression, But What Must We Give in Return? A Comprehensive Benchmark of Long Context Capable Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01527/) (2024)
- [Agentic Software Engineering: Foundational Pillars and a Research Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06216/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08748/) (2025)
- [DePT: Decomposed Prompt Tuning for Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05173/) (2023)
- [Online Adaptation of Language Models with a Memory of Amortized Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04317/) (2024)
- [Symbolic Prompt Program Search: A Structure-Aware Approach to Efficient Compile-Time Prompt Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02319/) (2024)
- [Fewer is More: Boosting LLM Reasoning with Reinforced Context Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08901/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We explore the idea of compressing the prompts used to condition language models, and show that compressed prompts can retain a substantive amount of information about the original prompt. For severely compressed prompts, while fine-grained information is lost, abstract information and general sentiments can be retained with surprisingly few parameters, which can be useful in the context of decode-time algorithms for controllability and toxicity reduction. We explore contrastive conditioning to steer language model generation towards desirable text and away from undesirable text, and find that some complex prompts can be effectively compressed into a single token to guide generation. We also show that compressed prompts are largely compositional, and can be constructed such that they can be used to control independent aspects of generated text.