# DiffuseST: Unleashing the Capability of the Diffusion Model for Style Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.15007 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15007/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 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 32 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Oct 2024.

## 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 32)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14818/) (2021)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11427/) (2022)
- [BLIP-Diffusion: Pre-trained Subject Representation for Controllable Text-to-Image Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14720/) (2023)
- [Universal Style Transfer via Feature Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08086/) (2017)
- [Inversion-Based Style Transfer with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13203/) (2022)
- [DiffBIR: Towards Blind Image Restoration with Generative Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15070/) (2023)
- [Pixel-Aware Stable Diffusion for Realistic Image Super-resolution and Personalized Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14469/) (2023)
- [CLIPstyler: Image Style Transfer with a Single Text Condition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00374/) (2021)
- [AdaAttN: Revisit Attention Mechanism in Arbitrary Neural Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03647/) (2021)
- [StyleDiffusion: Controllable Disentangled Style Transfer via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07863/) (2023)
- [Diffusion-based Image Translation using Disentangled Style and Content Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15264/) (2022)
- [ArtFlow: Unbiased Image Style Transfer via Reversible Neural Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16877/) (2021)
- [Inversion-Free Image Editing with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04965/) (2023)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer with Deep Feature Reshuffle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04103/) (2018)
- [ProSpect: Prompt Spectrum for Attribute-Aware Personalization of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16225/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Contrastive Loss for Text-Guided Diffusion Image Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08622/) (2023)
- [Attention-aware Multi-stroke Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05127/) (2019)
- [General Image-to-Image Translation with One-Shot Image Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14352/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [StyleProtect: Safeguarding Artistic Identity in Fine-tuned Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13711/) (2025)
- [LouvreSAE: Sparse Autoencoders for Interpretable and Controllable Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18930/) (2025)
- [MAST: Mask-Guided Attention Control for Training-Free Regional-Multi Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12281/) (2026)
- [Scheduled Style Injection: Expanding the Style-Content Pareto Frontier in Training-Free Diffusion-based Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26538/) (2026)
- [Chameleon: Style-Content Disentangled Framework for Cross-Domain Object Compositing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01079/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Style transfer aims to fuse the artistic representation of a style image with the structural information of a content image. Existing methods train specific networks or utilize pre-trained models to learn content and style features. However, they rely solely on textual or spatial representations that are inadequate to achieve the balance between content and style. In this work, we propose a novel and training-free approach for style transfer, combining textual embedding with spatial features and separating the injection of content or style. Specifically, we adopt the BLIP-2 encoder to extract the textual representation of the style image. We utilize the DDIM inversion technique to extract intermediate embeddings in content and style branches as spatial features. Finally, we harness the step-by-step property of diffusion models by separating the injection of content and style in the target branch, which improves the balance between content preservation and style fusion. Various experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed DiffeseST for achieving balanced and controllable style transfer results, as well as the potential to extend to other tasks.