# Separating Style and Content for Generalized Style Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.06454 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06454/

## Key facts

- Cited by 64 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [StyleDiffusion: Controllable Disentangled Style Transfer via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07863/) (2023)
- [DG-Font: Deformable Generative Networks for Unsupervised Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03064/) (2021)
- [FontDiffuser: One-Shot Font Generation via Denoising Diffusion with Multi-Scale Content Aggregation and Style Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12142/) (2023)
- [Multiple Heads are Better than One: Few-shot Font Generation with Multiple Localized Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00887/) (2021)
- [Improving Diffusion Models for Scene Text Editing with Dual Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05568/) (2023)
- [Diff-Font: Diffusion Model for Robust One-Shot Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05895/) (2022)
- [DRANet: Disentangling Representation and Adaptation Networks for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13447/) (2021)
- [Disentangling Writer and Character Styles for Handwriting Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14736/) (2023)
- [Few-Shot Font Generation by Learning Fine-Grained Local Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09965/) (2022)
- [Look Closer to Supervise Better: One-Shot Font Generation via Component-Based Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00146/) (2022)
- [DeepVecFont-v2: Exploiting Transformers to Synthesize Vector Fonts with Higher Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14585/) (2023)
- [CF-Font: Content Fusion for Few-shot Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14017/) (2023)
- [ZiGAN: Fine-grained Chinese Calligraphy Font Generation via a Few-shot Style Transfer Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03596/) (2021)
- [Prior Image-Constrained Reconstruction using Style-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12525/) (2021)
- [Aesthetic Text Logo Synthesis via Content-aware Layout Inferring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02701/) (2022)
- [Visual Text Processing: A Comprehensive Review and Unified Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21682/) (2025)
- [XMP-Font: Self-Supervised Cross-Modality Pre-training for Few-Shot Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05084/) (2022)
- [AGTGAN: Unpaired Image Translation for Photographic Ancient Character Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07012/) (2023)
- [Style Equalization: Unsupervised Learning of Controllable Generative Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02891/) (2021)
- [Zero-shot Generation of Training Data with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15660/) (2023)
- [Intelligent Artistic Typography: A Comprehensive Review of Artistic Text Design and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14774/) (2024)
- [Few shot font generation via transferring similarity guided global style and quantization local style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00827/) (2023)
- [Few-shot Font Generation with Weakly Supervised Localized Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11895/) (2021)
- [SE-GAN: Skeleton Enhanced GAN-based Model for Brush Handwriting Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10484/) (2022)
- [SVG Vector Font Generation for Chinese Characters with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10329/) (2022)
- [GenText: Unsupervised Artistic Text Generation via Decoupled Font and Texture Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09649/) (2022)
- [FontTransformer: Few-shot High-resolution Chinese Glyph Image Synthesis via Stacked Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06301/) (2022)
- [FASTER: A Font-Agnostic Scene Text Editing and Rendering Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02905/) (2023)
- [Pencils to Pixels: A Systematic Study of Creative Drawings across Children, Adults and AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05999/) (2025)
- [Learning to Generate Poetic Chinese Landscape Painting with Calligraphy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04719/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural style transfer has drawn broad attention in recent years. However, most existing methods aim to explicitly model the transformation between different styles, and the learned model is thus not generalizable to new styles. We here attempt to separate the representations for styles and contents, and propose a generalized style transfer network consisting of style encoder, content encoder, mixer and decoder. The style encoder and content encoder are used to extract the style and content factors from the style reference images and content reference images, respectively. The mixer employs a bilinear model to integrate the above two factors and finally feeds it into a decoder to generate images with target style and content. To separate the style features and content features, we leverage the conditional dependence of styles and contents given an image. During training, the encoder network learns to extract styles and contents from two sets of reference images in limited size, one with shared style and the other with shared content. This learning framework allows simultaneous style transfer among multiple styles and can be deemed as a special `multi-task' learning scenario. The encoders are expected to capture the underlying features for different styles and contents which is generalizable to new styles and contents. For validation, we applied the proposed algorithm to the Chinese Typeface transfer problem. Extensive experiment results on character generation have demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of our method.