# Scale-Separated Conditioning for Style-Encoder-Free Diffusion Stylization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19719 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19719/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2026.

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

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Holistically-Nested Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06375/) (2015)
- [DragDiffusion: Harnessing Diffusion Models for Interactive Point-based Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14435/) (2023)
- [EDICT: Exact Diffusion Inversion via Coupled Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12446/) (2022)
- [Style Aligned Image Generation via Shared Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02133/) (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)
- [StyTr2: Image Style Transfer with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14576/) (2021)
- [CSGO: Content-Style Composition in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16766/) (2024)
- [DEADiff: An Efficient Stylization Diffusion Model with Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06951/) (2024)
- [Visual Style Prompting with Swapping Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12974/) (2024)
- [StyleShot: A Snapshot on Any Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01414/) (2024)
- [Continuous-Multiple Image Outpainting in One-Step via Positional Query and A Diffusion-based Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15652/) (2024)
- [SWIFT: Prompt-Adaptive Memory for Efficient Interactive Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09442/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Video Physical Consistency via Role-aware Joint Training and Modality-decoupled Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04653/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [FaultLens: Learning Compact Behavioral Test Suites for Generated Operational Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26746/) (2026)
- [SafeStyle: Calibrated Style Residual Injection for Controllable Style-Leakage Trade-off in Diffusion Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21242/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reference-based diffusion stylization requires separating target geometry from transferable appearance. Existing tuning-based methods often rely on aligned content-style-target triplets or auxiliary visual encoders, which increases data cost and can transfer unintended scene structure from the style reference. We propose SEFS (Style-Encoder-Free Stylization), a style-encoder-free conditioning framework for diffusion transformers. SEFS forms style tokens from stochastic low-resolution crops of single training images. This crop bottleneck preserves local appearance statistics such as palette, stroke, texture, and material, while reducing access to global layout cues. Target content is encoded by edge and segmentation cues and fused with the noisy latent through parameter-efficient trainable projections. We add style-to-denoising re-normalization for token-statistic alignment and cross-block skip fusion for spatial detail. SEFS trains on unpaired single images; the frozen diffusion VAE is used only to place image conditions in the latent space. On artistic stylization benchmarks, SEFS improves content consistency and leakage diagnostics while retaining reference-style affinity, and ablations support the crop-resolution, re-normalization, and skip-fusion choices. The code of SEFS will be made publicly available.