# DCT-Net: Domain-Calibrated Translation for Portrait Stylization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.02426 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02426/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00951/) (2020)
- [Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03189/) (2019)
- [MaskGAN: Towards Diverse and Interactive Facial Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11922/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00848/) (2017)
- [Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02766/) (2021)
- [Pivotal Tuning for Latent-based Editing of Real Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05744/) (2021)
- [In-Domain GAN Inversion for Real Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00049/) (2020)
- [GAN Inversion: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05278/) (2021)
- [Image2StyleGAN++: How to Edit the Embedded Images?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11544/) (2019)
- [Generative Visual Manipulation on the Natural Image Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03552/) (2016)
- [Few-shot Image Generation via Cross-domain Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06820/) (2021)
- [U-GAT-IT: Unsupervised Generative Attentional Networks with Adaptive Layer-Instance Normalization for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10830/) (2019)
- [Seeing What a GAN Cannot Generate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11626/) (2019)
- [Inverting The Generator Of A Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05644/) (2016)
- [Invertible Conditional GANs for image editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06355/) (2016)
- [Resolution Dependent GAN Interpolation for Controllable Image Synthesis Between Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05334/) (2020)
- [StyleGAN2 Distillation for Feed-forward Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03581/) (2020)
- [WarpGAN: Automatic Caricature Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10100/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Scenimefy: Learning to Craft Anime Scene via Semi-Supervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12968/) (2023)
- [AlteredAvatar: Stylizing Dynamic 3D Avatars with Fast Style Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19245/) (2023)
- [Realtime Data-Efficient Portrait Stylization Based On Geometric Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15549/) (2022)
- [Training-Free Diffusion Framework for Stylized Image Generation with Identity Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06802/) (2025)
- [StyleID: A Perception-Aware Dataset and Metric for Stylization-Agnostic Facial Identity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21689/) (2026)
- [GenEAva: Generating Cartoon Avatars with Fine-Grained Facial Expressions from Realistic Diffusion-based Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07945/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces DCT-Net, a novel image translation architecture for few-shot portrait stylization. Given limited style exemplars (~100), the new architecture can produce high-quality style transfer results with advanced ability to synthesize high-fidelity contents and strong generality to handle complicated scenes (e.g., occlusions and accessories). Moreover, it enables full-body image translation via one elegant evaluation network trained by partial observations (i.e., stylized heads). Few-shot learning based style transfer is challenging since the learned model can easily become overfitted in the target domain, due to the biased distribution formed by only a few training examples. This paper aims to handle the challenge by adopting the key idea of "calibration first, translation later" and exploring the augmented global structure with locally-focused translation. Specifically, the proposed DCT-Net consists of three modules: a content adapter borrowing the powerful prior from source photos to calibrate the content distribution of target samples; a geometry expansion module using affine transformations to release spatially semantic constraints; and a texture translation module leveraging samples produced by the calibrated distribution to learn a fine-grained conversion. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed method's superiority over the state of the art in head stylization and its effectiveness on full image translation with adaptive deformations.