Styleclone: Face Stylization with Diffusion Based Data Augmentation

Abstract: We present StyleClone, a method for training image-to-image translation networks to stylize faces in a specific style, even with limited style images. Our approach leverages textual inversion and diffusion-based guided image generation to augment small style datasets. By systematically generating diverse style samples guided by both the original style images and real face images, we significantly enhance the diversity of the style dataset. Using this augmented dataset, we train fast image-to-image translation networks that outperform diffusion-based methods in speed and quality. Experiments on multiple styles demonstrate that our method improves stylization quality, better preserves source image content, and significantly accelerates inference. Additionally, we provide a systematic evaluation of the augmentation techniques and their impact on stylization performance.