# PhotoWCT2: Compact Autoencoder for Photorealistic Style Transfer Resulting from Blockwise Training and Skip Connections of High-Frequency Residuals

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.11995 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11995/

## Key facts

- Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Deep Laplacian Pyramid Networks for Fast and Accurate Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03915/) (2017)
- [NIMA: Neural Image Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05424/) (2017)
- [Universal Style Transfer via Feature Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08086/) (2017)
- [Deep Generative Image Models using a Laplacian Pyramid of Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05751/) (2015)
- [Deep Photo Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07511/) (2017)
- [Photorealistic Style Transfer via Wavelet Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09760/) (2019)
- [A Closed-form Solution to Photorealistic Image Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06474/) (2018)
- [Avatar-Net: Multi-scale Zero-shot Style Transfer by Feature Decoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.03857/) (2018)
- [Greedy Layerwise Learning Can Scale to ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11446/) (2018)
- [Fast Patch-based Style Transfer of Arbitrary Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.04337/) (2016)
- [Lightweight Pyramid Networks for Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06173/) (2018)
- [Densely Residual Laplacian Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12021/) (2019)
- [Ultrafast Photorealistic Style Transfer via Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02398/) (2019)
- [Joint Bilateral Learning for Real-time Universal Photorealistic Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10955/) (2020)
- [LAPRAN: A Scalable Laplacian Pyramid Reconstructive Adversarial Network for Flexible Compressive Sensing Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09388/) (2018)
- [A Tale of Two Bases: Local-Nonlocal Regularization on Image Patches with Convolution Framelets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01377/) (2016)

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

- [Neural Preset for Color Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13511/) (2023)
- [FreGAN: Exploiting Frequency Components for Training GANs under Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05461/) (2022)
- [Transforming Radiance Field with Lipschitz Network for Photorealistic 3D Scene Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13232/) (2023)
- [PCA-Based Knowledge Distillation Towards Lightweight and Content-Style Balanced Photorealistic Style Transfer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13452/) (2022)
- [Color Conditional Generation with Sliced Wasserstein Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19034/) (2025)
- [FPRF: Feed-Forward Photorealistic Style Transfer of Large-Scale 3D Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05516/) (2024)
- [Video Color Grading via Look-Up Table Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00548/) (2025)
- [Breaching FedMD: Image Recovery via Paired-Logits Inversion Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11436/) (2023)
- [Color Transfer with Modulated Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19062/) (2025)
- [Color Prompting for Data-Free Continual Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10716/) (2023)
- [Modernizing Old Photos Using Multiple References via Photorealistic Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04461/) (2023)
- [Style Spectroscope: Improve Interpretability and Controllability through Fourier Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06140/) (2022)
- [AquaFuse: Waterbody Fusion for Physics Guided View Synthesis of Underwater Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01119/) (2024)
- [Personalized Image Filter: Mastering Your Photographic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16791/) (2025)
- [DSI2I: Dense Style for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13253/) (2022)
- [Color and Texture Dual Pipeline Lightweight Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01321/) (2023)
- [FPGS: Feed-Forward Semantic-aware Photorealistic Style Transfer of Large-Scale Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09635/) (2025)
- [UStyle: Waterbody Style Transfer of Underwater Scenes by Depth-Guided Feature Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11893/) (2025)
- [Towards In-Context Tone Style Transfer with A Large-Scale Triplet Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16114/) (2026)
- [CanonCGT: Reference-Based Color Grading via Canonical Pivot Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01638/) (2026)
- [Multimodal 3D LUT Generation via StatLUT with Statistical Features for Photorealistic Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08227/) (2026)
- [Image Style Transfer: from Artistic to Photorealistic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06328/) (2022)
- [Line Search-Based Feature Transformation for Fast, Stable, and Tunable Content-Style Control in Photorealistic Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05996/) (2022)
- [Region-controlled Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15658/) (2023)
- [Dual Pipeline Style Transfer with Input Distribution Differentiation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05432/) (2023)
- [MRStyle: A Unified Framework for Color Style Transfer with Multi-Modality Reference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05250/) (2024)
- [ReSWD: ReSTIR'd, not shaken. Combining Reservoir Sampling and Sliced Wasserstein Distance for Variance Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01061/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Content Shift and Hallucination in GenAI Image Editing via Structural Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30437/) (2026)
- [Hist2Style: Histogram-Guided Stylization with Bilateral Grids](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01819/) (2026)
- [ColorFM: An Optimization-to-Learning Framework for Color Transfer via Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07119/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Photorealistic style transfer is an image editing task with the goal to modify an image to match the style of another image while ensuring the result looks like a real photograph. A limitation of existing models is that they have many parameters, which in turn prevents their use for larger image resolutions and leads to slower run-times. We introduce two mechanisms that enable our design of a more compact model that we call PhotoWCT2, which preserves state-of-art stylization strength and photorealism. First, we introduce blockwise training to perform coarse-to-fine feature transformations that enable state-of-art stylization strength in a single autoencoder in place of the inefficient cascade of four autoencoders used in PhotoWCT. Second, we introduce skip connections of high-frequency residuals in order to preserve image quality when applying the sequential coarse-to-fine feature transformations. Our PhotoWCT2 model requires fewer parameters (e.g., 30.3% fewer) while supporting higher resolution images (e.g., 4K) and achieving faster stylization than existing models.