# Thank you BART! Rewarding Pre-Trained Models Improves Formality Style Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.06947 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06947/

## Key facts

- Cited by 28 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [OpenNMT: Open-source Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03815/) (2017)
- [Style Transfer from Non-Parallel Text by Cross-Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09655/) (2017)
- [Dear Sir or Madam, May I introduce the GYAFC Dataset: Corpus, Benchmarks and Metrics for Formality Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06535/) (2018)
- [Style Transfer in Text: Exploration and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06861/) (2017)
- [Disentangled Representation Learning for Non-Parallel Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04339/) (2018)
- [Style Transfer Through Back-Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09000/) (2018)
- [A Probabilistic Formulation of Unsupervised Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03912/) (2020)
- [A Dual Reinforcement Learning Framework for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10060/) (2019)
- [Parallel Data Augmentation for Formality Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07522/) (2020)
- [Reinforcement Learning Based Text Style Transfer without Parallel Training Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10671/) (2019)
- [Domain Control for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06140/) (2016)
- [Multi-Task Neural Models for Translating Between Styles Within and Across Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04357/) (2018)
- [Semi-supervised Text Style Transfer: Cross Projection in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11493/) (2019)
- [A Hierarchical Reinforced Sequence Operation Method for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01833/) (2019)
- [Style Transfer as Unsupervised Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07894/) (2018)
- [Semi-supervised Formality Style Transfer using Language Model Discriminator and Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05090/) (2020)
- [Reinforced Rewards Framework for Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05256/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing via Large Pre-Trained Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01243/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Multimodal Fact-Checking and Explanation Generation: A Challenging Dataset and Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12487/) (2022)
- [MVP: Multi-task Supervised Pre-training for Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12131/) (2022)
- [Prompt-Based Editing for Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11997/) (2023)
- [Deliberate then Generate: Enhanced Prompting Framework for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19835/) (2023)
- [Semi-Supervised Formality Style Transfer with Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13620/) (2022)
- [Human Judgement as a Compass to Navigate Automatic Metrics for Formality Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07549/) (2022)
- [Multidimensional Evaluation for Text Style Transfer Using ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13462/) (2023)
- [Distilling Text Style Transfer With Self-Explanation From LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01106/) (2024)
- [Generic resources are what you need: Style transfer tasks without task-specific parallel training data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04543/) (2021)
- [Multilingual Pre-training with Language and Task Adaptation for Multilingual Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08552/) (2022)
- [LLM-based Rewriting of Inappropriate Argumentation using Reinforcement Learning from Machine Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03363/) (2024)
- [Paying More Attention to Self-attention: Improving Pre-trained Language Models via Attention Guiding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02922/) (2022)
- [Learning Evaluation Models from Large Language Models for Sequence Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04386/) (2023)
- [From Theories on Styles to their Transfer in Text: Bridging the Gap with a Hierarchical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15871/) (2021)
- [Reducing Sequence Length by Predicting Edit Operations with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11862/) (2023)
- [VQA-GEN: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00807/) (2023)
- [StyleFlow: Disentangle Latent Representations via Normalizing Flow for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09670/) (2022)
- [SynthDetoxM: Modern LLMs are Few-Shot Parallel Detoxification Data Annotators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06394/) (2025)
- [Replacing Language Model for Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07343/) (2022)
- [TextBox 2.0: A Text Generation Library with Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13005/) (2022)
- [Studying the role of named entities for content preservation in text style transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09676/) (2022)
- [Positive Text Reframing under Multi-strategy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17940/) (2024)
- [Multi-perspective Alignment for Increasing Naturalness in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08473/) (2024)
- [Learning from Bootstrapping and Stepwise Reinforcement Reward: A Semi-Supervised Framework for Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09324/) (2022)
- [HeroNet: A Hybrid Retrieval-Generation Network for Conversational Bots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12400/) (2023)
- [PSST: A Benchmark for Evaluation-driven Text Public-Speaking Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08389/) (2023)
- [RT-SFT: Text Style Transfer from Non-Parallel Corpora by Roundtrip Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15013/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scarcity of parallel data causes formality style transfer models to have scarce success in preserving content. We show that fine-tuning pre-trained language (GPT-2) and sequence-to-sequence (BART) models boosts content preservation, and that this is possible even with limited amounts of parallel data. Augmenting these models with rewards that target style and content -- the two core aspects of the task -- we achieve a new state-of-the-art.