Text Style Transfer

Adapting large language models to an individual author's style from a few examples is challenging, and scientific writing sharpens the difficulty: formal conventions leave little surface variation, and authors write about their own topics, so extracted ``style'' easily entangles with content. We study style-conditioned abstract generation from a few example abstracts per author and propose three methods: (1) contrastive activation steering, (2) a network that predicts steering vectors, and (3) a hypernetwork that predicts LoRA adapters. We find a consistent trade-off between style imitation and output quality: fine-tuning buys most of the available style signal but forfeits fluency, while the hypernetwork achieves the best trade-off on both seen and unseen authors. Our steering operates at author level, contrasting an author's abstracts against style-neutral generations for the same content. This holds topic fixed, removes the need for a predefined style inventory, and outperforms inventory-based steering. % [EDIT 1a] softened "no single optimal axis" claim Moreover, our analyses demonstrate that manually extracted and predicted steering vectors are near-orthogonal yet score comparably, indicating that style conditioning here can admit at least two unrelated directions rather than requiring one particular axis.

InMyStyle is a privacy first, single user system that adapts small language models to rewrite AI-edited text towards an individual user's writing style without an instruction prompt at inference. Given a user's documents, it uses multiple local helper LLMs to construct paired training examples and fine tunes LoRA adapters on base models ranging from 0.5B to 7B parameters. Length aware generation budgets and automatic chunking support inputs of different lengths. On 219 evaluation pairs from a scientific-paper corpus, the automatic composite score plateaus at 0.69 [scale 0-1] across all model sizes under both greedy and sampled decoding. This observed plateau suggests that small models are sufficient for the measured rewriting task, with model size determining trade-offs rather than a stable quality ranking. As a secondary evaluation, 400 ratings from five LLM judges give InMyStyle outputs a mean perceived AI-ness score over 20% lower than their helper-AI generated inputs, while mean perceived AI-ness scores decrease with model size within InMyStyle.

Style representation learning is a powerful tool for authorship analysis and modeling writing style, yet the latent nature of learned representations makes them difficult to interpret. Recent work has attempted to explain these representations by generating natural language descriptions with large language models (LLMs) conditioned on input text. However, such descriptions are often prone to the LLM's biases and hallucinations, and they lack an explicit objective and practical utility. In this work, we propose a novel framework for interpreting style representations through style-eliciting prompts: natural language instructions designed to steer LLMs to generate text that reflects specific stylistic attributes. We curate 1,010 distinct style features spanning 26 stylistic categories and construct a dataset by prompting an LLM to generate text conditioned on these features. Using this data, we train a decoder to generate a style prompt from the style representation of the generated text. We evaluate our approach on three tasks: (1) recovering original style prompts from generated text, (2) generating text in the same style using the recovered prompts, and (3) steering LLM outputs to match the style of human-written texts. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines that directly prompt LLMs with target text, achieving superior performance in both style description and style imitation. These results highlight that style-eliciting prompts can provide a practical and interpretable interface to stylistic information encoded in style representations.

Formality transfer is commonly framed as a symmetric bidirectional task between informal and formal registers. We argue that this framing conceals a supervision design flaw in existing benchmarks such as GYAFC: binary human rewrites encode relative stylistic shifts rather than absolute human notions of formality. Consequently, models learn to generate pseudo-formal outputs that satisfy benchmark labels while failing to produce genuinely formal language. We quantify this misalignment by re-evaluating benchmark formal labels under a human-aligned definition of formality, revealing substantial discrepancies that propagate to consistent informal-to-formal failures across model families. To address this issue, we reconceptualize formality transfer as a graded dimension rather than a binary attribute. We introduce a three-level spectrum: informal, casual, and formal, where casual serves as an explicit intermediate state that clarifies supervision signals. Based on this framework, we introduce 3LF, a dataset providing parallel supervision across all three levels. Training on 3LF substantially reduces informal-to-formal failures and improves alignment with human perception. For example, GPT-4.1-nano improves from 0.06 to 0.88 F1 in the informal-to-formal direction despite 3LF being significantly smaller than GYAFC. We further demonstrate that these gains cannot be reproduced through in-context learning alone and provide qualitative analyses of ambiguity-driven errors and meaning distortions. Overall, our findings demonstrate how supervision design shapes stylistic alignment and highlight the importance of alignment-aware benchmark construction in controllable text generation.

Handwritten text generation (HTG) conditioned on writer style has been widely studied for Latin scripts, but remains underexplored for low-resource and non-Latin writing systems, leaving open how well existing models generalise beyond the Latin domain. Cyrillic, particularly Ukrainian, lacks both large-scale writer-labeled datasets and empirical evidence of such generalisation. To address this gap, we construct a Ukrainian handwritten word dataset of 126,177 images from 308 writers using connected-component segmentation, quality filtering, and targeted oversampling of underrepresented Ukrainian characters. We retrain DiffusionPen, a MobileNetV2 triplet-loss style encoder with a CANINE-conditioned latent diffusion U-Net, on this dataset without architectural modification, testing direct transfer from Latin to Cyrillic. We evaluate cross-domain style transfer in three settings: cross-lingual transfer from IAM English samples, zero-shot transfer to an early 20th-century Ukrainian manuscript, and few-shot imitation of contemporary writers. The model produces legible, style-consistent word images, indicating that few-shot latent diffusion models generalize beyond the Latin-script domain. We release the dataset, trained models, and evaluation protocol as a reproducible benchmark for writer-aware Cyrillic HTG, providing a foundation for extending stylized HTG to other underrepresented writing systems.

Reproducing an empirical NLP study used to take weeks. Given the released data and a modern agentic-research harness, we redo every experiment of a recent ACL,2026 study on personal-style post-editing of LLM drafts -- and add three new ones -- with the human investigator acting only as a reviewer-in-the-loop. We reproduce all seven preregistered hypotheses and recover the paper's headline correlation between perceived self-similarity and embedding-measured self-similarity to three decimal places ($r{=}{+}0.244$, $p{<}10^{-8}$, $n{=}648$). Under a leakage-free held-out protocol, GPT-5.5 and Claude,Opus,4.7 close $71$--$75\,\%$ of the style gap to the same-author ceiling on $324$ paired tasks, against $24\,\%$ for the human post-edit, and beat the human post-edit on \sim$$80\,\% of tasks. We then frame the same data as an AI-text detection arms race. A leave-authors-out linear SVM on LUAR-MUD embeddings reaches AUC $0.93$--$1.00$ across approaches; six diagnostics show that GPT-5.5 detection is mostly a length confound while Opus detection is a genuine stylistic signature. Given $T{=}20$ feedback iterations against the frozen detector, an Opus agent flips two of five held-out test mimics to the human half-space and shrinks every margin by an order of magnitude. With moderate effort against a known detector, a frontier LLM can already efficiently lower its own AI-detection probability. All code, $648$ mimic drafts, trained detectors, diagnostics, and adversarial trajectories are released.

AI-generated content (AIGC) detectors are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings such as academic integrity screening, yet their reliability rests on a fundamental paradox: as language models are trained on human-written corpora, the statistical boundary between AI and human writing will inevitably dissolve as models improve. Commercial incentives have further distorted this landscape -- detection services and "de-AIification" tools often operate within the same supply chain, replacing evaluation of content quality with judgment of content origin. We present StyleShield, the first flow matching framework for conditional text style transfer, operating directly in continuous token embedding space via a DiT backbone with zero-initialized cross-attention adapters conditioned on frozen Qwen-7B representations. At inference, we adapt the SDEdit paradigm from image synthesis to text embeddings, with a single parameter gamma providing smooth continuous control over the evasion-preservation trade-off. On a multi-domain Chinese benchmark, StyleShield achieves 94.6% evasion against the training detector and >=99% against three unseen detectors, maintaining 0.928 semantic similarity. We further introduce RateAudit, a document-level scheduling algorithm that demonstrates detection-rate verdicts can be set to arbitrary values, directly questioning the reliability of score-based evaluation.

Globalization of graphic designs such as those used in marketing materials and magazines is increasingly important for communication to broad audiences. To accomplish this, the textual content in the graphic designs needs to be accurately translated and have the text styling preserved in order to fit visually into the design. Preserving text styling requires high accuracy word alignment between the original and the translated text. The problem of word alignment between source and translated text is long known. The industry standards for extracting word alignments are defined by Giza++ and attention probabilities from neural machine translation (NMT) models. In this paper, we explore three new methods to tackle the word alignment problem for transferring text styles from the source to the translated text. The proposed methods are developed on top of commercially available NMT and LLM translation technologies. They include: NMT with custom input and output tags for text styling; LLM with custom input and output tags; a hybrid with NMT for translation followed by an LLM with use of unigram mappings. To analyze the performance of these solutions, their alignment results are compared with the results of an attention head approach to gauge their usability in graphic design applications. Interestingly, the attention head strong baseline proves more accurate than the LLM or NMT approach and on par with the hybrid NMT+LLM approach.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the factuality of Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating retrieved documents and/or generated context. However, LLMs often exhibit a stylistic bias when presented with mixed contexts, favoring fluent but hallucinated generated content over factually grounded yet disorganized retrieved evidence. This phenomenon reveals that the utility of retrieved information is bottlenecked by its presentation. To bridge this gap, we propose QREAM, a style-controlled rewriter that aligns retrieved documents with a question-oriented style while preserving facts, better for LLM readers to utilize. Our framework consists of two stages: (1) QREAM-ICL, which uses stylistic seeds to guide iterative rewriting exploration; and (2) QREAM-FT, a lightweight student model distilled from denoised ICL outputs. QREAM-FT employs dual-criteria rejection sampling, filtering based on answer correctness and factual consistency to ensure high-quality supervision. QREAM seamlessly integrates into existing RAG pipelines as a plug-and-play module. Experiments demonstrate that QREAM consistently enhances advanced RAG pipelines, yielding up to 8% relative improvement with negligible latency overhead, effectively balancing question relevance with factual grounding.

AI-generated text has become common in academic and professional writing, prompting research into detection methods. Less studied is the reverse: systematically rewriting AI-generated prose to read as genuinely human-authored. We build a parallel corpus of 25,140 paired AI-input and human-reference text chunks, identify 11 measurable stylistic markers separating the two registers, and fine-tune three models: BART-base, BART-large, and Mistral-7B-Instruct with QLoRA. BART-large achieves the highest reference similarity -- BERTScore F1 of 0.924, ROUGE-L of 0.566, and chrF++ of 55.92 -- with 17x fewer parameters than Mistral-7B. We show that Mistral-7B's higher marker shift score reflects overshoot rather than accuracy, and argue that shift accuracy is a meaningful blind spot in current style transfer evaluation.

The task of authorship style transfer involves rewriting text in the style of a target author while preserving the meaning of the original text. Existing style transfer methods train a single model on large corpora to model all target styles at once: this high-cost approach offers limited flexibility for target-specific adaptation, and often sacrifices meaning preservation for style transfer. In this paper, we propose AuthorMix: a lightweight, modular, and interpretable style transfer framework. We first train individual, style-specific LoRA adapters on a small set of high-resource authors: this allows for the rapid training of specialized adaptation models for each new target using layer-wise adapter mixing via reinforcement learning, necessitating only a handful of target-style training examples. AuthorMix ranks first on the combined style-meaning score among all baselines, including GPT-5.1, and substantially improves meaning preservation over the trained baselines; under human evaluation it is the only method best-or-tied on every dimension.

Applying Small Language Models (SLMs) to Chinese character-driven generation remains challenging due to data scarcity and the difficulty of disentangling character style. Standard Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) often captures surface-level semantics but produces frequent Out-Of-Character (OOC) outputs. We frame this as a controlled sentence-level style rewriting task, which isolates stylistic quality from dialogue context management. We propose a Structured Style-Rewrite Framework that decomposes character style into interpretable format signature, syntactic, and pragmatic dimensions, combined with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) supervision for explicit style planning. A CoT-Shared Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) stage further aligns style planning with surface realization by ensuring preference learning targets output-level style execution rather than reasoning trace differences. Experiments across eight characters from four diverse source domains demonstrate that our method enables a Qwen3-1.7B model to achieve a Valid Style Score of $0.632$ while maintaining strong semantic fidelity (0.878), placing on the Pareto frontier among the evaluated systems and outperforming significantly larger baselines (e.g., GLM-4.7) on consumer hardware.

Text style transfer (TST) is naturally a supervised task - rewrite a sentence in a target style while preserving its meaning - yet the parallel corpora that supervision requires exist for only a handful of style domains. A common workaround is to normalize an input into a style-agnostic intermediate and then stylize it into the target style, but the normalizer is typically a lightweight, task-specific paraphraser applied only at test time, feeding a correspondingly small stylizer. We observe that a style-stripping normalizer already exists at scale: neural MT systems trained on hundreds of millions of general-domain sentence pairs preserve content while regressing toward generic phrasing, so roundtrip translation through a pivot language strips stylistic signal without any task-specific training. This turns normalization from an inference-time patch into a data-generation tool. Roundtrip-translating a monolingual in-style corpus yields a pseudo-parallel corpus on which we LoRA-finetune an instruction-tuned LLM as the stylizer (RT-SFT); applying the same normalizer to test queries keeps that stylizer in-distribution. We show that across four style domains, RT-SFT outperforms state-of-the-art methods, such as few-shot in-context learning, by considerable margins. We also report on effective retrieval augmentation methods for expert style domains with strict terminology and naming conventions.