# Gradient-guided Unsupervised Text Style Transfer via Contrastive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.00469 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00469/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jan 2022.

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

- [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)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01759/) (2016)
- [Ups and Downs: Modeling the Visual Evolution of Fashion Trends with One-Class Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01585/) (2016)
- [Learning the Difference that Makes a Difference with Counterfactually-Augmented Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12434/) (2019)
- [Toward Controlled Generation of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00955/) (2017)
- [Style Transfer from Non-Parallel Text by Cross-Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09655/) (2017)
- [Delete, Retrieve, Generate: A Simple Approach to Sentiment and Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06437/) (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)
- [Automatically Neutralizing Subjective Bias in Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09709/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Text Style Transfer using Language Models as Discriminators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11749/) (2018)
- [Hooks in the Headline: Learning to Generate Headlines with Controlled Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01980/) (2020)
- [Controllable Unsupervised Text Attribute Transfer via Editing Entangled Latent Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12926/) (2019)
- [Style-transfer and Paraphrase: Looking for a Sensible Semantic Similarity Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05001/) (2020)
- [Stable Style Transformer: Delete and Generate Approach with Encoder-Decoder for Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12086/) (2020)
- [Revision in Continuous Space: Unsupervised Text Style Transfer without Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12304/) (2019)
- [Towards A Friendly Online Community: An Unsupervised Style Transfer Framework for Profanity Redaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00403/) (2020)
- [The Style-Content Duality of Attractiveness: Learning to Write Eye-Catching Headlines via Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07419/) (2020)
- [Dictionary-Guided Editing Networks for Paraphrase Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08077/) (2018)
- [Natural Adversarial Sentence Generation with Gradient-based Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04495/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Prefix-Tuning Based Unsupervised Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14599/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text style transfer is a challenging text generation problem, which aims at altering the style of a given sentence to a target one while keeping its content unchanged. Since there is a natural scarcity of parallel datasets, recent works mainly focus on solving the problem in an unsupervised manner. However, previous gradient-based works generally suffer from the deficiencies as follows, namely: (1) Content migration. Previous approaches lack explicit modeling of content invariance and are thus susceptible to content shift between the original sentence and the transferred one. (2) Style misclassification. A natural drawback of the gradient-guided approaches is that the inference process is homogeneous with a line of adversarial attack, making latent optimization easily becomes an attack to the classifier due to misclassification. This leads to difficulties in achieving high transfer accuracy. To address the problems, we propose a novel gradient-guided model through a contrastive paradigm for text style transfer, to explicitly gather similar semantic sentences, and to design a siamese-structure based style classifier for alleviating such two issues, respectively. Experiments on two datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed approach, as compared to the state-of-the-arts.