Image Style Transfer

Style transfer lacks a reliable evaluation standard: ground truth is inherently ill-defined, and existing automatic metrics often fail to reflect human preference. This paper introduces ASTRA (Assessment of Style TRansfer Algorithms), an approach for automatic evaluation of style transfer algorithms; it contains two components, ASTRA-Data and ASTRA-Score. ASTRA-Data consists of a benchmark image set of content and style references, a collection of style transfer results generated on the benchmark set, and user study data capturing human judgements through a two-stage pairwise comparison protocol. From these annotations, we derive ranking-based ground truth for content preservation, style fidelity, and overall preference. Based on ASTRA-Data, we construct ASTRA-Score, a learnt evaluator that predicts preference-aligned scores from content-style-stylization image triplets, enabling automatic and scalable evaluation of new models applied to the benchmark set. Experimental results demonstrate that ASTRA-Score achieves substantially higher correlation with human rankings compared to prior metrics. Overall, ASTRA establishes a robust mechanism for standardised evaluation of style transfer methods.

Region-based neural style transfer enables fine-grained artistic control by allowing independent stylization of semantic image regions. However, compositing these regions often leads to boundary artifacts, degrading visual quality. We propose Interior-Guided Boundary Repair (IGBR), a lightweight and model-agnostic method that improves boundary handling in multi-region stylization. IGBR repairs boundary pixels using interior-guided propagation and applies inward, distance-based blending restricted to object-background boundaries, preventing inter-object style leakage. The method is derived from a region-wise constrained formulation with a closed-form solution and can be seamlessly integrated into existing stylization pipelines without retraining. To evaluate efficiency of our IGBR, we introduce quantitative metrics that measure boundary consistency, gradient artifacts, inter-object leakage, and interior preservation without requiring annotated stylized images. Our experiments and evaluations demonstrate that the proposed IGBR consistently produces plausible boundaries, outperforming prior blending techniques in boundary consistency, gradient stability, and interior preservation. The code is available at https://github.com/Son-SDT/IGBR.

Image stylization with latent-diffusion models entangles two independently refined axes: what a region depicts and how it is depicted. Such pipelines expose only global controls, yet professional retouching demands deliberate, region-specific control. We lift two conditioning weights already present in a ControlNet + IP-Adapter stylization pipeline from global scalars to per-location spatial maps, yielding local, per-axis control of content and style in a single generative pass. Because the two weights act on disjoint pathways, adjusting them independently spans a 2x2 retouching vocabulary, from free regeneration to identity preservation. We validate that edits stay confined to the retouched region and that each weight predominantly steers its own axis. Our approach requires no retraining and drops unchanged into any such pipeline.

Personalized image generation aims to synthesize text-driven images conditioned on reference images, while mainly casting the generation as image customization for foreground and style transfer for background. Previous arts of diffusion models suffers from the text misalignment with background for image customization and foreground for style transfer during the denoising process. Such facts, as we observed, rooted from the entanglement among hybrid frequency bands during the denoising process. To address such salient limitation, in this paper, we study personalized generation based on dual references - customization and color and style reference - and propose a paradigm to disentangle these Dual image references within Frequency-aware Diffusion Models, dubbed Dual-FDM, to simultaneously tackle two crucial personalized image generation tasks: customization style transfer and color style transfer, by disentangling different frequency bands via mask strategy within frequency domain. For customization style transfer, we replace the mid-frequency band of the background in the style reference with that from the foreground of the customized reference. For color style transfer, we substitute the low-frequency band of the background in the style reference with that from both the foreground and background of the color reference. Both the substituted frequency bands are used as the key and value to reconstruct the query foreground and background of the denoised personalized image.Extensive experiments validate the superiority of Dual-FDM over the state-of-the-art diffusion models for personalized image generation. Our code can be accessed from https://github.com/htyjers/Dual-FDM.

Adapting step-distilled text-to-image (T2I) models through post-training incurs additional computational costs and affects native few-step generation behavior. This motivates a complementary route beyond style-specific adaptation: drawing on the visual knowledge already encoded in step-distilled T2I models to elicit stylistic capabilities through language. Pursuing this direction requires textual guidance that captures how visual attributes jointly define a style and remain applicable as the depicted content changes. To explore this approach, we introduce StyleForge, a fully automatic, training-free framework that expresses reference styles as reusable rendering instructions. By integrating overall rendering characteristics with local color and lighting behavior, StyleForge organizes visual evidence from reference images into a coherent specification of how the target style should be expressed. The specification is then compiled into textual guidance that can be reused across content prompts, enabling frozen step-distilled T2I models to render different subjects and scenes in the reference style while retaining native few-step generation. Extensive experiments show relative gains of up to 29.47% in generation quality scores over the strongest baseline, while Pareto analysis indicates that improved stylization is accompanied by strong adherence to the requested content.

Complex surgical procedures around critical anatomy, such as the endoscopic endonasal skull base surgery, requires significant practice and training on the part of the surgeon before they are allowed to perform the operation on a live patient. This training in typically done in cadaveric specimens, due to them containing the same critical structures as a living human. However, cadavers are not a perfect 1-to-1 substitute for a living patient. The dead and preserved tissues of a cadaver are colored completely differently than a living human, and -- without complex and expensive pumping systems -- do not bleed in the same way. As a result, identifying the critical pieces of anatomy that make this procedure so complex can be quite different in a live case than in a surgeon's cadaveric practice. This paper presents EndoLive, a framework for real-time style transfer between cadaveric endoscopic video and living human endoscopic video. Our method combines the ConStructS GAN model for realistic style transfer for surgical applications, with the HyPER-GAN model that can learn complex translations and perform them in real-time. We train EndoLive on unpaired cadaveric and live images taken from an endoscope, and test the trained model with cadaveric video, on a variety of devices. Experimental results demonstrate that EndoLive can perform cadaveric-to-live translation at speeds well above the minimum necessary for real-time, while maintaining semantic consistency of critical anatomical structures. Our source code is available at https://github.com/griffhurt/endolive.

Style transfer aims to render target content in the style of a reference image, but existing methods often suffer from content leakage, where objects, layouts, or semantics from the style reference appear in the generated output. Although prior data-driven and training-free methods can reduce leakage, they often face a leakage-degradation dilemma: stronger content suppression may weaken style fidelity, while richer style preservation may reintroduce unwanted reference content. We identify this dilemma across the full style-transfer pipeline, including feature separation, feature-space grounding, and diffusion generation. To address these issues, we propose CLeaR, a training-free framework for content-leakage-resistant style transfer. CLeaR first uses Orthogonal Subspace Projection to define content-reduced style targets in each vision foundation model (VFM) feature space. It then performs Ensemble Inversion, which optimizes a shared pixel-space style anchor satisfying style constraints across multiple VFMs. Finally, Energy-Guided Calibration maintains style alignment during diffusion sampling by steering the denoising trajectory toward the ensemble-defined style manifold. We further provide a theoretical analysis showing that the style-anchor estimation error decreases with the number of VFMs. Experiments on StyleBench demonstrate that CLeaR improves style alignment, reduces content leakage, and achieves better LLM-as-Judge evaluation compared with existing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/0606zt/CLeaR.

Image style is a highly abstract, human-constructed concept shaped by a range of visual factors and intrinsically entangled with content, yet a unified and explicit definition of image style remains lacking. In this work, we first discuss the fundamental question of what is style and then propose a hierarchical style definition that describes image style from an overall style identity to fine-grained visual attributes, providing a more structured, transferable, and interpretable style representation. Based on this definition, we refine the style annotation pipeline of MegaStyle and construct MegaStyle++-8M, a large-scale style dataset containing 150K overall style identities, 1M fine-grained style prompts, and 8M stylized images. Extensive analyses demonstrate that our hierarchical definition substantially expands the style space in both diversity and semantic breadth, while precisely capturing intrinsic visual style of reference images. The dataset and code will be updated at https://github.com/Tencent/MegaStyle, we hope MegaStyle++ provides a scalable foundation for studying and modeling diverse image styles.

Artistic image synthesis aims to recreate the expressive visual identity of a target artist, yet existing methods often fail to capture an artist's global style. Conventional style transfer methods transfer the style of one or a few reference artworks to a content image in a One-to-One manner, making them effective for artwork-level stylization but limited in representing the broader stylistic distribution of an artist. Text-to-image diffusion models conditioned on artist names, such as '~ in Van Gogh style', offer greater flexibility, but they often suffer from text-induced bias and reproduce patterns from only a few iconic works. To address these limitations, we introduce Global Style Transfer (GST), an artistic image synthesis paradigm, in a Many-to-One manner, that aggregates multiple artworks from a target artist and transfers their shared global style to a single content image. For GST, we propose Global Style Guidance (GSG), which learns a residual global style offset in the intermediate feature space, or h-space, of a diffusion model under a fixed prompt. By learning artist-level style semantics purely from visual statistics, GSG mitigates text-dependent artistic bias. We further propose Content Alignment Guidance (CAG), a training-free perceptual guidance mechanism that preserves the semantic structure of the content image while allowing artist-specific geometric deformation. Experiments on WikiArt demonstrate that GST achieves superior stylistic fidelity, content preservation, and output diversity compared to existing style transfer and diffusion-based artistic synthesis methods.

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

Histopathological examination primarily relies on hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) and immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining. Although IHC provides critical molecular information, it is costly and requires specialized expertise. Stain transfer provides an efficient alternative by computationally generating IHC from H&E images, but remains challenged by unified and interpretable modeling for heterogeneous biomarkers under pixel-unaligned supervision. We propose DMCoStain, a novel Data-Model Co-optimization framework for Stain transfer. It iteratively co-refines training data and model capability, improving staining accuracy and interpretability in both pathological and structural consistency. To refine training data in a clinically meaningful manner, it incorporates the Multimodal Expert-Guided Finer Selection (MEGFS) strategy, built upon a pioneering IHC-positive-expression (IPE) vision-language model (VLM) that emulates pathologist reasoning. To support MEGFS, we construct ImmunoInstruction, the first large-scale IPE instruction-following dataset with 150K VQA samples. Extensive experiments on multiple tissues and biomarkers demonstrate that DMCoStain achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy. This paradigm offers strong practical value, and MEGFS also functions as a specialized evaluation tool for future model development. Dataset, code, and more details are in https://github.com/SikangSHU/DMCoStain.

Makeup-transfer applies the reference makeup to the source face while preserving the source identity. Despite advances in full-face editing by diffusion-based methods, strong regional controllability, makeup fidelity, and identity preservation remain challenging. The reasons are (i) pixel-to-attention misalignment that causes spillover into non-target areas and weakens regional control; (ii) unclear transfer/preservation concept separation under two-image conditioning, leading to coupling between makeup attributes and identity; and (iii) the lack of a high-resolution dataset that is identity-consistent and region-labeled for fine-grained supervision. In this paper, we propose MagicMakeup, a diffusion transformer-based framework for region-controllable and high-fidelity makeup transfer, built on spatial constraints and concept disentanglement. To enable precise region-specific editing while preserving identity, we propose Token-Aligned Region Gating, which aligns pixel masks with attention and applies region-specific logit gating. To clarify the concepts of transfer and preservation, we further introduce Cross-Modal Perception Guidance, which aligns text and image features to enhance cross-modal concept perception. We also design a pipeline for the generation of 1024 x 1024 data pairs through region-specific makeup removal and establish a unified benchmark in synthetic and real settings. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments show that MagicMakeup improves regional controllability, makeup fidelity, and identity preservation, with strong robustness across styles, races, and poses.

Style transfer remains a fundamental and highly important task across various data modalities, enabling creative manipulation conditioned by both reference images and textual descriptions. Recently, methods utilizing Gaussian Splatting have emerged as a unified representation for 2D images, video, 3D scenes, and 4D dynamics. However, representing videos and 2D images with Gaussian Splatting is structurally sub-optimal for dense continuous domains. The number of required Gaussians often approaches the total number of pixels, raising questions about the actual utility of such a representation for these specific modalities. In contrast, Implicit Neural Representations have established themselves as a much more popular and natural choice across all these data domains. Implicit Neural Representations naturally provide significant advantages, including data compression, inherent capabilities for super resolution, and seamless integration with deep generative models. To this end, we introduce OmniStyle-INR, a novel framework that leverages network-based continuous representations as a truly universal domain. Our approach successfully performs high-quality style transfer across all visual modalities, guided seamlessly by both text prompts and visual exemplars.

Hairstyle transfer aims to synthesize a photorealistic portrait by transplanting the hairstyle from a reference image onto a source subject while preserving the source identity. Recent foundation models show strong generative capability, but they struggle with the zero-shot disentanglement required for precise local editing, often entangling the reference hairstyle with its original identity and pose. Existing diffusion-based pipelines typically decompose the task by first generating a "bald" image from the source and then injecting hairstyle features from the reference. However, we show that this paradigm suffers from a fundamental leakage problem. Identity Leakage in Hairstyle occurs when hairstyle features retain reference identity or pose information, while Flaw Leakage in Bald arises when residual artifacts in the bald image are propagated into the final synthesis. To address both issues, we propose the Dual-Purification Framework (DPF), which introduces two complementary training-time regularizers. Adversarial Hairstyle Purification (AHP) purifies hairstyle features by suppressing identity predictability under a mutual-information-inspired adversarial objective. Contrastive Geometric Purification (CGP) regularizes the ControlNet pathway with a contrastive objective, reducing the model's reliance on geometric artifacts in the bald condition. By jointly purifying the hairstyle representation and geometric pathway, DPF achieves high-fidelity, identity-preserving hairstyle transfer and state-of-the-art performance on diverse benchmarks.

Photorealistic Style Transfer (PST) aims to transfer the color and tonal style of a reference to a content image while strictly preserving its structural integrity. However, existing deep learning-based methods inherently suffer from semantic entanglement caused by pre-trained image encoders, leading to unnatural spatial distortions. Moreover, current pixel-level mapping paradigms often ignore color gamut topology, resulting in color banding, while also lacking the multimodal capability for intuitive text-driven control. To address these bottlenecks, we propose StatLUT, an innovative multimodal framework for 3D LUT generation. First, we bypass traditional encoders and introduce a Lab-Extractor to derive spatially-agnostic statistical features, fundamentally decoupling color distributions from structural semantics to ensure artifact-free rendering. Second, we formulate LUT generation as a Transformer-based Seq2Seq translation task, utilizing a Multi-dimensional Residual Mapper (MR-Mapper) to predict topologically smooth 3D LUTs. Finally, to break the single-modal barrier, we propose the H-Diffuser, a lightweight Diffusion Transformer that directly synthesizes statistical features from natural language prompts, enabling flexible text-driven color grading. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that StatLUT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both visual quality and quantitative metrics, pioneering a highly robust and flexible paradigm for multimodal photorealistic style transfer.

Image-guided style transfer aims to apply the artistic characteristics of a style image to a content image while preserving its semantic structure and layout. Despite advances in diffusion-based methods, existing approaches often face challenges in disentangling content and style, particularly when independently optimized adapters are naively combined, causing conflicts between adapters and limiting controllability over the content-style balance in inference. We further demonstrate that training-free structural guidance directly derived from the content image through the internal attention of pre-trained model outperforms a dedicated content LoRA adapter in terms of structural fidelity and computational efficiency. Building on these observations, we propose AnyStyle, a streamlined framework for image-guided style transfer. The framework adopts a unified single-adapter paradigm for coherent style capture from the style image and incorporates training-free structural guidance from the content image, thus avoiding complex entanglement between multiple adapters and improving controllability and stability. Extensive experiments show that our method delivers competitive quantitative performance and significantly improved perceptual quality. Code is available at https://github.com/Yvan1001/AnyStyle.

Makeup transfer applies a reference cosmetic style to a source face while preserving its identity and geometry. However, this task is severely hindered by the lack of real paired training data. Current methods rely on either weak priors or synthetic pseudo-targets from large-scale editing models. These paradigms provide suboptimal guidance, often leading to degraded fine-grained details, synthetic artifacts, and identity drift. To this end, we propose Anchoring on Reality Makeup Transfer (ART), a two-stage framework with a reality-anchored refinement cycle. In Stage I, the model is initialized with pseudo-targets to establish basic semantic alignment and global makeup placement. Crucially, Stage II shifts supervision from pseudo-targets to the real reference, reconstructing it from its bare-skin counterpart through a differentiable cycle that penalizes any omitted detail and overrides synthetic artifacts. Furthermore, we introduce MakeupFaces2K (MF2K), the first 2K-resolution in-the-wild makeup portrait dataset comprising 8,573 images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior makeup fidelity, strong background stability, and robust identity preservation, especially for complex makeup styles.

Synthetic data mitigates the data scarcity problem in autonomous driving perception. However, the synthetic-to-real gap leads to performance degradation, hindering real-world model generalization. Although current methods leverage diffusion models for photorealistic style transfer to bridge this gap, they critically ignore a practical asymmetry: while synthetic data possesses perfect pixel-level annotations, real-world style reference images generally lack corresponding labels. Consequently, existing methods relying on symmetric semantic guidance suffer from either prohibitive annotation costs or severe semantic misalignment. To address this dilemma, we formally propose a novel task: Asymmetric Style Transfer for Autonomous Driving (ASTAD), which requires semantically consistent transfer using only labeled synthetic content and unlabeled real-world references. We further introduce the ASTModel, a training-free two-stage framework designed to bridge this domain gap under asymmetric constraints. ASTModel first extracts a coarse semantic prior from the unlabeled target, followed by dynamic prior refinement and class-consistent style injection during the denoising process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ASTModel significantly outperforms existing methods in downstream perception utility and structural fidelity, while offering a 3.2$\times$ inference speedup. This work aligns synthetic-to-real adaptation with practical constraints, holding the potential to accelerate the scalable deployment of robust autonomous driving systems. Code: https://github.com/Dingyi-Yao/ASTAD.

Hairstyle transfer has practical applications such as virtual try-on, yet remains challenging when the source and reference exhibit large head-pose discrepancies. We propose H-Adapter, which improves pose robustness by training with a region-specific loss that disentangles hair and non-hair objectives and thereby induces spatially disentangled cross-attention, from which a source-aligned hair edit mask is derived to guide diffusion-based inpainting. Experiments on pose-agnostic and pose-different subsets demonstrate strong quantitative results, including the best FID, $\mathrm{FID}_{\mathrm{CLIP}}$, and CLIP-I under pose differences, while maintaining competitive non-hair preservation and improving qualitative fidelity to fine-grained reference hairstyle details. Beyond source-conditioned transfer, H-Adapter supports practical extensions including text-to-image generation, auxiliary prompt-based hair color control, and compatibility with an identity-preserving IP-Adapter variant. We also introduce a VLM-as-a-judge protocol and observe consistent gains in hairstyle faithfulness, non-hair preservation, and artifact quality.

Style-content dual-reference generation aims to synthesize an image that preserves the structure and semantics of a content reference while adopting the style of a separate style reference.Despite recent progress, this setting remains challenging because models must balance content fidelity, style alignment, and instruction following avoiding semantic leakage from the style reference.A key bottleneck is the lack of large-scale triplet data with clean content-style separation and broad long-tail style coverage.In this work, we propose FreeStyle, a scalable dual-reference generation framework based on community LoRA mining.We treat community LoRAs as compositional anchors for style and content, and design a rigorous generation and filtering pipeline to construct large-scale Style-Reference and Content-Reference triplets across multiple base models.To address content leakage, we adopt a two-stage curriculum with stage-specific disentanglement mechanisms: an attention-level enrichment constraint that suppresses style-reference leakage in the style-transfer stage, and a frequency-aware RoPE modulation strategy that targets positional-correspondence-based leakage in the harder dual-reference stage.We also introduce a benchmark covering both style-reference and dual-reference generation, with evaluations on style similarity, content preservation, aesthetics, instruction following, and leakage rejection. The benchmark incorporates a style-invariant Content Alignment Score (CAS) and introduces a calibrated VLM-based Rejection Score for evaluating generation reliability and leakage suppression.Extensive experiments show that our model achieves a strong balance among style alignment, content preservation, and leakage suppression.

Makeup transfer models enable fun augmented reality (AR) experiences as well as virtual try-on (VTO) for online makeup shopping. While recent state-of-the-art diffusion based solutions such as Stable-Makeup dramatically improve the accuracy and realism of makeup transfer, they still face limitations in identity and skin color preservation, making production-level VTO for makeup shopping unrealistic. In this work, we propose MakeupMirror, a diffusion-based approach to makeup transfer that makes significant progress towards preserving facial features and skin tone. We introduce several technical innovations over Stable-Makeup: (1) integration of facial geometry conditioning with ControlNets to maintain facial fidelity; (2) region-specific makeup transfer control to enable precise makeup application across facial regions such as skin, eyes and lips; (3) skin tone-based makeup transfer modulation that prevent skin tone alteration in cross-subject transfer scenarios; and (4) integration of a Levenberg-Marquardt Langevin sampler to speed up inference while maintaining generation quality. Our experiments on CPM-Real, Makeup Wild, and (herein newly collected, more diverse) MakeupSelfies datasets show that MakeupMirror improves relative facial recognition similarity by +60%, reduces relative skin tone difference by -50% over Stable-Makeup, with a latency of 0.7s, while achieving expert acceptance rate of 94% across core facial identity preservation criteria.

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.

Diffusion-based style transfer must balance inference efficiency with stylization fidelity. Adapter-based methods are efficient, but they inject style as an external condition and can either weaken reference-specific appearance or copy reference semantics into the generated image. Optimization-based personalization methods such as LoRA internalize style more effectively, but require a separate training process for every new style. We introduce i2L (image-to-LoRA), a framework that amortizes style LoRA training into a single forward pass. Given one or more reference images, i2L predicts LoRA weights for a text-to-image model, enabling immediate style instantiation without per-style optimization. The architecture combines an image encoder, learnable LoRA queries, and compressed decoding heads that generate adapted matrices. Training on semantically diverse style pairs encourages the predictor to preserve appearance cues while suppressing reference-content copying. Experiments on Z-Image, FLUX.2, and Hidream-O1 show that i2L improves style fidelity, prompt alignment, and perceptual quality over existing baselines. Because i2L produces explicit LoRA weights, it also supports asymmetric classifier-free guidance, multi-reference style fusion, and composition with controllable-generation modules.

Transferring hairstyles between images is an important but challenging task in computer graphics, computer vision, and visual effects. It enables users to explore new looks without physically altering their hair, with applications in virtual try-on systems, augmented reality, and entertainment. Most prior works operate best under small pose gaps, and they fall short under large viewpoint and scale differences, where missing hair content must be synthesized rather than transferred. We propose HairPort, a 3D-aware hairstyle transfer framework that attempts to solve these issues by explicitly separating hair removal from transfer and enforcing geometric consistency before synthesis. We introduce a Bald Converter, which produces realistic bald versions of faces through LoRA-based in-context adaptation of FLUX.1 Kontext. To train our Bald Converter, we introduce a new dataset, Baldy, containing 6,000 paired bald and original images across diverse identities and conditions. We also use a 3D-Aware Transfer Pipeline that reconstructs and re-renders the reference hairstyle from the target viewpoint before compositing it onto the source image. Being 3D aware, our method supports large pose and scale discrepancies between the source and target. Finally, a conditional flow-matching generator synthesizes the transferred result from the bald source and geometry-aligned reference guidance. Together, our method enables accurate, pose-consistent, and identity-preserving hairstyle transfer, outperforming existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Content-Preserving Style transfer, given content and style references, remains challenging for Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) due to entangled content and style features. With a reverse triplet synthesis pipeline to build a million-scale training set and a dual-branch Style-Content DiT (SC-DiT) that decouples style and content via separate ROPE embeddings and causal masking, we observe that such a one-stage training paradigm on mixed style categories causes semantic styles to dominate, hindering texture style learning, and harming content preservation. To address these issues, we propose Style-CCL, a Multi-Stage Curriculum Continual Learning framework that trains SC-DiT from semantic (easy) to texture (hard) styles, and from clean to synthetic data, with Random Memory Rehearsal across stages to avoid catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Style-CCL achieves state-of-the-art performance in three core metrics: style similarity, content consistency, and aesthetic quality.

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.

Reference-based color grading aims to reproduce the tonal mood and lighting of a reference while preserving color harmony and scene structure. Existing photorealistic and filter-based methods often produce unstable tone mappings -- over-shifting or inconsistently retaining colors -- leading to unnatural results. We propose CanonCGT, a two-stage framework built on a canonical pivot -- a style-neutral intermediate representation for stable color mapping. The first stage canonicalizes the input by removing intrinsic tonal bias, and the second color-grades it to match the reference style. A dual-phase training scheme, DP-CGT, combines supervised preset learning with self-supervised refinement on unpaired photographs. CanonCGT delivers photorealistic and tonally consistent results across diverse datasets, surpassing state-of-the-art methods in stability and visual fidelity. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Jinwon-Ko/CanonCGT

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.

Style transfer with pre-trained diffusion models has advanced rapidly, but a core question remains underexplored: where in the model should style injection be strongest? StyleID, the leading training-free method, uses a single global parameter (gamma) uniformly across all layers and timesteps, which forces a fixed tradeoff between style quality and content preservation. We show this tradeoff is unnecessarily rigid. We systematically explore four dimensions of control: varying style injection strength across decoder layers, across denoising timesteps, and scheduling ControlNet geometric conditioning along both axes. The pattern is consistent everywhere: decreasing schedules, with stronger structural signal injection in shallower layers and earlier timesteps, reliably outperform the reverse. Beyond direction, schedule shape matters: cosine and square-root timestep schedules outperform linear. Most importantly, we find that gamma scheduling and ControlNet conditioning are nearly independent. The resulting combined configurations expand the Pareto frontier, offering superior tradeoffs between style fidelity and content preservation compared to any single baseline setting. Our best balanced configuration achieves ArtFID of 27.036 versus StyleID's 28.801 - a 6.1% relative improvement, with consistent gains across the full style-content tradeoff frontier. Results are validated across 35 configurations totaling over 28,000 stylized images using four complementary metrics. These findings generalize across SD backbones with identical rank ordering. All modifications are training-free, parameter-free, and require only a few lines of scheduling code; code is available at https://github.com/ameyskulkarni/scheduled_style_injection.