# Staying True to the Origin: Continuous Image Stylization with Smooth Transitions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08125 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08125/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Seedream 4.0: Toward Next-generation Multimodal Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20427/) (2025)
- [Patch n' Pack: NaViT, a Vision Transformer for any Aspect Ratio and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06304/) (2023)
- [Style Injection in Diffusion: A Training-free Approach for Adapting Large-scale Diffusion Models for Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09008/) (2023)
- [Style Transfer by Relaxed Optimal Transport and Self-Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12785/) (2019)
- [Multi-LoRA Composition for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16843/) (2024)
- [DiffMorpher: Unleashing the Capability of Diffusion Models for Image Morphing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07409/) (2023)
- [StyleTokenizer: Defining Image Style by a Single Instance for Controlling Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02543/) (2024)
- [OmniConsistency: Learning Style-Agnostic Consistency from Paired Stylization Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18445/) (2025)
- [OmniStyle: Filtering High Quality Style Transfer Data at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14028/) (2025)
- [StyleSSP: Sampling StartPoint Enhancement for Training-free Diffusion-based Method for Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11319/) (2025)
- [FreeMorph: Tuning-Free Generalized Image Morphing with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01953/) (2025)
- [ConsisLoRA: Enhancing Content and Style Consistency for LoRA-based Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10614/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in generative models have achieved remarkable performance in text- and image-conditioned editing. However, preserving the content of a given image while referencing style patterns from another remains challenging, often leading to uncontrollable stylization results. In this paper, we approach image stylization from the perspective of continuous control, aiming to enable modern Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based multi-reference editing models to (1) faithfully preserve the semantic structure of the content image, (2) render strong stylization effects, and (3) smoothly transition between the two. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective two-stage training strategy along with a style-strength-aware spline formulation. Specifically, in the first stage, the model is trained to produce strongly stylized outputs while preserving the content semantics as much as possible. In the second stage, with the base model frozen, we learn a set of anchor projectors that map various stylization strengths into the model parameter space. During inference, by performing style-strength-aware spline interpolation in a low-rank space, our method enables continuous control over stylization strength, even though the model is trained with only a few discrete strength levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method supports precise and continuous manipulation of stylization strength while generating high-fidelity results with modern DiT models. Project page: https://reychiaro.github.io/StyleController.