@inproceedings{liu-etal-2024-step,
    title = "Step-by-Step: Controlling Arbitrary Style in Text with Large Language Models",
    author = "Liu, Pusheng  and
      Wu, Lianwei  and
      Wang, Linyong  and
      Guo, Sensen  and
      Liu, Yang",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1328",
    pages = "15285--15295",
    abstract = "Recently, the autoregressive framework based on large language models (LLMs) has achieved excellent performance in controlling the generated text to adhere to the required style. These methods guide LLMs through prompt learning to generate target text in an autoregressive manner. However, this manner possesses lower controllability and suffers from the challenge of accumulating errors, where early prediction inaccuracies might influence subsequent word generation. Furthermore, existing prompt-based methods overlook specific region editing, resulting in a deficiency of localized control over input text. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel three-stage prompt-based approach for specific region editing. To alleviate the issue of accumulating errors, we transform the text style transfer task into a text infilling task, guiding the LLMs to modify only a small portion of text within the editing region to achieve style transfer, thus reducing the number of autoregressive iterations. To achieve an effective specific editing region, we adopt both prompt-based and word frequency-based strategies for region selection, subsequently employing a discriminator to validate the efficacy of the selected region. Experiments conducted on several publicly competitive datasets for text style transfer task confirm that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. Keywords: text style transfer, natural language generation, large language models",
}

Recently, the autoregressive framework based on large language models (LLMs) has achieved excellent performance in controlling the generated text to adhere to the required style. These methods guide LLMs through prompt learning to generate target text in an autoregressive manner. However, this manner possesses lower controllability and suffers from the challenge of accumulating errors, where early prediction inaccuracies might influence subsequent word generation. Furthermore, existing prompt-based methods overlook specific region editing, resulting in a deficiency of localized control over input text. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel three-stage prompt-based approach for specific region editing. To alleviate the issue of accumulating errors, we transform the text style transfer task into a text infilling task, guiding the LLMs to modify only a small portion of text within the editing region to achieve style transfer, thus reducing the number of autoregressive iterations. To achieve an effective specific editing region, we adopt both prompt-based and word frequency-based strategies for region selection, subsequently employing a discriminator to validate the efficacy of the selected region. Experiments conducted on several publicly competitive datasets for text style transfer task confirm that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. Keywords: text style transfer, natural language generation, large language models
Liu, Pusheng Wu, Lianwei Wang, Linyong Guo, Sensen Liu, Yang
Step-by-Step: Controlling Arbitrary Style in Text with Large Language Models