# RewriteLM: An Instruction-Tuned Large Language Model for Text Rewriting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15685 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15685/

## Key facts

- Cited by 67 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [Adafactor: Adaptive Learning Rates with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04235/) (2018)
- [Compressive Transformers for Long-Range Sequence Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05507/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models Can Self-Improve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11610/) (2022)
- [Is ChatGPT a General-Purpose Natural Language Processing Task Solver?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06476/) (2023)
- [A Discourse-Aware Attention Model for Abstractive Summarization of Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05685/) (2018)
- [Multi-News: a Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset and Abstractive Hierarchical Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01749/) (2019)
- [Efficient Attentions for Long Document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02112/) (2021)
- [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)
- [BIGPATENT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Abstractive and Coherent Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03741/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Self-Training for Neural Sequence Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13788/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Controllable Text Generation using Transformer-based Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05337/) (2022)
- [BillSum: A Corpus for Automatic Summarization of US Legislation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00523/) (2019)
- [A Recipe For Arbitrary Text Style Transfer with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03910/) (2021)
- [Automatically Neutralizing Subjective Bias in Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09709/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [Statistical Rejection Sampling Improves Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06657/) (2023)
- [MINT: Evaluating LLMs in Multi-turn Interaction with Tools and Language Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10691/) (2023)
- [DRESS: Instructing Large Vision-Language Models to Align and Interact with Humans via Natural Language Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10081/) (2023)
- [LiPO: Listwise Preference Optimization through Learning-to-Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01878/) (2024)
- [A Design Space for Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14117/) (2024)
- [Aligning LLMs with Individual Preferences via Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03642/) (2024)
- [Can AI writing be salvaged? Mitigating Idiosyncrasies and Improving Human-AI Alignment in the Writing Process through Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14509/) (2024)
- [M4GT-Bench: Evaluation Benchmark for Black-Box Machine-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11175/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model Inference Acceleration: A Comprehensive Hardware Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04466/) (2024)
- [Practical Poisoning Attacks against Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03957/) (2025)
- [SemEval-2024 Task 8: Multidomain, Multimodel and Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14183/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models on Controllable Generation under Diversified Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00690/) (2024)
- [Beyond Sparse Rewards: Enhancing Reinforcement Learning with Language Model Critique in Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07382/) (2024)
- [Prompt Public Large Language Models to Synthesize Data for Private On-device Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04360/) (2024)
- [Waterfall: Framework for Robust and Scalable Text Watermarking and Provenance for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04411/) (2024)
- [HACo-Det: A Study Towards Fine-Grained Machine-Generated Text Detection under Human-AI Coauthoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02959/) (2025)
- [Montessori-Instruct: Generate Influential Training Data Tailored for Student Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14208/) (2024)
- [A Piece of Theatre: Investigating How Teachers Design LLM Chatbots to Assist Adolescent Cyberbullying Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17456/) (2024)
- [LLM-Friendly Knowledge Representation for Customer Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10331/) (2025)
- [KIWI: A Dataset of Knowledge-Intensive Writing Instructions for Answering Research Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03866/) (2024)
- [Help Me Write a Story: Evaluating LLMs' Ability to Generate Writing Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16007/) (2025)
- [TreeDiff: AST-Guided Code Generation with Diffusion LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01473/) (2025)
- [Towards an On-device Agent for Text Rewriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11807/) (2023)
- [DEFT: Data Efficient Fine-Tuning for Pre-Trained Language Models via Unsupervised Core-Set Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16776/) (2023)
- [Language Models as Critical Thinking Tools: A Case Study of Philosophers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04516/) (2024)
- [What's Producible May Not Be Reachable: Measuring the Steerability of Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17482/) (2025)
- [Back to the Future: Towards Explainable Temporal Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01074/) (2023)
- [Audio Description Generation in the Era of LLMs and VLMs: A Review of Transferable Generative AI Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08860/) (2024)
- [Progressive Document-level Text Simplification via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03857/) (2025)
- [Role-Augmented Intent-Driven Generative Search Engine Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11158/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in creative tasks such as storytelling and E-mail generation. However, as LLMs are primarily trained on final text results rather than intermediate revisions, it might be challenging for them to perform text rewriting tasks. Most studies in the rewriting tasks focus on a particular transformation type within the boundaries of single sentences. In this work, we develop new strategies for instruction tuning and reinforcement learning to better align LLMs for cross-sentence rewriting tasks using diverse wording and structures expressed through natural languages including 1) generating rewriting instruction data from Wiki edits and public corpus through instruction generation and chain-of-thought prompting; 2) collecting comparison data for reward model training through a new ranking function. To facilitate this research, we introduce OpenRewriteEval, a novel benchmark covers a wide variety of rewriting types expressed through natural language instructions. Our results show significant improvements over a variety of baselines. The public repository is available on GitHub under Google Research (https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/rewritelm).