# StyleRWKV: High-Quality and High-Efficiency Style Transfer with RWKV-like Architecture

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19535 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19535/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13048/) (2023)
- [MaxViT: Multi-Axis Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01697/) (2022)
- [Inversion-Based Style Transfer with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13203/) (2022)
- [Style Injection in Diffusion: A Training-free Approach for Adapting Large-scale Diffusion Models for Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09008/) (2023)
- [StyTr2: Image Style Transfer with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14576/) (2021)
- [Large-scale Classification of Fine-Art Paintings: Learning The Right Metric on The Right Feature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00855/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Exact Feature Distribution Matching for Arbitrary Style Transfer and Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07740/) (2022)
- [Vision-RWKV: Efficient and Scalable Visual Perception with RWKV-Like Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02308/) (2024)
- [Domain Enhanced Arbitrary Image Style Transfer via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09542/) (2022)
- [ArtFID: Quantitative Evaluation of Neural Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12280/) (2022)
- [Diffusion-RWKV: Scaling RWKV-Like Architectures for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04478/) (2024)
- [Restore-RWKV: Efficient and Effective Medical Image Restoration with RWKV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11087/) (2024)
- [AesPA-Net: Aesthetic Pattern-Aware Style Transfer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09724/) (2023)
- [RWKV-CLIP: A Robust Vision-Language Representation Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06973/) (2024)
- [PointRWKV: Efficient RWKV-Like Model for Hierarchical Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15214/) (2024)
- [Mamba or RWKV: Exploring High-Quality and High-Efficiency Segment Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19369/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [EvRWKV: A Continuous Interactive RWKV Framework for Effective Event-Guided Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03184/) (2025)
- [PestVL-Net: Enabling Multimodal Pest Learning via Fine-grained Vision-Language Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17278/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Style transfer aims to generate a new image preserving the content but with the artistic representation of the style source. Most of the existing methods are based on Transformers or diffusion models, however, they suffer from quadratic computational complexity and high inference time. RWKV, as an emerging deep sequence models, has shown immense potential for long-context sequence modeling in NLP tasks. In this work, we present a novel framework StyleRWKV, to achieve high-quality style transfer with limited memory usage and linear time complexity. Specifically, we propose a Recurrent WKV (Re-WKV) attention mechanism, which incorporates bidirectional attention to establish a global receptive field. Additionally, we develop a Deformable Shifting (Deform-Shifting) layer that introduces learnable offsets to the sampling grid of the convolution kernel, allowing tokens to shift flexibly and adaptively from the region of interest, thereby enhancing the model's ability to capture local dependencies. Finally, we propose a Skip Scanning (S-Scanning) method that effectively establishes global contextual dependencies. Extensive experiments with analysis including qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of stylization quality, model complexity, and inference efficiency.