Gwen Yidou Weng

dblp:405/5228 · DBLP profile ↗
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1ranked-venue papers
1as first author
1since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021

Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.

Artificial intelligence
1 paper
Language models and text generation · 54% Knowledge representation and reasoning · 23% Probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning · 23%

Topics — the 5 heaviest of 5, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation
controllable text generation
0.912025
TRACE Back from the Future: A Probabilistic Reasoning Approach to Controllable Language Generation · ICML 2025
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation › large language model safety
detoxification
0.912025
TRACE Back from the Future: A Probabilistic Reasoning Approach to Controllable Language Generation · ICML 2025
Machine learning › Probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning › structured models › latent variable model
hidden markov model
0.912025
TRACE Back from the Future: A Probabilistic Reasoning Approach to Controllable Language Generation · ICML 2025
Knowledge, reasoning and agents › Knowledge representation and reasoning
probabilistic reasoning
0.912025
TRACE Back from the Future: A Probabilistic Reasoning Approach to Controllable Language Generation · ICML 2025
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation
decoding
0.312025
TRACE Back from the Future: A Probabilistic Reasoning Approach to Controllable Language Generation · ICML 2025

Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics

expected attribute probability · 0.9classifier-guided decoding · 0.9
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 TRACE Back from the Future: A Probabilistic Reasoning Approach to Controllable Language Generation
abstract
As large language models (LMs) advance, there is an increasing need to control their outputs to align with human values (e.g., detoxification) or desired attributes (e.g., personalization, topic). However, autoregressive models focus on next-token predictions and struggle with global properties that require looking ahead. Existing solutions either post-train LMs for each new attribute—expensive and inflexible—or approximate the Expected Attribute Probability (EAP) of future sequences by sampling or training, which is slow and unreliable for rare attributes. We introduce **TRACE** (Tractable Probabilistic Reasoning for Adaptable Controllable gEneration), a novel framework that efficiently computes EAP and adapts to new attributes through tractable *probabilistic* reasoning and lightweight *control*. TRACE distills a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) from an LM and pairs it with a small classifier to estimate attribute probabilities, enabling exact EAP computation over the HMM’s predicted futures. This EAP is then used to reweigh the LM’s next-token probabilities for globally compliant continuations. Empirically, TRACE achieves state-of-the-art detoxification results with only 20% decoding overhead, yields 76 low-resource personalized LMs within seconds, and seamlessly extends to composite attributes.
Gwen Yidou Weng, Benjie Wang 0001, Guy Van den Broeck
ICML1