# UPainting: Unified Text-to-Image Diffusion Generation with Cross-modal Guidance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.16031 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16031/

## Key facts

- Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 31 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2022.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (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)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13290/) (2021)
- [AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10485/) (2017)
- [Make-A-Scene: Scene-Based Text-to-Image Generation with Human Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13131/) (2022)
- [DM-GAN: Dynamic Memory Generative Adversarial Networks for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01310/) (2019)
- [Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04702/) (2021)
- [UNIMO: Towards Unified-Modal Understanding and Generation via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15409/) (2020)
- [ERNIE 2.0: A Continual Pre-training Framework for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12412/) (2019)
- [More Control for Free! Image Synthesis with Semantic Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05744/) (2021)
- [ERNIE-ViL: Knowledge Enhanced Vision-Language Representations Through Scene Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16934/) (2020)
- [Improving Text-to-Image Synthesis Using Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02423/) (2021)
- [ERNIE-ViLG: Unified Generative Pre-training for Bidirectional Vision-Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15283/) (2021)
- [UNIMO-2: End-to-End Unified Vision-Language Grounded Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09067/) (2022)

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

- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [Directly Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models on Differentiable Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17400/) (2023)
- [Text-to-image Diffusion Models in Generative AI: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07909/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Diffusion Latent Optimization Improves Classifier Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13703/) (2023)
- [Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Models: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02567/) (2025)
- [A Complete Survey on Generative AI (AIGC): Is ChatGPT from GPT-4 to GPT-5 All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11717/) (2023)
- [RenAIssance: A Survey into AI Text-to-Image Generation in the Era of Large Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00810/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Model-Based Video Editing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07111/) (2024)
- [Motion Guidance: Diffusion-Based Image Editing with Differentiable Motion Estimators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18085/) (2024)
- [Auto-Encoding Morph-Tokens for Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01926/) (2024)
- [Brain Diffusion for Visual Exploration: Cortical Discovery using Large Scale Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03089/) (2023)
- [DreamStyler: Paint by Style Inversion with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06933/) (2023)
- [Improved Visual Story Generation with Adaptive Context Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16811/) (2023)
- [ViPer: Visual Personalization of Generative Models via Individual Preference Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17365/) (2024)
- [UNIMO-G: Unified Image Generation through Multimodal Conditional Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13388/) (2024)
- [Accelerating Guided Diffusion Sampling with Splitting Numerical Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11558/) (2023)
- [DiG-IN: Diffusion Guidance for Investigating Networks -- Uncovering Classifier Differences Neuron Visualisations and Visual Counterfactual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17833/) (2023)
- [MuseumMaker: Continual Style Customization without Catastrophic Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16612/) (2024)
- [Imperceptible Protection against Style Imitation from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19254/) (2024)
- [Vision + Language Applications: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14598/) (2023)
- [Towards Accurate Guided Diffusion Sampling through Symplectic Adjoint Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12030/) (2023)
- [Do DALL-E and Flamingo Understand Each Other?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.12249/) (2022)
- [From Broad Exploration to Stable Synthesis: Entropy-Guided Optimization for Autoregressive Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02355/) (2026)
- [GVDIFF: Grounded Text-to-Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01921/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Diffusion-based Unrestricted Adversarial Attacks via Adversary Preferences Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01511/) (2025)
- [DiffBlender: Composable and Versatile Multimodal Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15194/) (2023)
- [LTOS: Layout-controllable Text-Object Synthesis via Adaptive Cross-attention Fusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13579/) (2024)
- [StressDream: Steering Video World Models for Robust Policy Evaluation and Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00267/) (2026)
- [GEM: Boost Simple Network for Glass Surface Segmentation via Segment Anything Model and Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15282/) (2024)
- [Input-Adaptive Generative Dynamics in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15199/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion generative models have recently greatly improved the power of text-conditioned image generation. Existing image generation models mainly include text conditional diffusion model and cross-modal guided diffusion model, which are good at small scene image generation and complex scene image generation respectively. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective approach, namely UPainting, to unify simple and complex scene image generation, as shown in Figure 1. Based on architecture improvements and diverse guidance schedules, UPainting effectively integrates cross-modal guidance from a pretrained image-text matching model into a text conditional diffusion model that utilizes a pretrained Transformer language model as the text encoder. Our key findings is that combining the power of large-scale Transformer language model in understanding language and image-text matching model in capturing cross-modal semantics and style, is effective to improve sample fidelity and image-text alignment of image generation. In this way, UPainting has a more general image generation capability, which can generate images of both simple and complex scenes more effectively. To comprehensively compare text-to-image models, we further create a more general benchmark, UniBench, with well-written Chinese and English prompts in both simple and complex scenes. We compare UPainting with recent models and find that UPainting greatly outperforms other models in terms of caption similarity and image fidelity in both simple and complex scenes. UPainting project page urlhttps://upainting.github.io/.