# ArtFlow: Unbiased Image Style Transfer via Reversible Neural Flows

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.16877 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16877/

## Key facts

- Cited by 113 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [NICE: Non-linear Independent Components Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.8516/) (2014)
- [A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06576/) (2015)
- [Universal Style Transfer via Feature Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08086/) (2017)
- [A Learned Representation For Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07629/) (2016)
- [WaveGlow: A Flow-based Generative Network for Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00002/) (2018)
- [Glow-TTS: A Generative Flow for Text-to-Speech via Monotonic Alignment Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11129/) (2020)
- [Flow++: Improving Flow-Based Generative Models with Variational Dequantization and Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00275/) (2019)
- [Improved Texture Networks: Maximizing Quality and Diversity in Feed-forward Stylization and Texture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02096/) (2017)
- [Texture Networks: Feed-forward Synthesis of Textures and Stylized Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03417/) (2016)
- [Photorealistic Style Transfer via Wavelet Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09760/) (2019)
- [Demystifying Neural Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01036/) (2017)
- [A Closed-form Solution to Photorealistic Image Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06474/) (2018)
- [Visual Attribute Transfer through Deep Image Analogy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01088/) (2017)
- [Avatar-Net: Multi-scale Zero-shot Style Transfer by Feature Decoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.03857/) (2018)
- [Combining Markov Random Fields and Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.04589/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Image Inpainting via a Mutual Encoder-Decoder with Feature Equalizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06929/) (2020)
- [Fast Patch-based Style Transfer of Arbitrary Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.04337/) (2016)
- [StyleBank: An Explicit Representation for Neural Image Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09210/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Instance Normalization for Arbitrary Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06953/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 113)

- [Inversion-Based Style Transfer with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13203/) (2022)
- [Style Injection in Diffusion: A Training-free Approach for Adapting Large-scale Diffusion Models for Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09008/) (2023)
- [StyTr2: Image Style Transfer with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14576/) (2021)
- [StyleDiffusion: Controllable Disentangled Style Transfer via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07863/) (2023)
- [ARF: Artistic Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06360/) (2022)
- [Domain Enhanced Arbitrary Image Style Transfer via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09542/) (2022)
- [DEADiff: An Efficient Stylization Diffusion Model with Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06951/) (2024)
- [UnlearnCanvas: Stylized Image Dataset for Enhanced Machine Unlearning Evaluation in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11846/) (2024)
- [ArtFID: Quantitative Evaluation of Neural Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12280/) (2022)
- [CCPL: Contrastive Coherence Preserving Loss for Versatile Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04808/) (2022)
- [DiffStyler: Controllable Dual Diffusion for Text-Driven Image Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10682/) (2022)
- [ArtAdapter: Text-to-Image Style Transfer using Multi-Level Style Encoder and Explicit Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02109/) (2023)
- [Wavelet Knowledge Distillation: Towards Efficient Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06321/) (2022)
- [AesPA-Net: Aesthetic Pattern-Aware Style Transfer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09724/) (2023)
- [StyleTTS: A Style-Based Generative Model for Natural and Diverse Text-to-Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15439/) (2022)
- [General Image-to-Image Translation with One-Shot Image Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14352/) (2023)
- [OmniStyle: Filtering High Quality Style Transfer Data at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14028/) (2025)
- [Learning Graph Neural Networks for Image Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11681/) (2022)
- [SCS-Co: Self-Consistent Style Contrastive Learning for Image Harmonization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13962/) (2022)
- [CAP-VSTNet: Content Affinity Preserved Versatile Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17867/) (2023)
- [Neural Neighbor Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13215/) (2022)
- [StylizedGS: Controllable Stylization for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05220/) (2024)
- [AesUST: Towards Aesthetic-Enhanced Universal Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13016/) (2022)
- [MicroAST: Towards Super-Fast Ultra-Resolution Arbitrary Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15313/) (2022)
- [QuantArt: Quantizing Image Style Transfer Towards High Visual Fidelity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10431/) (2022)
- [Any-to-Any Style Transfer: Making Picasso and Da Vinci Collaborate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09728/) (2023)
- [Z^*: Zero-shot Style Transfer via Attention Rearrangement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16491/) (2023)
- [All-to-key Attention for Arbitrary Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04105/) (2022)
- [Name Your Style: An Arbitrary Artist-aware Image Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13562/) (2022)
- [S2WAT: Image Style Transfer via Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Strips Window Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12381/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Universal style transfer retains styles from reference images in content images. While existing methods have achieved state-of-the-art style transfer performance, they are not aware of the content leak phenomenon that the image content may corrupt after several rounds of stylization process. In this paper, we propose ArtFlow to prevent content leak during universal style transfer. ArtFlow consists of reversible neural flows and an unbiased feature transfer module. It supports both forward and backward inferences and operates in a projection-transfer-reversion scheme. The forward inference projects input images into deep features, while the backward inference remaps deep features back to input images in a lossless and unbiased way. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ArtFlow achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art style transfer methods while avoiding content leak.