System and method for synthetic image generation with localized editing

Embodiments described herein provide a system for generating synthetic images with localized editing. During operation, the system obtains a source image and a target image for image synthesis and selects a semantic element from the source image. The semantic element indicates a semantically meaningful part of an object depicted in the source image. The system then determines the style information associated with the source and target images. Subsequently, the system generates a synthetic image by transferring the style of the semantic element from the source image to the target image based on the feature representations. In this way, the system can facilitate localized editing of the target image.