# Diff-Font: Diffusion Model for Robust One-Shot Font Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.05895 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05895/

## Key facts

- Cited by 40 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 47 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2022.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [ILVR: Conditioning Method for Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02938/) (2021)
- [Compositional Visual Generation with Composable Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01714/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00848/) (2017)
- [DualGAN: Unsupervised Dual Learning for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02510/) (2017)
- [Toward Multimodal Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11586/) (2017)
- [Learning to Discover Cross-Domain Relations with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05192/) (2017)
- [Few-Shot Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01723/) (2019)
- [Coupled Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07536/) (2016)
- [More Control for Free! Image Synthesis with Semantic Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05744/) (2021)
- [EGSDE: Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via Energy-Guided Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06635/) (2022)
- [UNIT-DDPM: UNpaired Image Translation with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05358/) (2021)
- [DG-Font: Deformable Generative Networks for Unsupervised Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03064/) (2021)
- [Separating Style and Content for Generalized Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06454/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [TextDiffuser: Diffusion Models as Text Painters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10855/) (2023)
- [GlyphControl: Glyph Conditional Control for Visual Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18259/) (2023)
- [AnyText2: Visual Text Generation and Editing With Customizable Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15245/) (2024)
- [FontDiffuser: One-Shot Font Generation via Denoising Diffusion with Multi-Scale Content Aggregation and Style Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12142/) (2023)
- [TextCtrl: Diffusion-based Scene Text Editing with Prior Guidance Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10133/) (2024)
- [Brush Your Text: Synthesize Any Scene Text on Images via Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12232/) (2023)
- [GlyphDraw: Seamlessly Rendering Text with Intricate Spatial Structures in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17870/) (2023)
- [EasyText: Controllable Diffusion Transformer for Multilingual Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24417/) (2025)
- [DiffusionPen: Towards Controlling the Style of Handwritten Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06065/) (2024)
- [3D Human Interaction Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13120/) (2025)
- [HFH-Font: Few-shot Chinese Font Synthesis with Higher Quality, Faster Speed, and Higher Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06488/) (2024)
- [Few-shot Font Generation by Learning Style Difference and Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10008/) (2023)
- [GRIF-DM: Generation of Rich Impression Fonts using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07259/) (2024)
- [Diff-Oracle: Deciphering Oracle Bone Scripts with Controllable Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13631/) (2023)
- [Font Style Interpolation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14311/) (2024)
- [UniModel: A Visual-Only Framework for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16917/) (2025)
- [VecGlypher: Unified Vector Glyph Generation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21461/) (2026)
- [From Fragment to One Piece: A Survey on AI-Driven Graphic Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18641/) (2025)
- [UniCalli: A Unified Diffusion Framework for Column-Level Generation and Recognition of Chinese Calligraphy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13745/) (2025)
- [MetaScript: Few-Shot Handwritten Chinese Content Generation via Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16251/) (2023)
- [FontAdapter: Instant Font Adaptation in Visual Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05843/) (2025)
- [DA-Font: Few-Shot Font Generation via Dual-Attention Hybrid Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16632/) (2025)
- [Beyond Patches: Global-aware Autoregressive Model for Multimodal Few-Shot Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01593/) (2026)
- [CONSTANT: Towards High-Quality One-Shot Handwriting Generation with Patch Contrastive Enhancement and Style-Aware Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07543/) (2026)
- [FontCrafter: High-Fidelity Element-Driven Artistic Font Creation with Visual In-Context Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22054/) (2026)
- [Cross-Domain Image Conversion by CycleDM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02919/) (2024)
- [Total Disentanglement of Font Images into Style and Character Class Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12784/) (2024)
- [One-Shot Multilingual Font Generation Via ViT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11342/) (2024)
- [AnyArtisticGlyph: Multilingual Controllable Artistic Glyph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04743/) (2025)
- [Text-Conditioned Diffusion Model for High-Fidelity Korean Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21325/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Font generation is a difficult and time-consuming task, especially in those languages using ideograms that have complicated structures with a large number of characters, such as Chinese. To solve this problem, few-shot font generation and even one-shot font generation have attracted a lot of attention. However, most existing font generation methods may still suffer from (i) large cross-font gap challenge; (ii) subtle cross-font variation problem; and (iii) incorrect generation of complicated characters. In this paper, we propose a novel one-shot font generation method based on a diffusion model, named Diff-Font, which can be stably trained on large datasets. The proposed model aims to generate the entire font library by giving only one sample as the reference. Specifically, a large stroke-wise dataset is constructed, and a stroke-wise diffusion model is proposed to preserve the structure and the completion of each generated character. To our best knowledge, the proposed Diff-Font is the first work that developed diffusion models to handle the font generation task. The well-trained Diff-Font is not only robust to font gap and font variation, but also achieved promising performance on difficult character generation. Compared to previous font generation methods, our model reaches state-of-the-art performance both qualitatively and quantitatively.