Training-Free Style and Content Transfer by Leveraging U-Net Skip Connections in Stable Diffusion

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Main Authors: Schaerf, Ludovica, Alfarano, Andrea, Silvestri, Fabrizio, Impett, Leonardo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Schaerf, Ludovica
Alfarano, Andrea
Silvestri, Fabrizio
Impett, Leonardo
author_facet Schaerf, Ludovica
Alfarano, Andrea
Silvestri, Fabrizio
Impett, Leonardo
contents Recent advances in diffusion models for image generation have led to detailed examinations of several components within the U-Net architecture for image editing. While previous studies have focused on the bottleneck layer (h-space), cross-attention, self-attention, and decoding layers, the overall role of the skip connections of the U-Net itself has not been specifically addressed. We conduct thorough analyses on the role of the skip connections and find that the residual connections passed by the third encoder block carry most of the spatial information of the reconstructed image, splitting the content from the style, passed by the remaining stream in the opposed decoding layer. We show that injecting the representations from this block can be used for text-based editing, precise modifications, and style transfer. We compare our method, SkipInject, to state-of-the-art style transfer and image editing methods and demonstrate that our method obtains the best content alignment and optimal structural preservation tradeoff.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_14524
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Training-Free Style and Content Transfer by Leveraging U-Net Skip Connections in Stable Diffusion
Schaerf, Ludovica
Alfarano, Andrea
Silvestri, Fabrizio
Impett, Leonardo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent advances in diffusion models for image generation have led to detailed examinations of several components within the U-Net architecture for image editing. While previous studies have focused on the bottleneck layer (h-space), cross-attention, self-attention, and decoding layers, the overall role of the skip connections of the U-Net itself has not been specifically addressed. We conduct thorough analyses on the role of the skip connections and find that the residual connections passed by the third encoder block carry most of the spatial information of the reconstructed image, splitting the content from the style, passed by the remaining stream in the opposed decoding layer. We show that injecting the representations from this block can be used for text-based editing, precise modifications, and style transfer. We compare our method, SkipInject, to state-of-the-art style transfer and image editing methods and demonstrate that our method obtains the best content alignment and optimal structural preservation tradeoff.
title Training-Free Style and Content Transfer by Leveraging U-Net Skip Connections in Stable Diffusion
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.14524