# SA-LUT: Spatial Adaptive 4D Look-Up Table for Photorealistic Style Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13465 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13465/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Deep Bilateral Learning for Real-Time Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02880/) (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)
- [AdaAttN: Revisit Attention Mechanism in Arbitrary Neural Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03647/) (2021)
- [InstantStyle: Free Lunch towards Style-Preserving in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02733/) (2024)
- [Deep Photo Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07511/) (2017)
- [Photorealistic Style Transfer via Wavelet Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09760/) (2019)
- [Learning Image-adaptive 3D Lookup Tables for High Performance Photo Enhancement in Real-time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14468/) (2020)
- [A Closed-form Solution to Photorealistic Image Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06474/) (2018)
- [AdaInt: Learning Adaptive Intervals for 3D Lookup Tables on Real-time Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13983/) (2022)
- [SepLUT: Separable Image-adaptive Lookup Tables for Real-time Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08351/) (2022)
- [OpenUni: A Simple Baseline for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23661/) (2025)
- [Neural Preset for Color Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13511/) (2023)
- [4D LUT: Learnable Context-Aware 4D Lookup Table for Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01749/) (2022)
- [M2E-Try On Net: Fashion from Model to Everyone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08599/) (2018)
- [Deep Preset: Blending and Retouching Photos with Color Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10701/) (2020)
- [NLUT: Neural-based 3D Lookup Tables for Video Photorealistic Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09170/) (2023)
- [Remember What You have drawn: Semantic Image Manipulation with Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12579/) (2021)
- [SARA: Controllable Makeup Transfer with Spatial Alignment and Region-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16828/) (2023)
- [DI-Net : Decomposed Implicit Garment Transfer Network for Digital Clothed 3D Human](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16818/) (2023)
- [IPVTON: Image-based 3D Virtual Try-on with Image Prompt Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15616/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Personalized Image Filter: Mastering Your Photographic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16791/) (2025)
- [AceTone: Bridging Words and Colors for Conditional Image Grading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00530/) (2026)
- [Towards In-Context Tone Style Transfer with A Large-Scale Triplet Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16114/) (2026)
- [Multimodal 3D LUT Generation via StatLUT with Statistical Features for Photorealistic Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08227/) (2026)
- [SemiNFT: Learning to Transfer Presets from Imitation to Appreciation via Hybrid-Sample Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08582/) (2026)
- [Mitigating Content Shift and Hallucination in GenAI Image Editing via Structural Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30437/) (2026)
- [ColorFM: An Optimization-to-Learning Framework for Color Transfer via Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07119/) (2026)
- [PrefLUT: Reusable and Refinable Personalized Color Editing from Pairwise Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34133/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Photorealistic style transfer (PST) enables real-world color grading by adapting reference image colors while preserving content structure. Existing methods mainly follow either approaches: generation-based methods that prioritize stylistic fidelity at the cost of content integrity and efficiency, or global color transformation methods such as LUT, which preserve structure but lack local adaptability. To bridge this gap, we propose Spatial Adaptive 4D Look-Up Table (SA-LUT), combining LUT efficiency with neural network adaptability. SA-LUT features: (1) a Style-guided 4D LUT Generator that extracts multi-scale features from the style image to predict a 4D LUT, and (2) a Context Generator using content-style cross-attention to produce a context map. This context map enables spatially-adaptive adjustments, allowing our 4D LUT to apply precise color transformations while preserving structural integrity. To establish a rigorous evaluation framework for photorealistic style transfer, we introduce PST50, the first benchmark specifically designed for PST assessment. Experiments demonstrate that SA-LUT substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 66.7% reduction in LPIPS score compared to 3D LUT approaches, while maintaining real-time performance at 16 FPS for video stylization. Our code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/Ry3nG/SA-LUT