Stylizing ViT: Anatomy-Preserving Instance Style Transfer for Domain Generalization

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Doerrich, Sebastian, Di Salvo, Francesco, Alle, Jonas, Ledig, Christian
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Doerrich, Sebastian
Di Salvo, Francesco
Alle, Jonas
Ledig, Christian
author_facet Doerrich, Sebastian
Di Salvo, Francesco
Alle, Jonas
Ledig, Christian
contents Deep learning models in medical image analysis often struggle with generalizability across domains and demographic groups due to data heterogeneity and scarcity. Traditional augmentation improves robustness, but fails under substantial domain shifts. Recent advances in stylistic augmentation enhance domain generalization by varying image styles but fall short in terms of style diversity or by introducing artifacts into the generated images. To address these limitations, we propose Stylizing ViT, a novel Vision Transformer encoder that utilizes weight-shared attention blocks for both self- and cross-attention. This design allows the same attention block to maintain anatomical consistency through self-attention while performing style transfer via cross-attention. We assess the effectiveness of our method for domain generalization by employing it for data augmentation on three distinct image classification tasks in the context of histopathology and dermatology. Results demonstrate an improved robustness (up to +13% accuracy) over the state of the art while generating perceptually convincing images without artifacts. Additionally, we show that Stylizing ViT is effective beyond training, achieving a 17% performance improvement during inference when used for test-time augmentation. The source code is available at https://github.com/sdoerrich97/stylizing-vit .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_17586
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stylizing ViT: Anatomy-Preserving Instance Style Transfer for Domain Generalization
Doerrich, Sebastian
Di Salvo, Francesco
Alle, Jonas
Ledig, Christian
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Image and Video Processing
Deep learning models in medical image analysis often struggle with generalizability across domains and demographic groups due to data heterogeneity and scarcity. Traditional augmentation improves robustness, but fails under substantial domain shifts. Recent advances in stylistic augmentation enhance domain generalization by varying image styles but fall short in terms of style diversity or by introducing artifacts into the generated images. To address these limitations, we propose Stylizing ViT, a novel Vision Transformer encoder that utilizes weight-shared attention blocks for both self- and cross-attention. This design allows the same attention block to maintain anatomical consistency through self-attention while performing style transfer via cross-attention. We assess the effectiveness of our method for domain generalization by employing it for data augmentation on three distinct image classification tasks in the context of histopathology and dermatology. Results demonstrate an improved robustness (up to +13% accuracy) over the state of the art while generating perceptually convincing images without artifacts. Additionally, we show that Stylizing ViT is effective beyond training, achieving a 17% performance improvement during inference when used for test-time augmentation. The source code is available at https://github.com/sdoerrich97/stylizing-vit .
title Stylizing ViT: Anatomy-Preserving Instance Style Transfer for Domain Generalization
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17586