InstantRetouch: Personalized Image Retouching without Test-time Fine-tuning Using an Asymmetric Auto-Encoder

TL;DR

InstantRetouch is a novel framework for personalized image retouching that instantly adapts to user styles without fine-tuning, using an asymmetric auto-encoder and retrieval-augmented style transfer.

Contribution

It introduces an asymmetric auto-encoder for style encoding and a retrieval-augmented method for adaptive style transfer, enabling instant personalization without test-time fine-tuning.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods in personalized retouching tasks.

Effective across single, multi-reference, and mixed-style scenarios.

Generalizes well to photorealistic style transfer.

Abstract

Personalized image retouching aims to adapt retouching style of individual users from reference examples, but existing methods often require user-specific fine-tuning or fail to generalize effectively. To address these challenges, we introduce $\textbf{InstantRetouch}$, a general framework for personalized image retouching that instantly adapts to user retouching styles without any test-time fine-tuning. It employs an $\textit{asymmetric auto-encoder}$ to encode the retouching style from paired examples into a content disentangled latent representation that enables faithful transfer of the retouching style to new images. To adaptively apply the encoded retouching style to new images, we further propose $\textit{retrieval-augmented retouching}$ (RAR), which retrieves and aggregates style latents from reference pairs most similar in content to the query image. With these components, $\textbf{InstantRetouch}$ enables superior and generic content-aware retouching personalization across diverse scenarios, including single-reference, multi-reference, and mixed-style setups, while also generalizing out of the box to photorealistic style transfer.