# Prompt-Based Editing for Text Style Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.11997 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11997/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)
- [Ups and Downs: Modeling the Visual Evolution of Fashion Trends with One-Class Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01585/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Machine Translation Using Monolingual Corpora Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00043/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Noisy Channel Language Model Prompting for Few-Shot Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04106/) (2021)
- [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)
- [A Recipe For Arbitrary Text Style Transfer with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03910/) (2021)
- [CGMH: Constrained Sentence Generation by Metropolis-Hastings Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10996/) (2018)
- [Few-Shot Text Generation with Pattern-Exploiting Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11926/) (2020)
- [A Dual Reinforcement Learning Framework for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10060/) (2019)
- [EditNTS: An Neural Programmer-Interpreter Model for Sentence Simplification through Explicit Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08104/) (2019)
- [Generating Sentences from Disentangled Syntactic and Semantic Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05789/) (2019)
- [PowerTransformer: Unsupervised Controllable Revision for Biased Language Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13816/) (2020)
- [Fighting Offensive Language on Social Media with Unsupervised Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07685/) (2018)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Style-Specific Neurons for Steering LLMs in Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00593/) (2024)
- [Bridging the Editing Gap in LLMs: FineEdit for Precise and Targeted Text Modifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13358/) (2025)
- [mEdIT: Multilingual Text Editing via Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16472/) (2024)
- [MEGen: Generative Backdoor into Large Language Models via Model Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10722/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Text Style Transfer via LLMs and Attention Masking with Multi-way Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13647/) (2024)
- [LMStyle Benchmark: Evaluating Text Style Transfer for Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08943/) (2024)
- [Visual Captioning at Will: Describing Images and Videos Guided by a Few Stylized Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16399/) (2023)
- [Style Transfer with Multi-iteration Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11581/) (2024)
- [ELI-Why: Evaluating the Pedagogical Utility of Language Model Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14200/) (2025)
- [Text Attribute Control via Closed-Loop Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00277/) (2023)
- [Mind the Style Gap: Meta-Evaluation of Style and Attribute Transfer Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15022/) (2025)
- [Transferring Extreme Subword Style Using Ngram Model-Based Logit Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08550/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Text Style Transfer: Applications and Ethical Implications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16737/) (2024)
- [FiSTECH: Financial Style Transfer to Enhance Creativity without Hallucinations in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05365/) (2024)
- [Policy Learning with a Natural Language Action Space: A Causal Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17538/) (2025)
- [Multi-Agent Large Language Model Based Emotional Detoxification Through Personalized Intensity Control for Consumer Protection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23123/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prompting approaches have been recently explored in text style transfer, where a textual prompt is used to query a pretrained language model to generate style-transferred texts word by word in an autoregressive manner. However, such a generation process is less controllable and early prediction errors may affect future word predictions. In this paper, we present a prompt-based editing approach for text style transfer. Specifically, we prompt a pretrained language model for style classification and use the classification probability to compute a style score. Then, we perform discrete search with word-level editing to maximize a comprehensive scoring function for the style-transfer task. In this way, we transform a prompt-based generation problem into a classification one, which is a training-free process and more controllable than the autoregressive generation of sentences. In our experiments, we performed both automatic and human evaluation on three style-transfer benchmark datasets, and show that our approach largely outperforms the state-of-the-art systems that have 20 times more parameters. Additional empirical analyses further demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.