# ColorFM: An Optimization-to-Learning Framework for Color Transfer via Flow Matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07119 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07119/

## 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 36 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 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 36)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [On the Spectral Bias of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08734/) (2018)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [Building Normalizing Flows with Stochastic Interpolants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15571/) (2022)
- [Improving and generalizing flow-based generative models with minibatch optimal transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00482/) (2023)
- [InstaFlow: One Step is Enough for High-Quality Diffusion-Based Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06380/) (2023)
- [Universal Style Transfer via Feature Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08086/) (2017)
- [Multisample Flow Matching: Straightening Flows with Minibatch Couplings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14772/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Learning with minibatch Wasserstein : asymptotic and gradient properties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04091/) (2019)
- [StyleMaster: Stylize Your Video with Artistic Generation and Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07744/) (2024)
- [Domain-Aware Universal Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04441/) (2021)
- [Ultrafast Photorealistic Style Transfer via Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02398/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Joint Bilateral Learning for Real-time Universal Photorealistic Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10955/) (2020)
- [PhotoWCT2: Compact Autoencoder for Photorealistic Style Transfer Resulting from Blockwise Training and Skip Connections of High-Frequency Residuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11995/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Color transfer aims to align the color distribution of a source image with that of a reference image while preserving structural and semantic consistency. However, existing methods often suffer from inaccurate global mapping, semantic misalignment, and visual artifacts. To address these issues, we propose ColorFM, an optimization-to-learning framework. ColorFM connects online optimization to offline inference by reformulating color transfer as the transport of pixel distributions along velocity fields via Flow Matching. Specifically, we introduce ColorFM-O, an instance-specific optimization scheme that fits the velocity field through hierarchical color coupling guided by semantic priors. By numerically integrating the induced flow trajectories, ColorFM-O produces precise and semantically consistent color transfer results, while generating high-quality paired data as pseudo-supervision. Building upon this, we design ColorFM-L, an efficient feed-forward model trained on the generated pairs. Through implicit state modeling, ColorFM-L extracts deep semantic features to predict flow parameters for bidirectional linearized transport, ensuring accurate color transfer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ColorFM-L outperforms state-of-the-art methods in visual quality, structural fidelity, and semantic consistency, successfully combining the accuracy of optimization with the speed of feed-forward inference.