One-shot Face Sketch Synthesis in-the-Wild via Generative Diffusion Prior and Instruction Tuning

Face sketch synthesis is a technique aimed at converting face photos into sketches. Existing face sketch synthesis research mainly relies on training with numerous photo–sketch sample pairs from existing datasets. However, these large-scale discriminative learning methods will have to face problems, such as data scarcity and high human labor costs. Once the training data become scarce, their generative performance significantly degrades. In this article, we propose a one-shot face sketch synthesis method based on diffusion models. We optimize text instructions on a diffusion model using face photo–sketch image pairs. Then, the instructions derived through gradient-based optimization are used for inference. To simulate real-world scenarios more accurately and evaluate method effectiveness more comprehensively, we introduce a new benchmark named One-shot Face Sketch Dataset (OS-Sketch). The benchmark consists of 400 pairs of face photo–sketch images, including sketches with different styles and photos with different backgrounds, ages, sexes, expressions, illumination, and so on. For a solid out-of-distribution evaluation, we select only one pair of images for training at each time, with the rest used for inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can convert various photos into realistic and highly consistent sketches in a one-shot context. Compared to other methods, our approach offers greater convenience and broader applicability. The dataset will be available at: https://github.com/HanWu3125/OS-Sketch .