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So I saw someone ask for an ELI5 on style adaptation versus style synthesis, and it got me thinking. My (possibly oversimplified) understanding is that style adaptation is like mimicking an existing artist. You're taking teh core content of something and modifying its look to match a pre-existing style. Think "paint this photo of a cat in the style of Van Gogh." Style synthesis, on the other hand, feels closer to creating a novel style itself, frequently enough by blending aspects of multiple existing ones or even inventing entirely new visual rules.
Is that too broad a brush? I'm notably curious about where things like transfer learning fit into all of this. If you're training a model on many artists and then generating something "in the style" it learned, is that still adaptation, or has the model synthesized some broader understanding of "artistic" that goes beyond any single artist? It feels like the more complex and abstract the generated style, the closer it leans toward synthesis rather than simple adaptation. Anyone have a better, more nuanced clarification? I'd love to here it.