1) The authors introduce conditional instance normalization, which allows a single style transfer network to capture multiple artistic styles. This is done by normalizing activations according to style-dependent scaling and shifting parameters.
2) A key benefit is the network can stylize an image into different styles with a single forward pass, unlike previous methods that required separate networks for each style.
3) The approach significantly reduces parameters compared to training separate networks, growing linearly with the number of feature maps rather than the number of styles. This also makes adding new styles more efficient.