# UI-Styler: Ultrasound Image Style Transfer with Class-Aware Prompts for Cross-Device Diagnosis Using a Frozen Black-Box Inference Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17155 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17155/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2025.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [On Layer Normalization in the Transformer Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04745/) (2020)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Robust fine-tuning of zero-shot models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01903/) (2021)
- [Fine-Tuning can Distort Pretrained Features and Underperform Out-of-Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10054/) (2022)
- [ImageNet-21K Pretraining for the Masses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10972/) (2021)
- [Exploring Visual Prompts for Adapting Large-Scale Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17274/) (2022)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer with Style-Attentional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02342/) (2018)
- [StyTr2: Image Style Transfer with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14576/) (2021)
- [AdaAttN: Revisit Attention Mechanism in Arbitrary Neural Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03647/) (2021)
- [On Translation Invariance in CNNs: Convolutional Layers can Exploit Absolute Spatial Location](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07064/) (2020)
- [BlackVIP: Black-Box Visual Prompting for Robust Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14773/) (2023)
- [E^2VPT: An Effective and Efficient Approach for Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13770/) (2023)
- [Beyond Adapting SAM: Towards End-to-End Ultrasound Image Segmentation via Auto Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06824/) (2023)
- [Adapting to Distribution Shift by Visual Domain Prompt Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02797/) (2024)
- [S2WAT: Image Style Transfer via Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Strips Window Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12381/) (2022)
- [Learning to Adapt Frozen CLIP for Few-Shot Test-Time Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17307/) (2025)
- [Learning CNN on ViT: A Hybrid Model to Explicitly Class-specific Boundaries for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18360/) (2024)
- [Prompt-CAM: Making Vision Transformers Interpretable for Fine-Grained Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09333/) (2025)
- [Mamba-ST: State Space Model for Efficient Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10385/) (2024)
- [Analyzing Data Augmentation for Medical Images: A Case Study in Ultrasound Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09828/) (2024)
- [HiGDA: Hierarchical Graph of Nodes to Learn Local-to-Global Topology for Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11819/) (2024)

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

- [Grad-CAM for Vision Transformers: A Systematic Taxonomy and Audit of Methodological Ambiguity in Explainable AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05258/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The appearance of ultrasound images varies across acquisition devices, causing domain shifts that degrade the performance of fixed black-box downstream inference models when reused. To mitigate this issue, it is practical to develop unpaired image translation (UIT) methods that effectively align the statistical distributions between source and target domains, particularly under the constraint of a reused inference-blackbox setting. However, existing UIT approaches often overlook class-specific semantic alignment during domain adaptation, resulting in misaligned content-class mappings that can impair diagnostic accuracy. To address this limitation, we propose UI-Styler, a novel ultrasound-specific, class-aware image style transfer framework. UI-Styler leverages a pattern-matching mechanism to transfer texture patterns embedded in the target images onto source images while preserving the source structural content. In addition, we introduce a class-aware prompting strategy guided by pseudo labels of the target domain, which enforces accurate semantic alignment with diagnostic categories. Extensive experiments on ultrasound cross-device tasks demonstrate that UI-Styler consistently outperforms existing UIT methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in distribution distance and downstream tasks, such as classification and segmentation.