Counterfactual generation lies at the core of various machine learning tasks, including image translation and controllable text generation. This generation process usually requires the identification of the disentangled latent representations, such as content and style, that underlie the observed data. However, it becomes more challenging when faced with a scarcity of paired data and labelling information. Existing disentangled methods crucially rely on oversimplified assumptions, such as assuming independent content and style variables, to identify the latent variables, even though such assumptions may not hold for complex data distributions. For instance, food reviews tend to involve words like "tasty", whereas movie reviews commonly contain words such as "thrilling" for the same positive sentiment.

Style transfer combines the content of one signal with the style of another. It supports applications such as data augmentation and scenario simulation, helping machine learning models generalize in data-scarce domains. While well developed in vision and language, style transfer methods for time series data remain limited. We introduce DiffTSST, a diffusion-based framework that disentangles a time series into content and style representations via convolutional encoders and recombines them through a self-supervised attention-based diffusion process. At inference, encoders extract content and style from two distinct series, enabling conditional generation of novel samples to achieve style transfer. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively that DiffTSST achieves effective style transfer. We further validate its real-world utility by showing that data augmentation with DiffTSST improves anomaly detection in data-scarce regimes.

Counterfactual generation lies at the core of various machine learning tasks, including image translation and controllable text generation.

Explicitly disentangling style and content in vision models remains challenging due to their semantic overlap and the subjectivity of human perception. Existing methods propose separation through generative or discriminative objectives, but they still face the inherent ambiguity of disentangling intertwined concepts. Instead, we ask: Can we bypass explicit disentanglement by learning to merge style and content invertibly, allowing separation to emerge naturally? We propose SCFlow, a flow-matching framework that learns bidirectional mappings between entangled and disentangled representations. Our approach is built upon three key insights: 1) Training solely to merge style and content, a well-defined task, enables invertible disentanglement without explicit supervision; 2) flow matching bridges on arbitrary distributions, avoiding the restrictive Gaussian priors of diffusion models and normalizing flows; and 3) a synthetic dataset of 510,000 samples (51 styles $\times$ 10,000 content samples) was curated to simulate disentanglement through systematic style-content pairing. Beyond controllable generation tasks, we demonstrate that SCFlow generalizes to ImageNet-1k and WikiArt in zero-shot settings and achieves competitive performance, highlighting that disentanglement naturally emerges from the invertible merging process.

Learning representations unaffected by superficial characteristics is important to ensure that shifts in these characteristics at test time do not compromise downstream prediction performance. For instance, in healthcare applications, we might like to learn features that contain information about pathology yet are unaffected by race, sex, and other sources of physiologic variability, thereby ensuring predictions are equitable and generalizable across all demographics. Here we propose Contrastive LEarning with Anti-contrastive Regularization (CLEAR), an intuitive and easy-to-implement framework that effectively separates essential (i.e., task-relevant) characteristics from superficial (i.e., task-irrelevant) characteristics during training, leading to better performance when superficial characteristics shift at test time. We begin by supposing that data representations can be semantically separated into task-relevant content features, which contain information relevant to downstream tasks, and task-irrelevant style features, which encompass superficial attributes that are irrelevant to these tasks, yet may degrade performance due to associations with content present in training data that do not generalize. We then prove that our anti-contrastive penalty, which we call Pair-Switching (PS), minimizes the Mutual Information between the style attributes and content labels. Finally, we instantiate CLEAR in the latent space of a Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE), then perform experiments to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the resulting CLEAR-VAE over several image datasets. Our results show that CLEAR-VAE allows us to: (a) swap and interpolate content and style between any pair of samples, and (b) improve downstream classification performance in the presence of previously unseen combinations of content and style. Our code will be made publicly available.

Disentangling content and style from a single image, known as content-style decomposition (CSD), enables recontextu-alization of extracted content and stylization of extracted styles, offering greater creative flexibility in visual synthesis. While recent personalization methods have explored the decomposition of explicit content style, they remain tailored for diffusion models. Meanwhile, Visual Autoregressive Modeling (VAR) has emerged as a promising alternative with a next-scale prediction paradigm, achieving performance comparable to that of diffusion models. In this paper, we explore VAR as a generative framework for CSD, leveraging its scale-wise generation process for improved disentanglement. T o this end, we propose CSD-VAR, a novel method that introduces three key innovations: (1) a scale-aware alternating optimization strategy that aligns content and style representation with their respective scales to enhance separation, (2) an SVD-based rectification method to mitigate content leakage into style representations, and (3) an Augmented Key-V alue (K-V) memory enhancing content identity preservation. T o benchmark this task, we introduce CSD-100, a dataset specifically designed for content-style decomposition, featuring diverse subjects rendered in various artistic styles. Experiments demonstrate that CSD-VAR outperforms prior approaches, achieving superior content preservation and stylization fidelity.

Counterfactual generation lies at the core of various machine learning tasks, including image translation and controllable text generation. This generation process usually requires the identification of the disentangled latent representations, such as content and style, that underlie the observed data. However, it becomes more challenging when faced with a scarcity of paired data and labelling information. Existing disentangled methods crucially rely on oversimplified assumptions, such as assuming independent content and style variables, to identify the latent variables, even though such assumptions may not hold for complex data distributions. For instance, food reviews tend to involve words like "tasty", whereas movie reviews commonly contain words such as "thrilling" for the same positive sentiment.

Counterfactual generation lies at the core of various machine learning tasks, including image translation and controllable text generation. This generation process usually requires the identification of the disentangled latent representations, such as content and style, that underlie the observed data. However, it becomes more challenging when faced with a scarcity of paired data and labelling information. Existing disentangled methods crucially rely on oversimplified assumptions, such as assuming independent content and style variables, to identify the latent variables, even though such assumptions may not hold for complex data distributions. For instance, food reviews tend to involve words like "tasty", whereas movie reviews commonly contain words such as "thrilling" for the same positive sentiment.

Balancing content fidelity and artistic style is a pivotal challenge in image generation. While traditional style transfer methods and modern Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) strive to achieve this balance, they often struggle to do so without sacrificing either style, content, or sometimes both. This work addresses this challenge by analyzing the ability of DDPMs to maintain content and style equilibrium. We introduce a novel method to identify sensitivities within the DDPM attention layers, identifying specific layers that correspond to different stylistic aspects. By directing conditional inputs only to these sensitive layers, our approach enables fine-grained control over style and content, significantly reducing issues arising from over-constrained inputs. Our findings demonstrate that this method enhances recent stylization techniques by better aligning style and content, ultimately improving the quality of generated visual content.