mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks

arXiv 1612.03242 ↗First posted 10 Dec 2016cs.CV cs.AI stat.MLcited by 577

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 110 in Diffusion models, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Synthesizing high-quality images from text descriptions is a challenging problem in computer vision and has many practical applications. Samples generated by existing text-to-image approaches can roughly reflect the meaning of the given descriptions, but they fail to contain necessary details and vivid object parts. In this paper, we propose Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks (StackGAN) to generate 256x256 photo-realistic images conditioned on text descriptions. We decompose the hard problem into more manageable sub-problems through a sketch-refinement process. The Stage-I GAN sketches the primitive shape and colors of the object based on the given text description, yielding Stage-I low-resolution images. The Stage-II GAN takes Stage-I results and text descriptions as inputs, and generates high-resolution images with photo-realistic details. It is able to rectify defects in Stage-I results and add compelling details with the refinement process. To improve the diversity of the synthesized images and stabilize the training of the conditional-GAN, we introduce a novel Conditioning Augmentation technique that encourages smoothness in the latent conditioning manifold. Extensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-arts on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements on generating photo-realistic images conditioned on text descriptions.

Key facts. Cited by 577 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 10 Dec 2016.

Builds on

No reference list yet.

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 147; 2022: 120; 2023: 165; 2024: 78; 2025: 51; 2026: 16.

577 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,255
  2. 2022Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 5,627
  3. 2021Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generationcited by 4,288
  4. 2022LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text modelscited by 4,152
  5. 2022Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Datacited by 1,742
  6. 2022Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generationcited by 1,295
  7. 2022Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusioncited by 1,106
  8. 2021Transformers in Vision: A Surveycited by 1,013
  9. 2021Vector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesiscited by 774
  10. 2023MasaCtrl: Tuning-Free Mutual Self-Attention Control for Consistent Image Synthesis and Editingcited by 727
  11. 2021CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformerscited by 694
  12. 2023Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generatorscited by 670
38 more
  1. 2022Compositional Visual Generation with Composable Diffusion Modelscited by 624
  2. 2023MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editingcited by 624
  3. 2023Scaling up GANs for Text-to-Image Synthesiscited by 492
  4. 2023TokenFlow: Consistent Diffusion Features for Consistent Video Editingcited by 442
  5. 2022Blended Latent Diffusioncited by 432
  6. 2023InstaFlow: One Step is Enough for High-Quality Diffusion-Based Text-to-Image Generationcited by 395
  7. 2022TM2T: Stochastic and Tokenized Modeling for the Reciprocal Generation of 3D Human Motions and Textscited by 359
  8. 2023Uni-ControlNet: All-in-One Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 359
  9. 2023Ablating Concepts in Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 317
  10. 2023Training-Free Layout Control with Cross-Attention Guidancecited by 313
  11. 2022Text2LIVE: Text-Driven Layered Image and Video Editingcited by 312
  12. 2022MAXIM: Multi-Axis MLP for Image Processingcited by 302
  13. 2023Show-1: Marrying Pixel and Latent Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generationcited by 302
  14. 2023Text-to-image Diffusion Models in Generative AI: A Surveycited by 265
  15. 2023Generating Images with Multimodal Language Modelscited by 260
  16. 2023T2I-CompBench++: An Enhanced and Comprehensive Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-image Generationcited by 260
  17. 2023Rerender A Video: Zero-Shot Text-Guided Video-to-Video Translationcited by 253
  18. 2021Deep Generative Modelling: A Comparative Review of VAEs, GANs, Normalizing Flows, Energy-Based and Autoregressive Modelscited by 252
  19. 2023Break-A-Scene: Extracting Multiple Concepts from a Single Imagecited by 231
  20. 2023TextDiffuser: Diffusion Models as Text Painterscited by 229
  21. 2023A Comprehensive Survey of AI-Generated Content (AIGC): A History of Generative AI from GAN to ChatGPTcited by 224
  22. 2021More Control for Free! Image Synthesis with Semantic Diffusion Guidancecited by 212
  23. 2023Controlling Text-to-Image Diffusion by Orthogonal Finetuningcited by 208
  24. 2022Diffusion-GAN: Training GANs with Diffusioncited by 205
  25. 2023Glaze: Protecting Artists from Style Mimicry by Text-to-Image Modelscited by 205
  26. 2023Exposing flaws of generative model evaluation metrics and their unfair treatment of diffusion modelscited by 205
  27. 2021CLIPstyler: Image Style Transfer with a Single Text Conditioncited by 203
  28. 2022ReCo: Region-Controlled Text-to-Image Generationcited by 179
  29. 2022Depth-Aware Generative Adversarial Network for Talking Head Video Generationcited by 178
  30. 2022Translation between Molecules and Natural Languagecited by 177
  31. 2023HIVE: Harnessing Human Feedback for Instructional Visual Editingcited by 173
  32. 2022DE-FAKE: Detection and Attribution of Fake Images Generated by Text-to-Image Generation Modelscited by 168
  33. 2024Lotus: Diffusion-based Visual Foundation Model for High-quality Dense Predictioncited by 166
  34. 2022A Comprehensive Survey of Few-shot Learning: Evolution, Applications, Challenges, and Opportunitiescited by 163
  35. 2023Raising the Cost of Malicious AI-Powered Image Editingcited by 163
  36. 2023Swap Attention in Spatiotemporal Diffusions for Text-to-Video Generationcited by 154
  37. 2022Dream3D: Zero-Shot Text-to-3D Synthesis Using 3D Shape Prior and Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 151
  38. 2023Localizing Object-level Shape Variations with Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 142

50 most cited of 577 All 577 (JSON)