Style Transfer with Multi-iteration Preference Optimization

Shuai Liu, Jonathan May


Abstract
Numerous recent techniques for text style transfer characterize their approaches as variants of reinforcement learning and preference optimization. In this work, we consider the relationship between these approaches and a class of optimization approaches developed primarily for (non-neural) statistical machine translation, formerly known as ‘tuning’. Inspired by these techniques from the past, we improve upon established preference optimization approaches, incorporating multiple iterations of exploration and optimization, and choosing contrastive examples by following a ‘hope’ vs ‘fear’ sampling strategy. Cognizant of the difference between machine translation and style transfer, however, we further tailor our framework with a new pseudo-parallel data generation method and a dynamic weighted reward aggregation method to tackle the lack of parallel data and the need for a multi-objective reward. We evaluate our model on two commonly used text style transfer datasets. Through automatic and human evaluation results we show the effectiveness and the superiority of our model compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.135
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2663–2681
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.135/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shuai Liu and Jonathan May. 2025. Style Transfer with Multi-iteration Preference Optimization. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2663–2681, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Style Transfer with Multi-iteration Preference Optimization (Liu & May, NAACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.135.pdf