# Adversarial Text-to-Image Synthesis: A Review

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.09983 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09983/

## Key facts

- Cited by 52 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 134 of its 187 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 134)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [TIFA: Accurate and Interpretable Text-to-Image Faithfulness Evaluation with Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11897/) (2023)
- [Text-to-image Diffusion Models in Generative AI: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07909/) (2023)
- [DALL-Eval: Probing the Reasoning Skills and Social Biases of Text-to-Image Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04053/) (2022)
- [CLIPDraw: Exploring Text-to-Drawing Synthesis through Language-Image Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14843/) (2021)
- [AGIQA-3K: An Open Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04717/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Models, Image Super-Resolution And Everything: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00736/) (2024)
- [ShapeCrafter: A Recursive Text-Conditioned 3D Shape Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09446/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Multimodal Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01008/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Image Synthesis and Editing: The Generative AI Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13592/) (2021)
- [RenAIssance: A Survey into AI Text-to-Image Generation in the Era of Large Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00810/) (2023)
- [Mutual Information Divergence: A Unified Metric for Multimodal Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13445/) (2022)
- [Extreme Generative Image Compression by Learning Text Embedding from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07793/) (2022)
- [WordStylist: Styled Verbatim Handwritten Text Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16576/) (2023)
- [Foundation Models for Geospatial Reasoning: Assessing Capabilities of Large Language Models in Understanding Geometries and Topological Spatial Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17136/) (2025)
- [Hitchhiker's Guide to Super-Resolution: Introduction and Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13131/) (2022)
- [Q-Refine: A Perceptual Quality Refiner for AI-Generated Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01117/) (2024)
- [Bias and Fairness in Chatbots: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08836/) (2023)
- [Waving Goodbye to Low-Res: A Diffusion-Wavelet Approach for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01994/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Intent Understanding for Ambiguous prompt: A Human-Machine Co-Adaption Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15167/) (2025)
- [GAN Computers Generate Arts? A Survey on Visual Arts, Music, and Literary Text Generation using Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03857/) (2021)
- [ClimateGAN: Raising Climate Change Awareness by Generating Images of Floods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02871/) (2021)
- [CLIP-AGIQA: Boosting the Performance of AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment with CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15098/) (2024)
- [TISE: Bag of Metrics for Text-to-Image Synthesis Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01398/) (2021)
- [Diagnostic Benchmark and Iterative Inpainting for Layout-Guided Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06671/) (2023)
- [SpotDiffusion: A Fast Approach For Seamless Panorama Generation Over Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15507/) (2024)
- [AttrLostGAN: Attribute Controlled Image Synthesis from Reconfigurable Layout and Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13722/) (2021)
- [Generalization in Neural Networks: A Broad Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01610/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Attention-Guided Diffusion for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07977/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Mixed-Scale Feature Fusion Network for Blind AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15163/) (2024)
- [Arbitrary Style Guidance for Enhanced Diffusion-Based Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07751/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the advent of generative adversarial networks, synthesizing images from textual descriptions has recently become an active research area. It is a flexible and intuitive way for conditional image generation with significant progress in the last years regarding visual realism, diversity, and semantic alignment. However, the field still faces several challenges that require further research efforts such as enabling the generation of high-resolution images with multiple objects, and developing suitable and reliable evaluation metrics that correlate with human judgement. In this review, we contextualize the state of the art of adversarial text-to-image synthesis models, their development since their inception five years ago, and propose a taxonomy based on the level of supervision. We critically examine current strategies to evaluate text-to-image synthesis models, highlight shortcomings, and identify new areas of research, ranging from the development of better datasets and evaluation metrics to possible improvements in architectural design and model training. This review complements previous surveys on generative adversarial networks with a focus on text-to-image synthesis which we believe will help researchers to further advance the field.