# A Style is Worth One Code: Unlocking Code-to-Style Image Generation with Discrete Style Space

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10555 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10555/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [OminiControl: Minimal and Universal Control for Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15098/) (2024)
- [ZipLoRA: Any Subject in Any Style by Effectively Merging LoRAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13600/) (2023)
- [InstantStyle: Free Lunch towards Style-Preserving in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02733/) (2024)
- [UniTok: A Unified Tokenizer for Visual Generation and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20321/) (2025)
- [PuLID: Pure and Lightning ID Customization via Contrastive Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16022/) (2024)
- [Implicit Style-Content Separation using B-LoRA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14572/) (2024)
- [Measuring Style Similarity in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01292/) (2024)
- [CSGO: Content-Style Composition in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16766/) (2024)
- [OminiControl2: Efficient Conditioning for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08280/) (2025)
- [InstantStyle-Plus: Style Transfer with Content-Preserving in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00788/) (2024)
- [BooW-VTON: Boosting In-the-Wild Virtual Try-On via Mask-Free Pseudo Data Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06047/) (2024)
- [Quality-Aware Image-Text Alignment for Opinion-Unaware Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11176/) (2024)
- [USO: Unified Style and Subject-Driven Generation via Disentangled and Reward Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18966/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Beyond Emotion Prompts: Fine-Grained Text-to-Image Generation Driven by Valence-Arousal-Dominance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24215/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Innovative visual stylization is a cornerstone of artistic creation, yet generating novel and consistent visual styles remains a significant challenge. Existing generative approaches typically rely on lengthy textual prompts, reference images, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning to guide style-aware image generation, but often struggle with style consistency, limited creativity, and complex style representations. In this paper, we affirm that a style is worth one numerical code by introducing the novel task, code-to-style image generation, which produces images with novel, consistent visual styles conditioned solely on a numerical style code. To date, this field has only been primarily explored by the industry (e.g., Midjourney), with no open-source research from the academic community. To fill this gap, we propose CoTyle, the first open-source method for this task. Specifically, we first train a discrete style codebook from a collection of images to extract style embeddings. These embeddings serve as conditions for a text-to-image diffusion model (T2I-DM) to generate stylistic images. Subsequently, we train an autoregressive style generator on the discrete style embeddings to model their distribution, allowing the synthesis of novel style embeddings. During inference, a numerical style code is mapped to a unique style embedding by the style generator, and this embedding guides the T2I-DM to generate images in the corresponding style. Unlike existing methods, our method offers unparalleled simplicity and diversity, unlocking a vast space of reproducible styles from minimal input. Extensive experiments validate that CoTyle effectively turns a numerical code into a style controller, demonstrating a style is worth one code.