# Multimodal Image Synthesis and Editing: The Generative AI Era

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.13592 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13592/

## Key facts

- Cited by 52 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 244 of its 399 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 244)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [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)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [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)

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

- [NeRF: Neural Radiance Field in 3D Vision: A Comprehensive Review (Updated Post-Gaussian Splatting)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00379/) (2022)
- [State of the Art on Diffusion Models for Visual Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07204/) (2023)
- [SIDA: Social Media Image Deepfake Detection, Localization and Explanation with Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04292/) (2024)
- [Improving Tuning-Free Real Image Editing with Proximal Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05414/) (2023)
- [A Bias-Free Training Paradigm for More General AI-generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17671/) (2024)
- [Text2Earth: Unlocking Text-driven Remote Sensing Image Generation with a Global-Scale Dataset and a Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00895/) (2025)
- [DreamStory: Open-Domain Story Visualization by LLM-Guided Multi-Subject Consistent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12899/) (2024)
- [Regularized Vector Quantization for Tokenized Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06424/) (2023)
- [MetaEarth: A Generative Foundation Model for Global-Scale Remote Sensing Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13570/) (2024)
- [Object-aware Inversion and Reassembly for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12149/) (2023)
- [TGIF: Text-Guided Inpainting Forgery Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11566/) (2024)
- [Marginal Contrastive Correspondence for Guided Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00442/) (2022)
- [Visual Text Processing: A Comprehensive Review and Unified Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21682/) (2025)
- [Audio-Visual Speech Representation Expert for Enhanced Talking Face Video Generation and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04327/) (2024)
- [Compositional Generative Model of Unbounded 4D Cities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08983/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Composed Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18495/) (2025)
- [On the Trustworthiness Landscape of State-of-the-art Generative Models: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16680/) (2023)
- [Simulating the Real World: A Unified Survey of Multimodal Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04641/) (2025)
- [Human Image Generation: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08896/) (2022)
- [Auto-regressive Image Synthesis with Integrated Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10776/) (2022)
- [Generative Artificial Intelligence Meets Synthetic Aperture Radar: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05027/) (2024)
- [DialogPaint: A Dialog-based Image Editing Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10073/) (2023)
- [Vision + Language Applications: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14598/) (2023)
- [Advances in 3D Neural Stylization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18328/) (2023)
- [RAIDX: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation and GRPO Reinforcement Learning Framework for Explainable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04524/) (2025)
- [Deformation-Recovery Diffusion Model (DRDM): Instance Deformation for Image Manipulation and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07295/) (2024)
- [FACEMUG: A Multimodal Generative and Fusion Framework for Local Facial Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19009/) (2024)
- [Visual Enumeration Remains Challenging for Multimodal Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03328/) (2024)
- [Ultra-High-Resolution Image Synthesis: Data, Method and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01331/) (2025)
- [Aria-NeRF: Multimodal Egocentric View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06455/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As information exists in various modalities in real world, effective interaction and fusion among multimodal information plays a key role for the creation and perception of multimodal data in computer vision and deep learning research. With superb power in modeling the interaction among multimodal information, multimodal image synthesis and editing has become a hot research topic in recent years. Instead of providing explicit guidance for network training, multimodal guidance offers intuitive and flexible means for image synthesis and editing. On the other hand, this field is also facing several challenges in alignment of multimodal features, synthesis of high-resolution images, faithful evaluation metrics, etc. In this survey, we comprehensively contextualize the advance of the recent multimodal image synthesis and editing and formulate taxonomies according to data modalities and model types. We start with an introduction to different guidance modalities in image synthesis and editing, and then describe multimodal image synthesis and editing approaches extensively according to their model types. After that, we describe benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics as well as corresponding experimental results. Finally, we provide insights about the current research challenges and possible directions for future research. A project associated with this survey is available at https://github.com/fnzhan/Generative-AI.