# A Recipe For Arbitrary Text Style Transfer with Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.03910 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03910/

## Key facts

- Cited by 107 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)
- [Prompt Programming for Large Language Models: Beyond the Few-Shot Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07350/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Delete, Retrieve, Generate: A Simple Approach to Sentiment and Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06437/) (2018)
- [Reformulating Unsupervised Style Transfer as Paraphrase Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05700/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for Text Style Transfer: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00416/) (2020)
- [Style Transfer in Text: Exploration and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06861/) (2017)
- [Style Transfer Through Back-Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09000/) (2018)
- [Style Transformer: Unpaired Text Style Transfer without Disentangled Latent Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05621/) (2019)
- [Transforming Delete, Retrieve, Generate Approach for Controlled Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09368/) (2019)
- [Politeness Transfer: A Tag and Generate Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14257/) (2020)
- [Learning from Task Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08115/) (2020)
- [A Dual Reinforcement Learning Framework for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10060/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Style Transfer for Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02295/) (2019)
- [Unpaired Sentiment-to-Sentiment Translation: A Cycled Reinforcement Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05181/) (2018)
- [Zero-shot Text Classification With Generative Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10165/) (2019)
- [IMaT: Unsupervised Text Attribute Transfer via Iterative Matching and Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11333/) (2019)
- [Efficient Online Scalar Annotation with Bounded Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01170/) (2018)
- [Revision in Continuous Space: Unsupervised Text Style Transfer without Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12304/) (2019)
- [A Review of Human Evaluation for Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04747/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 107)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [PAL: Program-aided Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10435/) (2022)
- [RLPrompt: Optimizing Discrete Text Prompts with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12548/) (2022)
- [AI Chains: Transparent and Controllable Human-AI Interaction by Chaining Large Language Model Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01691/) (2021)
- [In-context Vectors: Making In Context Learning More Effective and Controllable Through Latent Space Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06668/) (2023)
- [Co-Writing Screenplays and Theatre Scripts with Language Models: An Evaluation by Industry Professionals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14958/) (2022)
- [Text and Patterns: For Effective Chain of Thought, It Takes Two to Tango](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07686/) (2022)
- [SatLM: Satisfiability-Aided Language Models Using Declarative Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09656/) (2023)
- [Language Model Behavior: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11504/) (2023)
- [Cognitive Reframing of Negative Thoughts through Human-Language Model Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02466/) (2023)
- [Help me write a poem: Instruction Tuning as a Vehicle for Collaborative Poetry Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13669/) (2022)
- [Creative Writing with an AI-Powered Writing Assistant: Perspectives from Professional Writers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05030/) (2022)
- [CoEdIT: Text Editing by Task-Specific Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09857/) (2023)
- [RewriteLM: An Instruction-Tuned Large Language Model for Text Rewriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15685/) (2023)
- [Mix and Match: Learning-free Controllable Text Generation using Energy Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13299/) (2022)
- [ChatGPT vs Human-authored Text: Insights into Controllable Text Summarization and Sentence Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07799/) (2023)
- [Prompt-and-Rerank: A Method for Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Arbitrary Textual Style Transfer with Small Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11503/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking and Improving Generator-Validator Consistency of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01846/) (2023)
- [SoK: Memorization in General-Purpose Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18362/) (2023)
- [Beyond the Chat: Executable and Verifiable Text-Editing with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15337/) (2023)
- [ARIES: A Corpus of Scientific Paper Edits Made in Response to Peer Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12587/) (2023)
- [A Measure-Theoretic Characterization of Tight Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10502/) (2022)
- [Bounding the Capabilities of Large Language Models in Open Text Generation with Prompt Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09185/) (2023)
- [Undesirable Memorization in Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02650/) (2024)
- [Causally Testing Gender Bias in LLMs: A Case Study on Occupational Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10678/) (2022)
- [Don't lose the message while paraphrasing: A study on content preserving style transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09055/) (2023)
- [CORE: A Retrieve-then-Edit Framework for Counterfactual Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04873/) (2022)
- [The AI Ghostwriter Effect: When Users Do Not Perceive Ownership of AI-Generated Text But Self-Declare as Authors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03283/) (2023)
- [Few-shot Controllable Style Transfer for Low-Resource Multilingual Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07385/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we leverage large language models (LMs) to perform zero-shot text style transfer. We present a prompting method that we call augmented zero-shot learning, which frames style transfer as a sentence rewriting task and requires only a natural language instruction, without model fine-tuning or exemplars in the target style. Augmented zero-shot learning is simple and demonstrates promising results not just on standard style transfer tasks such as sentiment, but also on arbitrary transformations such as "make this melodramatic" or "insert a metaphor."