# StyEmp: Stylizing Empathetic Response Generation via Multi-Grained Prefix Encoder and Personality Reinforcement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.02271 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02271/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 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 5 Aug 2024.

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

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [LUKE: Deep Contextualized Entity Representations with Entity-aware Self-attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01057/) (2020)
- [Diverse Beam Search: Decoding Diverse Solutions from Neural Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02424/) (2016)
- [A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08441/) (2020)
- [BRIO: Bringing Order to Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16804/) (2022)
- [Training Millions of Personalized Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01984/) (2018)
- [MIME: MIMicking Emotions for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01454/) (2020)
- [CEM: Commonsense-aware Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05739/) (2021)
- [Same Author or Just Same Topic? Towards Content-Independent Style Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04907/) (2022)
- [A Taxonomy of Empathetic Response Intents in Human Social Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04080/) (2020)
- [Less is More: Learning to Refine Dialogue History for Personalized Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08128/) (2022)
- [Perspective-taking and Pragmatics for Generating Empathetic Responses Focused on Emotion Causes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08828/) (2021)
- [PANDORA Talks: Personality and Demographics on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04460/) (2020)
- [Aligning Language Models with Human Preferences via a Bayesian Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05782/) (2023)
- [RECAP: Retrieval-Enhanced Context-Aware Prefix Encoder for Personalized Dialogue Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07206/) (2023)
- [Controlling Personality Style in Dialogue with Zero-Shot Prompt-Based Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03848/) (2023)
- [Exemplars-guided Empathetic Response Generation Controlled by the Elements of Human Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11791/) (2021)
- [DiffusEmp: A Diffusion Model-Based Framework with Multi-Grained Control for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01657/) (2023)
- [Reasoning before Responding: Integrating Commonsense-based Causality Explanation for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00085/) (2023)
- [CARE: Causality Reasoning for Empathetic Responses by Conditional Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00255/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Exploring Personality-Aware Interactions in Salesperson Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18058/) (2025)
- [Minority-Aware Satisfaction Estimation in Dialogue Systems via Preference-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05407/) (2025)
- [I Understand How You Feel: Enhancing Deeper Emotional Support Through Multilingual Emotional Validation in Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11875/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent approaches for empathetic response generation mainly focus on emotional resonance and user understanding, without considering the system's personality. Consistent personality is evident in real human expression and is important for creating trustworthy systems. To address this problem, we propose StyEmp, which aims to stylize the empathetic response generation with a consistent personality. Specifically, it incorporates a multi-grained prefix mechanism designed to capture the intricate relationship between a system's personality and its empathetic expressions. Furthermore, we introduce a personality reinforcement module that leverages contrastive learning to calibrate the generation model, ensuring that responses are both empathetic and reflective of a distinct personality. Automatic and human evaluations on the EMPATHETICDIALOGUES benchmark show that StyEmp outperforms competitive baselines in terms of both empathy and personality expressions.