# Rethink Arbitrary Style Transfer with Transformer and Contrastive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.13584 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13584/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2024.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [Swin-Unet: Unet-like Pure Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05537/) (2021)
- [A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06576/) (2015)
- [Universal Style Transfer via Feature Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08086/) (2017)
- [A Learned Representation For Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07629/) (2016)
- [Contrastive Learning for Compact Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09367/) (2021)
- [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)
- [3DGStream: On-the-Fly Training of 3D Gaussians for Efficient Streaming of Photo-Realistic Free-Viewpoint Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01444/) (2024)
- [ArtFlow: Unbiased Image Style Transfer via Reversible Neural Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16877/) (2021)
- [Skeleton-based Action Recognition via Spatial and Temporal Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07404/) (2020)
- [Domain Enhanced Arbitrary Image Style Transfer via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09542/) (2022)
- [StyleBank: An Explicit Representation for Neural Image Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09210/) (2017)
- [Arbitrary Video Style Transfer via Multi-Channel Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08003/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Instance Normalization for Arbitrary Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06953/) (2019)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer via Multi-Adaptation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13219/) (2020)
- [Dual Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07689/) (2021)

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

- [Style Transfer: From Stitching to Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00606/) (2024)
- [DyArtbank: Diverse Artistic Style Transfer via Pre-trained Stable Diffusion and Dynamic Style Prompt Artbank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08392/) (2025)
- [Style as Cover: Deep Image Steganography via Stylized Transmission](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22392/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Arbitrary style transfer holds widespread attention in research and boasts numerous practical applications. The existing methods, which either employ cross-attention to incorporate deep style attributes into content attributes or use adaptive normalization to adjust content features, fail to generate high-quality stylized images. In this paper, we introduce an innovative technique to improve the quality of stylized images. Firstly, we propose Style Consistency Instance Normalization (SCIN), a method to refine the alignment between content and style features. In addition, we have developed an Instance-based Contrastive Learning (ICL) approach designed to understand the relationships among various styles, thereby enhancing the quality of the resulting stylized images. Recognizing that VGG networks are more adept at extracting classification features and need to be better suited for capturing style features, we have also introduced the Perception Encoder (PE) to capture style features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method generates high-quality stylized images and effectively prevents artifacts compared with the existing state-of-the-art methods.