Animated QR codes present an exciting frontier for dynamic content delivery and digital interaction. However, despite their potential, there has been no prior work focusing on the generation of animated QR codes that are both visually appealing and universally scannable. In this paper, we introduce AnimateQR, the first generative framework for creating animated QR codes that balance aesthetic flexibility with scannability. Unlike previous methods that focus on static QR codes, AnimateQR leverages hierarchical luminance guidance and progressive spatiotemporal control to produce high-quality dynamic QR codes. Our first innovation is a multi-scale hierarchical control signal that adjusts luminance across different spatial scales, ensuring that the QR code remains decodable while allowing for artistic expression. The second innovation is a progressive control mechanism that dynamically adjusts spatiotemporal guidance throughout the diffusion denoising steps, enabling fine-grained balance between visual quality and scannability. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that AnimateQR achieves state-of-the-art performance in both decoding success rates (96% vs. 56% baseline) and visual quality (user preference: 7.2 vs. 2.3 on a 10-point scale). Codes are availble at https://github.com/mulns/AnimateQR.

Controllable Dialogue Generation (CDG) enables chatbots to generate responses with desired attributes, and weighted decoding methods have achieved significant success in the CDG task. However, using a fixed constant value to manage the bias of attribute probabilities makes it challenging to find an ideal control strength that satisfies both controllability and fluency. To address this issue, we propose ECO decoding (Entropy-based COntrol), which dynamically adjusts the control strength at each generation step according to the model's entropy in both the language model and attribute classifier probability distributions. Experiments on the DailyDialog and MultiWOZ datasets demonstrate that ECO decoding consistently improves controllability while maintaining fluency and grammaticality, outperforming prior decoding methods across various models and settings. Furthermore, ECO decoding alleviates probability interpolation issues in multi-attribute generation and consequently demonstrates strong performance in both single and multi-attribute scenarios.

In the rapidly evolving field of text generation, the demand for more precise control mechanisms has become increasingly apparent. To address this need, we present a novel methodology, LIFI, which offers a lightweight approach with fine-grained control for controlled text generation. Unlike previous studies that train pre-trained language models to follow discrete, categorical, and exclusive control codes, LIFI learns controlled text generation under the guidance of continuous, relative, and nonexclusive control codes. These fine-grained codes are automatically derived from an attribute classifier, initially trained with a small amount of labeled data and subsequently employed to label abundant unlabeled data, thus garnering more extensive supervision signals. Moreover, to achieve efficient control, we incorporate the fine-grained control codes with adapters, a parameter- and compute-efficient way to steer a pre-trained language model. We evaluate LIFI on two conventional tasks -- sentiment control and topic control -- and one newly proposed task -- stylistic novel writing. Comprehensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, demonstrating substantial performance improvements over existing baselines.

We propose Prefix-Adaptive Decoding (PREADD), a flexible method for controlled text generation. Unlike existing methods that use auxiliary expert models to control for attributes, PREADD does not require an external model, instead relying on linearly combining output logits from multiple prompts. Specifically, PREADD contrasts the output logits generated using a raw prompt against those generated using a prefix-prepended prompt, enabling both positive and negative control with respect to any attribute encapsulated by the prefix. We evaluate PREADD on three tasks -- toxic output mitigation, gender bias reduction, and sentiment control -- and find that PREADD outperforms not only prompting baselines, but also an auxiliary-expert control method, by 12% or more in relative gain on our main metrics for each task.

We propose the Detailed Outline Control (DOC) framework for improving long-range plot coherence when automatically generating several-thousand-word-long stories. DOC consists of two complementary components: a detailed outliner and a detailed controller. The detailed outliner creates a more detailed, hierarchically structured outline, shifting creative burden from the main drafting procedure to the planning stage. The detailed controller ensures the more detailed outline is still respected during generation by controlling story passages to align with outline details. In human evaluations of automatically generated stories, DOC substantially outperforms a strong Re3 baseline (Yang et al., 2022) on plot coherence (22.5% absolute gain), outline relevance (28.2%), and interestingness (20.7%). Humans also judged DOC to be much more controllable in an interactive generation setting.

We describe a Plug-and-Play controllable language generation framework, Plug-and-Blend, that allows a human user to input multiple control codes (topics). In the context of automated story generation, this allows a human user lose or fine grained control of the topics that will appear in the generated story, and can even allow for overlapping, blended topics. We show that our framework, working with different generation models, controls the generation towards given continuous-weighted control codes while keeping the generated sentences fluent, demonstrating strong blending capability.