Structured 3D Latents Are Surprisingly Powerful: Unleashing Generalizable Style with 2D Diffusion

3D asset generation plays a pivotal role in fields such as gaming and virtual reality, enabling the rapid synthesis of high-fidelity 3D objects from a single or multiple images. Building on this capability, enabling style-controllable generation naturally emerges as an important and desirable direction. However, existing approaches typically rely on style images that lie within or are similar to the training distribution of 3D generation models. When presented with out-of-distribution (OOD) styles, their performance degrades significantly or even fails. To address this limitation, we introduce $\textbf{DiLAST}$: 2D Diffusion-based Latent Awakening for 3D Style Transfer. Specifically, we leverage a pretrained 2D diffusion model as a teacher to provide rich and generalizable style priors. By aligning rendered views with the target style under diffusion-based guidance, our method optimizes the structured 3D latent representation for stylization. We observe that this limitation stems not from insufficient model capacity, but from the underutilization of structured 3D latents, which are inherently expressive. Despite being trained on comparatively limited data, 3D generation models can leverage 2D diffusion guidance to steer denoising toward specific directions in latent space, thereby producing diverse, OOD styles. Extensive experiments across diverse data and multiple 3D generation backbones demonstrate the effectiveness and plug-and-play nature of our approach.