Inversion-based Style Transfer with Diffusion Models

The artistic style within a painting is the means of expression, which includes not only the painting material, colors, and brushstrokes, but also the high-level attributes, including semantic elements and object shapes. Previous arbitrary example-guided artistic image generation methods often fail to control shape changes or convey elements. Pre-trained text-to-image synthesis diffusion probabilistic models have achieved remarkable quality but often require extensive textual descriptions to accurately portray the attributes of a particular painting. The uniqueness of an artwork lies in the fact that it cannot be adequately explained with normal language. Our key idea is to learn the artistic style directly from a single painting and then guide the synthesis without providing complex textual descriptions. Specifically, we perceive style as a learnable textual description of a painting. We propose an inversion-based style transfer method (InST), which can efficiently and accurately learn the key information of an image, thus capturing and transferring the artistic style of a painting. We demonstrate the quality and efficiency of our method on numerous paintings of various artists and styles. Codes are available at https://github.com/zyxElsa/InST.