# Learning Dynamic Style Kernels for Artistic Style Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00414 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00414/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [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)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17249/) (2021)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [DynamicViT: Efficient Vision Transformers with Dynamic Token Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02034/) (2021)
- [TransReID: Transformer-based Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04378/) (2021)
- [Not All Patches are What You Need: Expediting Vision Transformers via Token Reorganizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07800/) (2022)
- [Universal Style Transfer via Feature Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08086/) (2017)
- [CLIPstyler: Image Style Transfer with a Single Text Condition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00374/) (2021)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer with Style-Attentional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02342/) (2018)
- [StyTr2: Image Style Transfer with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14576/) (2021)
- [AdaAttN: Revisit Attention Mechanism in Arbitrary Neural Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03647/) (2021)
- [Style Transfer by Relaxed Optimal Transport and Self-Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12785/) (2019)
- [Exact Feature Distribution Matching for Arbitrary Style Transfer and Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07740/) (2022)
- [Avatar-Net: Multi-scale Zero-shot Style Transfer by Feature Decoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.03857/) (2018)
- [Spatio-Temporal Filter Adaptive Network for Video Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12257/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Recognizing Image Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3715/) (2013)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [InstaStyle: Inversion Noise of a Stylized Image is Secretly a Style Adviser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15040/) (2023)
- [Disentangled Representation Learning for Controllable Person Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05798/) (2023)
- [Evaluation in Neural Style Transfer: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17109/) (2024)
- [FreezeAsGuard: Mitigating Illegal Adaptation of Diffusion Models via Selective Tensor Freezing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17472/) (2024)
- [CompArt: Operationalizing Aesthetic Alignment in Text-to-Image Generation via Principles of Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12018/) (2025)
- [LouvreSAE: Sparse Autoencoders for Interpretable and Controllable Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18930/) (2025)
- [Learning to Manipulate Artistic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13976/) (2024)
- [Set2Seq Transformer: Temporal and Position-Aware Set Representations for Sequential Multiple-Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03404/) (2024)
- [Bridging Text and Image for Artist Style Transfer via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09566/) (2024)
- [PQDAST: Depth-Aware Arbitrary Style Transfer for Games via Perceptual Quality-Guided Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16996/) (2025)
- [Pretrained Diffusion Models Are Inherently Skipped-Step Samplers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15233/) (2025)
- [DUDE: Diffusion-Based Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04193/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Arbitrary style transfer has been demonstrated to be efficient in artistic image generation. Previous methods either globally modulate the content feature ignoring local details, or overly focus on the local structure details leading to style leakage. In contrast to the literature, we propose a new scheme textit``style kernel" that learns em spatially adaptive kernels for per-pixel stylization, where the convolutional kernels are dynamically generated from the global style-content aligned feature and then the learned kernels are applied to modulate the content feature at each spatial position. This new scheme allows flexible both global and local interactions between the content and style features such that the wanted styles can be easily transferred to the content image while at the same time the content structure can be easily preserved. To further enhance the flexibility of our style transfer method, we propose a Style Alignment Encoding (SAE) module complemented with a Content-based Gating Modulation (CGM) module for learning the dynamic style kernels in focusing regions. Extensive experiments strongly demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and exhibits superior performance in terms of visual quality and efficiency.