# CLeaR: A Unified Framework for Resolving the Leakage-Degradation Dilemma in Style Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38136 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38136/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [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)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06576/) (2015)
- [Universal Guidance for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07121/) (2023)
- [A Tale of Two Features: Stable Diffusion Complements DINO for Zero-Shot Semantic Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15347/) (2023)
- [FreeDoM: Training-Free Energy-Guided Conditional Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09833/) (2023)
- [Inversion-Based Style Transfer with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13203/) (2022)
- [The Secret Revealer: Generative Model-Inversion Attacks Against Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07135/) (2019)
- [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)
- [InstantStyle: Free Lunch towards Style-Preserving in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02733/) (2024)
- [StyleDiffusion: Controllable Disentangled Style Transfer via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07863/) (2023)
- [Robust CLIP: Unsupervised Adversarial Fine-Tuning of Vision Embeddings for Robust Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12336/) (2024)
- [Measuring Style Similarity in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01292/) (2024)
- [CSGO: Content-Style Composition in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16766/) (2024)
- [A Unified Theory of Diversity in Ensemble Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03962/) (2023)
- [BRAVE: Broadening the visual encoding of vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07204/) (2024)
- [DEADiff: An Efficient Stylization Diffusion Model with Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06951/) (2024)
- [StyleShot: A Snapshot on Any Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01414/) (2024)
- [Plug & Play Attacks: Towards Robust and Flexible Model Inversion Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12179/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Style transfer aims to render target content in the style of a reference image, but existing methods often suffer from content leakage, where objects, layouts, or semantics from the style reference appear in the generated output. Although prior data-driven and training-free methods can reduce leakage, they often face a leakage-degradation dilemma: stronger content suppression may weaken style fidelity, while richer style preservation may reintroduce unwanted reference content. We identify this dilemma across the full style-transfer pipeline, including feature separation, feature-space grounding, and diffusion generation. To address these issues, we propose CLeaR, a training-free framework for content-leakage-resistant style transfer. CLeaR first uses Orthogonal Subspace Projection to define content-reduced style targets in each vision foundation model (VFM) feature space. It then performs Ensemble Inversion, which optimizes a shared pixel-space style anchor satisfying style constraints across multiple VFMs. Finally, Energy-Guided Calibration maintains style alignment during diffusion sampling by steering the denoising trajectory toward the ensemble-defined style manifold. We further provide a theoretical analysis showing that the style-anchor estimation error decreases with the number of VFMs. Experiments on StyleBench demonstrate that CLeaR improves style alignment, reduces content leakage, and achieves better LLM-as-Judge evaluation compared with existing methods. The code is available at hrefhttps://github.com/0606zt/CLeaRhttps://github.com/0606zt/CLeaR.