# Neural Collage Transfer: Artistic Reconstruction via Material Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02202 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02202/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Continuous control with deep reinforcement learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.02971/) (2015)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Soft Actor-Critic Algorithms and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05905/) (2018)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Network In Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4400/) (2013)
- [Weight Normalization: A Simple Reparameterization to Accelerate Training of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07868/) (2016)
- [A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06576/) (2015)
- [A Learned Representation For Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07629/) (2016)
- [A Neural Representation of Sketch Drawings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03477/) (2017)
- [An Intriguing Failing of Convolutional Neural Networks and the CoordConv Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03247/) (2018)
- [Kornia: an Open Source Differentiable Computer Vision Library for PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02190/) (2019)
- [CLIPstyler: Image Style Transfer with a Single Text Condition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00374/) (2021)
- [Neural Style Transfer: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04058/) (2017)
- [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)
- [CAN: Creative Adversarial Networks, Generating "Art" by Learning About Styles and Deviating from Style Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07068/) (2017)
- [Synthesizing Programs for Images using Reinforced Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01118/) (2018)

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

- [Reward Inflation: A Healthy Stimulus for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02545/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Collage is a creative art form that uses diverse material scraps as a base unit to compose a single image. Although pixel-wise generation techniques can reproduce a target image in collage style, it is not a suitable method due to the solid stroke-by-stroke nature of the collage form. While some previous works for stroke-based rendering produced decent sketches and paintings, collages have received much less attention in research despite their popularity as a style. In this paper, we propose a method for learning to make collages via reinforcement learning without the need for demonstrations or collage artwork data. We design the collage Markov Decision Process (MDP), which allows the agent to handle various materials and propose a model-based soft actor-critic to mitigate the agent's training burden derived from the sophisticated dynamics of collage. Moreover, we devise additional techniques such as active material selection and complexity-based multi-scale collage to handle target images at any size and enhance the results' aesthetics by placing relatively more scraps in areas of high complexity. Experimental results show that the trained agent appropriately selected and pasted materials to regenerate the target image into a collage and obtained a higher evaluation score on content and style than pixel-wise generation methods. Code is available at https://github.com/northadventure/CollageRL.