# Few shot font generation via transferring similarity guided global style and quantization local style

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.00827 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00827/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Pixel-Level Domain Adaptation with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05424/) (2016)
- [Few-Shot Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01723/) (2019)
- [GANs Trained by a Two Time-Scale Update Rule Converge to a Local Nash Equilibrium](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08500/) (2017)
- [Multi-Content GAN for Few-Shot Font Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00516/) (2017)
- [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)
- [A Unified Feature Disentangler for Multi-Domain Image Translation and Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01361/) (2018)
- [Rethinking the Truly Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06500/) (2020)
- [Artistic Glyph Image Synthesis via One-Stage Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04987/) (2019)
- [Improving the Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs: A Consistency Term and Its Dual Effect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01541/) (2018)
- [Few-shot Font Generation with Localized Style Representations and Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11042/) (2020)
- [Multiple Heads are Better than One: Few-shot Font Generation with Multiple Localized Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00887/) (2021)
- [Few-shot Compositional Font Generation with Dual Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10510/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Font Generation by Learning Fine-Grained Local Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09965/) (2022)
- [Look Closer to Supervise Better: One-Shot Font Generation via Component-Based Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00146/) (2022)
- [Learning to Write Stylized Chinese Characters by Reading a Handful of Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06424/) (2017)
- [CalliGAN: Style and Structure-aware Chinese Calligraphy Character Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12500/) (2020)
- [XMP-Font: Self-Supervised Cross-Modality Pre-training for Few-Shot Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05084/) (2022)
- [A Deep Factorization of Style and Structure in Fonts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00748/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Kinetic Typography Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10476/) (2024)
- [HFH-Font: Few-shot Chinese Font Synthesis with Higher Quality, Faster Speed, and Higher Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06488/) (2024)
- [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)
- [DiffInk: Glyph- and Style-Aware Latent Diffusion Transformer for Text to Online Handwriting Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23624/) (2025)
- [Beyond Patches: Global-aware Autoregressive Model for Multimodal Few-Shot Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01593/) (2026)
- [InkDiffuser: High-Fidelity One-shot Chinese Calligraphy via Differentiable Morphological Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05865/) (2026)
- [SmartFont: Dynamic Condition Allocation for Few-Shot Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13382/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic few-shot font generation (AFFG), aiming at generating new fonts with only a few glyph references, reduces the labor cost of manually designing fonts. However, the traditional AFFG paradigm of style-content disentanglement cannot capture the diverse local details of different fonts. So, many component-based approaches are proposed to tackle this problem. The issue with component-based approaches is that they usually require special pre-defined glyph components, e.g., strokes and radicals, which is infeasible for AFFG of different languages. In this paper, we present a novel font generation approach by aggregating styles from character similarity-guided global features and stylized component-level representations. We calculate the similarity scores of the target character and the referenced samples by measuring the distance along the corresponding channels from the content features, and assigning them as the weights for aggregating the global style features. To better capture the local styles, a cross-attention-based style transfer module is adopted to transfer the styles of reference glyphs to the components, where the components are self-learned discrete latent codes through vector quantization without manual definition. With these designs, our AFFG method could obtain a complete set of component-level style representations, and also control the global glyph characteristics. The experimental results reflect the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method on different linguistic scripts, and also show its superiority when compared with other state-of-the-art methods. The source code can be found at https://github.com/awei669/VQ-Font.