About ctrl by Salesforce

CTRL, developed by Salesforce, is a Conditional Transformer Language Model designed for controllable text generation. This model, with its 1.6 billion parameters, is trained to condition on control codes that specify various aspects such as domain, subdomain, entities, relationships between entities, dates, and task-specific behavior.

Here are four key features of CTRL

  1. Controlled Text Generation: CTRL allows users to guide the text generation process by specifying control codes. This provides more explicit control over the generated text while preserving the advantages of unsupervised learning.
  2. Versatility: The model supports two functionalities – generating from a trained model and source attribution. The former can generate text well beyond its trained sequence lengths, while the latter can print the perplexity of a prompt conditional on each domain control code.
  3. Compatibility: CTRL provides functionality to convert a model from TensorFlow to HuggingFace/Transformers, making it compatible with a wide range of applications.
  4. Community Engagement: The developers of CTRL actively engage with the community, addressing questions, suggestions, requests, and bug-reports through GitHub issues. They also plan to release the training code and tips related to data collection.