Ivanho\'e Botcazou
2026
Progress Ratio Embeddings: An Impatience Signal for Robust Length Control in Neural Text Generation
Ivanho\'e Botcazou | Tassadit Amghar | Sylvain Lamprier | Fr\'ed\'eric Saubion
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Ivanho\'e Botcazou | Tassadit Amghar | Sylvain Lamprier | Fr\'ed\'eric Saubion
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Modern neural language models achieve high accuracy in text generation, yet precise control over generation length remains underdeveloped. In this paper, we first investigate a recent length control method based on Reverse Positional Embeddings (RPE) and show its limits when control is requested beyond the training distribution. In particular, using a discrete countdown signal tied to the absolute remaining token count leads to instability. To provide robust length control, we introduce Progress Ratio Embeddings (PRE), as continuous embeddings tied to a trigonometric impatience signal. PRE integrates seamlessly into standard Transformer architectures, providing stable length fidelity without degrading text accuracy under standard evaluation metrics. We further show that PRE generalizes well to unseen target lengths. Experiments on two widely used news-summarization benchmarks and a popular question generation dataset validate these findings.