# Conditional Human Sketch Synthesis with Explicit Abstraction Control

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.09274 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09274/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [A Neural Representation of Sketch Drawings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03477/) (2017)
- [Learning to Sketch with Shortcut Cycle Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00247/) (2018)
- [B'ezierSketch: A generative model for scalable vector sketches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02190/) (2020)
- [Learning Deep Sketch Abstraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04804/) (2018)
- [Variational Attention for Sequence-to-Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.08207/) (2017)
- [Diffusion models for Handwriting Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06704/) (2020)
- [SketchLattice: Latticed Representation for Sketch Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11636/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Artificial Intelligence for Geometry-Based Feature Extraction, Analysis and Synthesis in Artistic Images: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01450/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a novel free-hand sketch synthesis approach addressing explicit abstraction control in class-conditional and photo-to-sketch synthesis. Abstraction is a vital aspect of sketches, as it defines the fundamental distinction between a sketch and an image. Previous works relied on implicit control to achieve different levels of abstraction, leading to inaccurate control and synthesized sketches deviating from human sketches. To resolve this challenge, we propose two novel abstraction control mechanisms, state embeddings and the stroke token, integrated into a transformer-based latent diffusion model (LDM). These mechanisms explicitly provide the required amount of points or strokes to the model, enabling accurate point-level and stroke-level control in synthesized sketches while preserving recognizability. Outperforming state-of-the-art approaches, our method effectively generates diverse, non-rigid and human-like sketches. The proposed approach enables coherent sketch synthesis and excels in representing human habits with desired abstraction levels, highlighting the potential of sketch synthesis for real-world applications.