# ICAS: IP Adapter and ControlNet-based Attention Structure for Multi-Subject Style Transfer Optimization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13224 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13224/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 30 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2025.

## 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 30)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [A Learned Representation For Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07629/) (2016)
- [Composer: Creative and Controllable Image Synthesis with Composable Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09778/) (2023)
- [Inversion-Based Style Transfer with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13203/) (2022)
- [Style Aligned Image Generation via Shared Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02133/) (2023)
- [Re-Imagen: Retrieval-Augmented Text-to-Image Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14491/) (2022)
- [Neural Style Transfer: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04058/) (2017)
- [Style Injection in Diffusion: A Training-free Approach for Adapting Large-scale Diffusion Models for Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09008/) (2023)
- [ZipLoRA: Any Subject in Any Style by Effectively Merging LoRAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13600/) (2023)
- [StyTr2: Image Style Transfer with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14576/) (2021)
- [InstantStyle: Free Lunch towards Style-Preserving in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02733/) (2024)
- [Implicit Style-Content Separation using B-LoRA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14572/) (2024)
- [IMAGDressing-v1: Customizable Virtual Dressing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12705/) (2024)
- [StyleBank: An Explicit Representation for Neural Image Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09210/) (2017)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer via Multi-Adaptation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13219/) (2020)
- [DEADiff: An Efficient Stylization Diffusion Model with Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06951/) (2024)
- [Visual Style Prompting with Swapping Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12974/) (2024)
- [StyleShot: A Snapshot on Any Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01414/) (2024)
- [Boosting Consistency in Story Visualization with Rich-Contextual Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02482/) (2024)
- [StyleAdapter: A Unified Stylized Image Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01770/) (2023)
- [Incorporating Degradation Estimation in Light Field Spatial Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07012/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generating multi-subject stylized images remains a significant challenge due to the ambiguity in defining style attributes (e.g., color, texture, atmosphere, and structure) and the difficulty in consistently applying them across multiple subjects. Although recent diffusion-based text-to-image models have achieved remarkable progress, existing methods typically rely on computationally expensive inversion procedures or large-scale stylized datasets. Moreover, these methods often struggle with maintaining multi-subject semantic fidelity and are limited by high inference costs. To address these limitations, we propose ICAS (IP-Adapter and ControlNet-based Attention Structure), a novel framework for efficient and controllable multi-subject style transfer. Instead of full-model tuning, ICAS adaptively fine-tunes only the content injection branch of a pre-trained diffusion model, thereby preserving identity-specific semantics while enhancing style controllability. By combining IP-Adapter for adaptive style injection with ControlNet for structural conditioning, our framework ensures faithful global layout preservation alongside accurate local style synthesis. Furthermore, ICAS introduces a cyclic multi-subject content embedding mechanism, which enables effective style transfer under limited-data settings without the need for extensive stylized corpora. Extensive experiments show that ICAS achieves superior performance in structure preservation, style consistency, and inference efficiency, establishing a new paradigm for multi-subject style transfer in real-world applications.