# CONSTANT: Towards High-Quality One-Shot Handwriting Generation with Patch Contrastive Enhancement and Style-Aware Quantization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07543 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07543/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 41 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2026.

## 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 41)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [BEiT v2: Masked Image Modeling with Vector-Quantized Visual Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06366/) (2022)
- [What the DAAM: Interpreting Stable Diffusion Using Cross Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04885/) (2022)
- [Disentangled Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11695/) (2022)
- [Exploring the structure of a real-time, arbitrary neural artistic stylization network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06830/) (2017)
- [Patch-Based Image Inpainting with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07422/) (2018)
- [ScrabbleGAN: Semi-Supervised Varying Length Handwritten Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10557/) (2020)
- [GANwriting: Content-Conditioned Generation of Styled Handwritten Word Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02567/) (2020)
- [Conditional Text Image Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10804/) (2023)
- [TextStyleBrush: Transfer of Text Aesthetics from a Single Example](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08385/) (2021)
- [FontDiffuser: One-Shot Font Generation via Denoising Diffusion with Multi-Scale Content Aggregation and Style Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12142/) (2023)
- [Diff-Font: Diffusion Model for Robust One-Shot Font Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05895/) (2022)
- [Disentanglement via Latent Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18378/) (2023)
- [Handwriting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03964/) (2021)
- [Discrete Representations Strengthen Vision Transformer Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10493/) (2021)
- [Handwritten Text Generation from Visual Archetypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15269/) (2023)
- [A Scalable Handwritten Text Recognition System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09150/) (2019)
- [Learning Generative Structure Prior for Blind Text Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14726/) (2023)

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

- [InkShield: Writing Style Protection Against Unauthorized Handwriting Mimicry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26976/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

One-shot styled handwriting image generation, despite achieving impressive results in recent years, remains challenging due to the difficulty in capturing the intricate and diverse characteristics of human handwriting by using solely a single reference image. Existing methods still struggle to generate visually appealing and realistic handwritten images and adapt to complex, unseen writer styles, struggling to isolate invariant style features (e.g., slant, stroke width, curvature) while ignoring irrelevant noise. To tackle this problem, we introduce Patch Contrastive Enhancement and Style-Aware Quantization via Denoising Diffusion (CONSTANT), a novel one-shot handwriting generation via diffusion model. CONSTANT leverages three key innovations: 1) a Style-Aware Quantization (SAQ) module that models style as discrete visual tokens capturing distinct concepts; 2) a contrastive objective to ensure these tokens are well-separated and meaningful in the embedding style space; 3) a latent patch-based contrastive (LLatentPCE) objective help improving quality and local structures by aligning multiscale spatial patches of generated and real features in latent space. Extensive experiments and analysis on benchmark datasets from multiple languages, including English, Chinese, and our proposed ViHTGen dataset for Vietnamese, demonstrate the superiority of adapting to new reference styles and producing highly detailed images of our method over state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at GitHub