TRACE: Time-Adaptive Residual Attention Control with Content-Style Decomposition for Training-Free Diffusion Style Transfer
Reference-guided style transfer aims to preserve the semantic structure of a content image while transferring the visual appearance of a style reference. Recent diffusion-based methods achieve impressive stylization quality by exploiting strong pretrained generative priors. However, training-free approaches still face a difficult trade-off among style fidelity, content preservation, and content leakage. Direct style injection may unintentionally transfer semantic content from the style image, while fixed guidance schedules often ignore the time- and state-dependent nature of diffusion sampling. To address these limitations, we propose TRACE, a training-free diffusion style transfer framework with Time-adaptive Residual Attention Control and Content-Style Decomposition. TRACE first performs offline CLIP-based subspace analysis to separate content and style directions from paired data. During inference, it removes content-related components from the style reference and style-related components from the content reference to reduce leakage. It then injects style information through residual cross-attention and applies uncertainty-aware guidance to adapt the guidance signal at each denoising step. Experiments show that TRACE achieves a favorable trade-off between stylization and preservation. Compared with optimal-control-based baselines, TRACE substantially improves style fidelity (+17.28 CSD and +34.10 SRA). While, compared with stylization methods, it better preserves content structure (+12.80 DINO, +5.52 CLIP-I, and -8.19 LPIPS) and reduces directional semantic leakage by 29.5% in DCL. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/pixelchemy-research/TRACE.