

Overview
CTRL model was proposed in CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation by Nitish Shirish Keskar, Bryan McCann, Lav R. Varshney, Caiming Xiong and
Richard Socher. It's a causal (unidirectional) transformer pre-trained using language modeling on a very large corpus
of ~140 GB of text data with the first token reserved as a control code (such as Links, Books, Wikipedia etc.).
The abstract from the paper is the following:
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.
This model was contributed by keskarnitishr. The original code can be found
here.
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