# Steering Large Language Models with Register Analysis for Arbitrary Style Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00679 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00679/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 May 2025.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Neural Network Acceptability Judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12471/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [A Recipe For Arbitrary Text Style Transfer with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03910/) (2021)
- [ASSET: A Dataset for Tuning and Evaluation of Sentence Simplification Models with Multiple Rewriting Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00481/) (2020)
- [Same Author or Just Same Topic? Towards Content-Independent Style Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04907/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Style Transfer for Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02295/) (2019)
- [Shakespearizing Modern Language Using Copy-Enriched Sequence-to-Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01161/) (2017)
- [Paragraph-level Simplification of Medical Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05767/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Content preserving text generation with attribute controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01135/) (2018)
- [Keep it Simple: Unsupervised Simplification of Multi-Paragraph Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03444/) (2021)
- [A Deep Metric Learning Approach to Account Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07263/) (2021)
- [APPDIA: A Discourse-aware Transformer-based Style Transfer Model for Offensive Social Media Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08207/) (2022)
- [Multiple-Attribute Text Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00552/) (2018)
- [StyleRemix: Interpretable Authorship Obfuscation via Distillation and Perturbation of Style Elements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15666/) (2024)
- [TinyStyler: Efficient Few-Shot Text Style Transfer with Authorship Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15586/) (2024)
- [Do Text Simplification Systems Preserve Meaning? A Human Evaluation via Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10126/) (2023)
- [Detecting Text Formality: A Study of Text Classification Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08975/) (2022)
- [Text Detoxification as Style Transfer in English and Hindi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07767/) (2024)
- [Keep It Private: Unsupervised Privatization of Online Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10260/) (2024)
- [Low-Resource Authorship Style Transfer: Can Non-Famous Authors Be Imitated?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08986/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Unveiling Unicode's Unseen Underpinnings in Undermining Authorship Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15840/) (2025)
- [From Instruction to Output: The Role of Prompting in Modern NLG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11179/) (2026)
- [Authorship Impersonation via LLM Prompting does not Evade Authorship Verification Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29454/) (2026)
- [Casual as an Anchor: Resolving Supervision Misalignment in Formality Transfer Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29365/) (2026)
- [Can Activation Steering Capture Multidimensional Authorship Style?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04792/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in rewriting text across various styles. However, effectively leveraging this ability for example-based arbitrary style transfer, where an input text is rewritten to match the style of a given exemplar, remains an open challenge. A key question is how to describe the style of the exemplar to guide LLMs toward high-quality rewrites. In this work, we propose a prompting method based on register analysis to guide LLMs to perform this task. Empirical evaluations across multiple style transfer tasks show that our prompting approach enhances style transfer strength while preserving meaning more effectively than existing prompting strategies.