# Diff-Oracle: Deciphering Oracle Bone Scripts with Controllable Diffusion Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.13631 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13631/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 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 43 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Dec 2023.

## 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 43)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07093/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [Conditional Image Synthesis With Auxiliary Classifier GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09585/) (2016)
- [Inversion-Based Style Transfer with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13203/) (2022)
- [EGSDE: Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via Energy-Guided Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06635/) (2022)
- [Remix: Rebalanced Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03943/) (2020)
- [UNIT-DDPM: UNpaired Image Translation with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05358/) (2021)
- [Inverse design of 3d molecular structures with conditional generative neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04824/) (2021)
- [Generative Adversarial Minority Oversampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09730/) (2019)
- [DG-Font: Deformable Generative Networks for Unsupervised Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03064/) (2021)
- [Few-shot Compositional Font Generation with Dual Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10510/) (2020)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Adversarial Consistency Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04858/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [OracleSage: Towards Unified Visual-Linguistic Understanding of Oracle Bone Scripts through Cross-Modal Knowledge Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17837/) (2024)
- [Towards Computational Chinese Paleography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06753/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Oracle Bone Inscription Recognition via Multi-Scale Layer Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00057/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deciphering oracle bone scripts plays an important role in Chinese archaeology and philology. However, a significant challenge remains due to the scarcity of oracle character images. To overcome this issue, we propose Diff-Oracle, a novel approach based on diffusion models to generate a diverse range of controllable oracle characters. Unlike traditional diffusion models that operate primarily on text prompts, Diff-Oracle incorporates a style encoder that utilizes style reference images to control the generation style. This encoder extracts style prompts from existing oracle character images, where style details are converted into a text embedding format via a pretrained language-vision model. On the other hand, a content encoder is integrated within Diff-Oracle to capture specific content details from content reference images, ensuring that the generated characters accurately represent the intended glyphs. To effectively train Diff-Oracle, we pre-generate pixel-level paired oracle character images (i.e., style and content images) by an image-to-image translation model. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments are conducted on datasets Oracle-241 and OBC306. While significantly surpassing present generative methods in terms of image generation, Diff-Oracle substantially benefits downstream oracle character recognition, outperforming all existing SOTAs by a large margin. In particular, on the challenging OBC306 dataset, Diff-Oracle leads to an accuracy gain of 7.70% in the zero-shot setting and is able to recognize unseen oracle character images with the accuracy of 84.62%, achieving a new benchmark for deciphering oracle bone scripts.