Textual style transfer is the task of transforming stylistic properties of text while preserving meaning. Target "styles" can be defined in numerous ways, ranging from single attributes (e.g, formality) to authorship (e.g, Shakespeare). Previous unsupervised style-transfer approaches generally rely on significant amounts of labeled data for only a fixed set of styles or require large language models. In contrast, we introduce a novel diffusion-based framework for general-purpose style transfer that can be flexibly adapted to arbitrary target styles at inference time. Our parameter-efficient approach, ParaGuide, leverages paraphrase-conditioned diffusion models alongside gradient-based guidance from both off-the-shelf classifiers and strong existing style embedders to transform the style of text while preserving semantic information. We validate the method on the Enron Email Corpus, with both human and automatic evaluations, and find that it outperforms strong baselines on formality, sentiment, and even authorship style transfer.

文本样式转换是将文本的样式特征进行转换而保留其含义的任务。我们引入了一种新颖的基于扩散的通用样式转换框架ParaGuide，它可以在推理时灵活地适应任意目标样式，利用改进的扩散模型，结合来自现成分类器和强大的已有样式嵌入器的梯度引导，以转换文本的样式同时保留语义信息。我们在Enron Email Corpus上进行人工和自动评估，发现该方法在正式化、情感以及甚至作者风格转换方面均超越了强大的基准。

ParaGuide: 文本风格转换的引导扩散改写器