Hist2Style: Histogram-Guided Stylization with Bilateral Grids
Authors: Dekel Galor, Adam Pikielny, Zhoutong Zhang, Ke Wang, Laura Waller, Jiawen Chen, Ilya Chugunov
Organizations: Adobe Nextcam · University of California, Berkeley
Abstract
Photorealistic style transfer aims to match the color and tone of an input image to that of a style target while preserving the content and details of the original scene. Although existing large image models can facilitate these kinds of appearance edits, their high computational demands, potential for hallucinations, and limited user control make them unsuitable for high-resolution, real-time workflows. We introduce Hist2Style, a bilateral-grid formulation for fast, edge-aware stylization that preserves visual fidelity by constraining operations to locally affine transforms in bilateral space. Our model distills a large image editing model into a lightweight network by training on a large supervised corpus generated with language and vision-language models, targeting spatially varying color edits. The network conditions on a histogram-based embedding of the style target to provide an interpretable interface for adjusting the output style by modifying the target color distribution. Overall, Hist2Style maintains content structure by construction, avoids hallucinations, and supports real-time, high-resolution photorealistic stylization with interactive user-controllable color and tone adjustments.
Given a content reference and a style reference, content-preserving style transfer requires the model to generate stylized outputs with content and style consistency. We introduced TeleStyle V1 to tackle this problem. However, TeleStyle V1 is trained with photorealistic content reference and artistic style reference, which makes it incapable to cope with artistic content reference and realistic style reference in most cases. In this paper, we designed a Self-Distillation data synthesis strategy to construct such triplets from TeleStyle V1. Trained with such self-distilled triplets, our TeleStyle V2 supports Content-Style references in the forms of Realistic-and-Realistic (RnR), Realistic-and-Stylized (RnS), Stylized-and-Realistic (SnR), Stylized-and-Stylized (SnS). In addition, we found Distribution Matching Distillation could preserve the general text-guided image editing capability of the foundation model and fix the content consistency degradation caused by SFT process. Through quantitative evaluations, our TeleStyleV2-QIE-2509-DMD performs at least on par with Qwen-Image-Edit-2509-DMD, demonstrating strong general image editing skills beyond content-preserving style transfer. We observed the content/style reference order confusion problem in TeleStyle V1 and further introduced prompt enhancer to solve it. TeleStyle V2 uses Qwen-Image-Edit's VLM encoder, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, to generate content prompt and style prompt for free. TeleStyle V2 could achieve comparable style transfer performance with state-of-the-art commercial model, gemini-3-pro-image-preview.
Recent advances in generative models have achieved remarkable performance in text- and image-conditioned editing. However, preserving the content of a given image while referencing style patterns from another remains challenging, often leading to uncontrollable stylization results. In this paper, we approach image stylization from the perspective of continuous control, aiming to enable modern Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based multi-reference editing models to (1) faithfully preserve the semantic structure of the content image, (2) render strong stylization effects, and (3) smoothly transition between the two. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective two-stage training strategy along with a style-strength-aware spline formulation. Specifically, in the first stage, the model is trained to produce strongly stylized outputs while preserving the content semantics as much as possible. In the second stage, with the base model frozen, we learn a set of anchor projectors that map various stylization strengths into the model parameter space. During inference, by performing style-strength-aware spline interpolation in a low-rank space, our method enables continuous control over stylization strength, even though the model is trained with only a few discrete strength levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method supports precise and continuous manipulation of stylization strength while generating high-fidelity results with modern DiT models. Project page: https://reychiaro.github.io/StyleController.
The style of a painting is not monolithic: color, texture, and structure may come from different sources. Existing reference-guided methods transfer them as one style signal, leaving each attribute's source and strength outside the user's control. We ask where in a diffusion model one attribute can change while the others hold, and find that no single representation isolates all three. The proposed StyleComposer therefore routes each style attribute through the representation where it separates best and coordinates the routes over denoising time. Without training or inversion, it satisfies three references and the prompt jointly more closely than prior methods, and exposes one strength slider per attribute. Project page: https://lexxsh.github.io/StyleComposer