Unsupervised Style Transfer for Text
Robert Gordan Mingu Kim
Abstract
Sequence to sequence translation is a fundamen-
tal problem in natural language processing that
aims to learn a mapping between two sets of se-
quences. Research on this problem has largely
focused on supervised contexts, where examples
in each set of sequences are paired with each
other. Machine translation is one area where
large quantities of supervised data exist for some
language pairs. In this paper we explore ap-
proaches to the unsupervised analog of the se-
quence to sequence mapping problem, where we
assume that a satisfactory mapping exists and
then attempt to learn this mapping. We explore
several approaches to this problem as applied
to transfer between different styles in the same
language. We present models employing back-
translation ideas and sentence encoders trained
on supervised tasks recovered from the data. Fi-
nally, we present qualitative evaluations of our
model based on transferred sample sentences,
and quantitative metrics based on pretrained
classifier models and paired style data.
1. Introduction
Learning sequence to sequence mappings is a well-studied
problem for supervised data. Work on unsupervised se-
quence to sequence models has approached the problem
both from a ”style transfer” and an unsupervised machine
translation perspective. The meaning of style in the con-
text of natural language is relatively unintuitive, when com-
pared to image style. We consider content to be all ele-
ments of natural language relevant to its semantic meaning,
and style to be all perturbations of natural language that do
not affect this semantic meaning. In this sense, style trans-
fer and machine translation are identical problems, because
this interpretation of style could be extended to encompass
linguistic differences.
Previous work on this problem has mostly modeled the
problem as one of learning a single latent vector represent-
ing content (for each sentence), and then used separate de-
coder networks, or a single decoder network with a style
indicator feature, to render the sentence in the appropriate
style. With this approach, the decoders must capture all the
information related to a given style. The problem then be-
comes one of aligning the latent vectors created by the en-
coder network from each style. One way to attempt to do
this is to use a Variational Autoencoder architecture. This
directly aligns the distribution of the latent representation
with a fixed prior, such as a multivariate normal distribu-
tion, meaning the model can be trained purely using re-
construction loss. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be
a strong enough constraint to align the latent distributions
well. Other ideas include the use of adversarial training
to achieve alignment. Discriminators can be applied both
directly to the latent representations to ensure alignment,
and to the generated sentences in order to ensure they are
distributed similarly to the true sentences of that style. In
theory, this latter method aligns the latent representations
indirectly. It also introduces the problem of propagating
gradients through the text generation process.
As we have noted, there is a strong parallelism between
translation and style transfer, and we explored an idea from
this literature, that of backtranslation, on the style transfer
domain. Backtranslation consists of transferring text from
one style to another, then back to the original style, where
reconstruction loss can be used. Gradients can only be re-
covered for the latter half of this process.
We have also explored the idea of using a fixed encod-
ing model trained on a supervised task to generate content
representations in the latent space. If the task is closely
aligned with the definition of content we have adopted,
then the sentence embeddings generated by this model will
be aligned without any intervention. Accordingly, we ex-
perimented with a skip-thought like sentence embedding
model, which learns sentence representations as inputs to
a classification task in which the goal is to choose the sen-
tences adjacent to the target sentence.
A persistent problem in the literature of unsupervised style
transfer is the lack of reliable metrics to evaluate models.
We look at cross-domain reconstruction loss as well and
qualitatively analyze transferred examples. Following the
example of past work, we use a yelp review dataset, com-
posed of positive and negative reviews.
 CS 287 Final Project Template
2. Background
The problem of unsupervised style transfer builds on the
rich literature of recurrent neural network architectures.
These architectures, such as LSTM and GRU have demon-
strated incredible success on supervised tasks. They form
the encoders and decoders and are thus the base of our
model.
While the neural network building blocks of our model
have showed success, the data that is available has prop-
erties that may conflict with our assumptions or render our
problem more difficult. First, we assume that the two con-
tent distributions (one for each style dataset) are identical,
but this is not necessarily true. Secondly, intuitively, style
may be organized at a higher level than the individual sen-
tence, which is not captured in our data. In some texts,
style and semantic meaning may be inextricably linked, es-
pecially literary works. We can comfortably ignore these
relative edge cases, because expecting neural networks to
learn such abstract relationships may be far-fetched in any
case, but common datasets such as yelp reviews may not
line up with our notions of style and content on a more fun-
damental level. Is sentiment style or is it content? While
these issues challenge our understanding of the problem
and our definitions of content and style, they don’t neces-
sarily inhibit the training of our model.
3. Related Work
Unsupervised image-to-image translation models (Zhu
et al., 2017) such as CycleGAN provide formidable exam-
ples of the power of the adversarial objective to achieve a
mapping between unpaired image data. The fundamental
innovation of CycleGAN is the use of the ”cycle loss” to
further constrain the mapping that is learned to be invert-
ible. While the natural language domain poses significant
additional challenges because of the discrete nature of text,
we nonetheless draw inspiration from the cycle loss objec-
tive in our use of ”backtranslation” for style transfer.
Most similar to our work in goals is that of Shen et al.
(Shen et al., 2017) They evaluate their style transfer model
based on sentiment modification performance, as well as on
artificial deterministic mappings. The two mappings they
choose are word substitution and word scrambling. Besides
a baseline VAE, they present two models. The first aligns
the latent distributions using an adversarial discriminator
on the latent vector. The second aligns the latent distribu-
tions using an adversarial discriminator on the generated
text. They employ a variety of tricks to create a differen-
tiable text generation process. First, they use the softmax
output of the RNN instead of sampling a specific word.
Secondly, they use ”professor-forcing” (Lamb et al., 2016),
which consists of running the discriminator network on the
hidden states of the RNN. While originally conceived of as
a method for regularizing RNNs, this process helps to avoid
the problem that one-hot word vectors would be easily dis-
tinguishable from softmax ones to a discriminator. Never-
theless, their results do not demonstrate convincingly that
their models learn an invertible cross-domain mapping (i.e.
one that preserves content).
We draw on the unsupervised machine translation literature
(Lample et al., 2017) for inspiration for our first model.
Lample et al. combine an adversarial discriminator on the
latent code with a cycle-loss-like ”backtranslation” pro-
cess, in which a transferred sentence is transferred back and
compared to the original sentence. They do not propagate
gradients through the text generation process. Additionally,
they use a Denoising Autoencoder (Vincent et al., 2008),
meaning that they perturb inputs with deletions and word
shuffles before attempting to encode and reconstruct. This
encourages local smoothness in the latent space. They ap-
ply the same process to transferred text before performing
backtranslation.
Finally, we make use of work on latent sentence represen-
tations. (Logeswaran & Lee, 2018) Logeswaran et al. train
their embedding model with a classification task in which a
classification network must choose which of several candi-
date sentences are neighbors in the original text to a given
sentence. This process is very fast compared to other neural
network based sentence encoding approaches, which is part
of its appeal. Learning good latent representation of sen-
tences that exclusively capture semantic meaning is closely
related to the style transfer because it would provide an in-
variant definition of content. This would extract much of
the underconstrained nature from the problem, making it
much easier.
4. Model
In unsupervised style transfer, we have two sets of sen-
tences X1 and X2 . For each example sentence, x1 ∈ X and
x2 ∈ X2 , we consider that it is a deterministic function of
a content random variable z sampled from p(z), a distribu-
tion over content. This content distribution p(z) is assumed
to be the same for both sets of sentences. The deterministic
invertible function is unique to each set of sentences. This
transformation represents the stylistic qualities of the sen-
tence, which in addition to the semantic meaning suffice to
render it. So we have:
F1 : X1 → Z
F2 : X2 → Z
And:
G1 : Z → X1
G2 : Z → X2
 CS 287 Final Project Template
where G(F (x)) = x. The task of the model is to learn
all four of the above functions, to be able to encode from
either style into the latent space and decode from the latent
space to either of the styles.
We model these functions using recurrent neural networks.
ht ← RNN(es (xt ), ht−1 )
The final hidden state of the encoder constitutes the latent
representation. Each word of the input sentence is embed-
ded before being fed into the RNN, and the embedding is
different for each style s, which provides a signal to the en-
coder about the origin style. We use an LSTM as the RNN.
The decoder is likewise an LSTM initialized with the latent
code as the first hidden state. In this case the hidden states
are mapped to one-hot word vectors when generating the
actual tokens.
This basic setup is shared by all of our models, but the train-
ing processes used to induce the properties we desire vary.
The natural extension of this model of unsupervised style
transfer is the introduction of latent style representations.
In this model, the functions would be parameterized by the
latent style vector, instead of training two separate decoders
or one decoder with discrete style indicator features. If the
set of style codes is S:
F : X1 ∪ X2 →< S, Z >
G :< S, Z >→ X1 ∪ X2
with the same inverse relationship holding. This is a much
more difficult problem because it is even more undercon-
strained. Unfortunately, we were not able to attempt to de-
velop models for this setup because of a lack of time, but it
may have been possible with the use of a fixed pretrained
sentence embedding producing the content code to do so.
5. Training
5.1. VAE
We implemented a Variational Autoencoder model as a
simple baseline. We used a multivariate normal distribu-
tion as the prior. Using the reparameterization trick, the
latent representation is that produced by the encoder with
gaussian noise added in. Following the VAE objective,
the loss function combines both a reconstruction loss and
a KL-divergence term which forces the latent distribution
to be close to that of the prior. The reconstruction loss
is found using ”teacher-forcing”, in which the correct se-
quence of tokens up to a given point is used in predict-
ing the next token. This process avoids using any non-
differentiable steps, allowing gradients to be propagated
backwards through the network.
5.2. Backtranslation
Instead of using KL-divergence to align latent distributions,
our backtranslation-based model uses a discriminator over
the latent space. This discriminator must classify latent
codes as corresponding to an encoding from one style or
the other. This gives us the objective:
Ladv (θE , θD ) =
Ex1 ∼X1 [− log (D(E(x1 , 1)))]+Ex2 ∼X2 [− log (1 − D(E(x2 , 2)))]
where E and D represent our encoder and discriminator,
respectively. This adversarial training can be interpreted
game-theoretically as a minimax game.
The backtranslation also employs reconstruction loss, sim-
ilarly to the VAE model. The key difference is the cor-
ruption of inputs as described in the related work section.
Because natural language is so sparse, it is possible to en-
code every input sentence in different places in the latent
space with spatial relationships that don’t correspond to
sentence similarity of the inputs. The noise helps to correct
this problem by making sure similar sentences are close to
each other in latent space, improving the generalizability of
the model.
The backtranslation model also takes advantage of a cross-
domain loss by transferring from one style to another and
then back. This can be viewed as a nearly analogous train-
ing procedure to the original reconstruction loss, because
the gradients are only passed through the second transfer.
For baseline calculations, we implemented this model
roughly following the parameter choices in the original pa-
per. We used a 2-layer, bidirectional LSTM with hidden
state size of 300 as our encoder. Our decoder used has 2
layers, and sentences were generated greedily. The LSTM
layers were shared between the source and target encoder,
as well as between the source and target decoder. Only
the embeddings were changed by the specification of lan-
guage as input to the encoder and decoder. The encoder
and decoder are trained using Adam, with a learning rate
of 0.0005, and a mini-batch size of 64. Our discriminator
is a multilayer perceptron with 3 hidden layers of size 1024
with ReLU activation functions and a sigmoid output unit.
Our discriminator was trained using Adam with a learning
rate of 0.0005. The encoder-decoder and the discrimina-
tor were trained by evenly alternating the gradient update
steps.
5.3. Sentence Embedding Model
We were originally unconvinced, however, that the back-
translation model would be completely effective for style
transfer. For example, its adversarial training components
as well as its seq2seq framework makes training difficult to
do. We argue that a successful model requires an encoder
 CS 287 Final Project Template

that can provide rich latent presentations of sentences, in
order for decoders to properly incorporate stylistic ele-
ments with minimal effort for recovering content. There-
fore, we wanted to implement an encoder framework in-
spired by skip-thought vector models for training.
The classification network we use to choose the correct
neighboring sentences given a target sentence is simply a
cosine similarity measure, which leaves all of the responsi-
bility of proper sentence embedding left for the encoder.
Source i would absolutely stay there again !
VAE we then think it ’s little horrible - now i can have had unk !
Backtranslation model i will never go back again !
Source nice place to eat pizza and great service .
VAE don’t waste this way to sit and get their good food and went to say .
Backtranslation model a little annoying with the pizza , not good .
Source nice location and shop is professional looking .
VAE and the service i have had to mad and the reviews is going along .
Backtranslation model a little slow , and the wait was empty .
Table 1. Sentiment transfer on Yelp reviews- each generated sen-
tence is a transfer from a positive sentence to a negative one.

5.4. REINFORCE Source (Shakespeare) who was t came by ?

Backtranslation model
We initially planned to use reinforcement learning as a way Backtranslation + SE model
Sparknotes original
to train our models directly from adversarial discrimina- Source (Shakespeare)
tors on transferred text. Although previous works rejected Backtranslation model
the use of reinforcement learning for its notoriously high Backtranslation + SE model
Sparknotes original
variance in this context, we hoped that a sufficiently strong Source ( Shakespeare)
model trained using another method would be able to bene- Backtranslation model
fit from further training using REINFORCE. We coded the Backtranslation + SE model
Sparknotes original
infrastructure to use this algorithm but were never able to
produce a sufficiently strong model that we reached this Table 2. Style transfer between writing by Shakespeare and mod-
stage. ern English
tell tell tell tell tell with me .
who came by?
who was it that came here?
the sky doth frown and unk upon our army .
dont take me to see me , and i ll have you .
sad days, they are here.
he sky frowns and scowls on our army.
all three now marry in an instant .
come on , when they re traitor .
three now come marry
All three of us will marry now in death.

6. Methods
The models were implemented using Pytorch.
For the sentiment modification task we use the yelp re-
views dataset. (yel) Following Shen et al., we consider
ratings above 3 to be attached to positive reviews and any-
thing lower to be attached to negative reviews. We con-
sider all sentences to have the sentiment of the overall re-
view. We mitigate this problem by dropping longer sen-
tences and longer reviews overall, which they argue cor-
relate with increased use of sentiment-neutral background
sentences. The final dataset has 250K negative sentences
and 350K positive ones.
When training our sentence embedding model, we used the
Children’s Book Test dataset (Hill et al., 2015) and the ”All
the news” Kaggle dataset (new). Combined, these datasets
have approximately a million sentences. Unfortunately, we
were unable to use this trained encoder for our experiments,
because we ran out of time.
We used cross entropy loss to measure reconstruction loss.
A major issue with style transfer is the lack of clear met-
rics because for unsupervised datasets there are no labels to
compare with directly and pre-trained classifiers may make
mistakes in similar ways to generators trained adversari-
ally with classifiers. Instead, we use supervised data, a col-
lection of Shakespeare sentences and their modern English
equivalents. We can then compare transferred examples to
the actual equivalents as created by a human. We were able
to train our sentence embedding model on these Shake-
speare sentences, with the goal of seeing whether a simple
alternative to normal encoder-decoder training could actu-
ally perform equally or even better.
7. Results
The results from Table 1 show our two baseline models for
the sentiment transfer task, as a proof of concept to show
how machine translation models perform well. Indeed, as a
replication of past reports, we can see that the VAE model
did not perform very well, because it was unable to capture
the content of the sentence and also struggled to generate
complete sentences.
The backtranslation model did noticeably better, as it was
able to preserve the content and correctly change key words
to transfer sentiment. However, the last sentence is an ex-
ample of where the model did not do a very good job.
In the Shakespeare task in Table 2, we can actually see that
our pretrained backtranslation model with frozen encoder
weights was most effective, although it still struggled with
preserving content.
8. Discussion
None of our models produced satisfactory performance on
this task. Perhaps informatively, though, each failed in
slightly different ways. The naive Variational Autoencoder
model, on the sentiment modification task, frequently pro-
duced transferred sentences that reflected the target style
 CS 287 Final Project Template

but completely abandoned any semantic resemblance to the
original sentence. This hints that the VAE architecture is
not capable of aligning the two latent distributions. This
could reflect something relatively simple, such as the la-
tent representation of one style being a rotation of the la-
tent style representation of another, or it may indicate some
deeper failure mode. The VAE learns to perfectly recon-
struct input sentences that are decoded from the latent space
to the same style.
The backtranslation produced qualitatively better results,
but suffered in general from a similar inability to preserve
semantic meaning.
We argue that sentiment transfer is a very simplified form
of general style transfer, and in many ways cannot be seen
as style transfer in the literary sense at all. Therefore, we
speculated that the backtranslation model, although it per-
formed acceptably in sentiment transfer, would not be able
to capture other forms of style transfer effectively.
9. Conclusion
Ultimately, our models failed to produce meaningful re-
sults. As noted in our discussion section, none of our mod-
els truly succeeded in preserving semantic meaning across
style transfer. There are several potential reasons for this.
First, it is possible that our models had insufficiently pro-
longed training when compared to their machine transla-
tion inspirations. It is also possible that some of our as-
sumptions, such as a shared content distribution, were vio-
lated by the data we used, subverting our goals.
Whatever the case, our models were not capable of align-
ing the latent representations. The first continuation of our
work would be further experimentation with and training of
the skip-thought sentence encoding model. Such a model
might completely sidestep the latent space alignment prob-
lem. The logical next step from models using discrete style
features is continuous representations of style. With a fixed
content encoder, one could use an adversarial discriminator
to disentangle the style representation.
Unsupervised style transfer for natural language remains an
open problem, with everything from the alignment problem
to the absence of accepted metrics lacking clear solutions.
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https://www.kaggle.com/snapcrack/all-the-news.

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