# Through Van Gogh's Eyes: Global Style Transfer with Diffusion Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11546 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11546/

## 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 30 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 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 30)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04488/) (2022)
- [Improved Precision and Recall Metric for Assessing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06991/) (2019)
- [Reliable Fidelity and Diversity Metrics for Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09797/) (2020)
- [Universal Style Transfer via Feature Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08086/) (2017)
- [Diffusion Models already have a Semantic Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10960/) (2022)
- [Inversion-Based Style Transfer with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13203/) (2022)
- [Style Aligned Image Generation via Shared Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02133/) (2023)
- [StyleDrop: Text-to-Image Generation in Any Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00983/) (2023)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer with Style-Attentional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02342/) (2018)
- [Style Injection in Diffusion: A Training-free Approach for Adapting Large-scale Diffusion Models for Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09008/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Demystifying Neural Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01036/) (2017)
- [Domain Enhanced Arbitrary Image Style Transfer via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09542/) (2022)
- [CSGO: Content-Style Composition in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16766/) (2024)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer with Deep Feature Reshuffle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04103/) (2018)
- [ArtFID: Quantitative Evaluation of Neural Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12280/) (2022)
- [StyleSSP: Sampling StartPoint Enhancement for Training-free Diffusion-based Method for Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11319/) (2025)
- [S2WAT: Image Style Transfer via Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Strips Window Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12381/) (2022)
- [StyleDomain: Efficient and Lightweight Parameterizations of StyleGAN for One-shot and Few-shot Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10229/) (2022)
- [DIFF-NST: Diffusion Interleaving For deFormable Neural Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04157/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Artistic image synthesis aims to recreate the expressive visual identity of a target artist, yet existing methods often fail to capture an artist's global style. Conventional style transfer methods transfer the style of one or a few reference artworks to a content image in a One-to-One manner, making them effective for artwork-level stylization but limited in representing the broader stylistic distribution of an artist. Text-to-image diffusion models conditioned on artist names, such as '~ in Van Gogh style', offer greater flexibility, but they often suffer from text-induced bias and reproduce patterns from only a few iconic works. To address these limitations, we introduce Global Style Transfer (GST), an artistic image synthesis paradigm, in a Many-to-One manner, that aggregates multiple artworks from a target artist and transfers their shared global style to a single content image. For GST, we propose Global Style Guidance (GSG), which learns a residual global style offset in the intermediate feature space, or h-space, of a diffusion model under a fixed prompt. By learning artist-level style semantics purely from visual statistics, GSG mitigates text-dependent artistic bias. We further propose Content Alignment Guidance (CAG), a training-free perceptual guidance mechanism that preserves the semantic structure of the content image while allowing artist-specific geometric deformation. Experiments on WikiArt demonstrate that GST achieves superior stylistic fidelity, content preservation, and output diversity compared to existing style transfer and diffusion-based artistic synthesis methods.