# Character-Aware Models Improve Visual Text Rendering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10562 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10562/

## Key facts

- Cited by 92 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 182 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01324/) (2022)
- [How multilingual is Multilingual BERT?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01502/) (2019)
- [Generating Sequences With Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.0850/) (2013)
- [ByT5: Towards a token-free future with pre-trained byte-to-byte models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13626/) (2021)
- [CANINE: Pre-training an Efficient Tokenization-Free Encoder for Language Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06874/) (2021)
- [Charformer: Fast Character Transformers via Gradient-based Subword Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12672/) (2021)
- [Between words and characters: A Brief History of Open-Vocabulary Modeling and Tokenization in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10508/) (2021)
- [What do tokens know about their characters and how do they know it?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02608/) (2022)
- [Models In a Spelling Bee: Language Models Implicitly Learn the Character Composition of Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11193/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 92)

- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [DPOK: Reinforcement Learning for Fine-tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16381/) (2023)
- [TIFA: Accurate and Interpretable Text-to-Image Faithfulness Evaluation with Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11897/) (2023)
- [Aligning Text-to-Image Models using Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12192/) (2023)
- [TextDiffuser: Diffusion Models as Text Painters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10855/) (2023)
- [Davidsonian Scene Graph: Improving Reliability in Fine-grained Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18235/) (2023)
- [AnyText: Multilingual Visual Text Generation And Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03054/) (2023)
- [Grounded Text-to-Image Synthesis with Attention Refocusing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05427/) (2023)
- [TextDiffuser-2: Unleashing the Power of Language Models for Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16465/) (2023)
- [GlyphControl: Glyph Conditional Control for Visual Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18259/) (2023)
- [Tokenization counts: the impact of tokenization on arithmetic in frontier LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14903/) (2024)
- [Controllable Generation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04279/) (2024)
- [Glyph-ByT5: A Customized Text Encoder for Accurate Visual Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09622/) (2024)
- [UDiffText: A Unified Framework for High-quality Text Synthesis in Arbitrary Images via Character-aware Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04884/) (2023)
- [DreamSync: Aligning Text-to-Image Generation with Image Understanding Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17946/) (2023)
- [AnyText2: Visual Text Generation and Editing With Customizable Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15245/) (2024)
- [Wuerstchen: An Efficient Architecture for Large-Scale Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00637/) (2023)
- [Glyph-ByT5-v2: A Strong Aesthetic Baseline for Accurate Multilingual Visual Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10208/) (2024)
- [Improving Diffusion Models for Scene Text Editing with Dual Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05568/) (2023)
- [DiffUTE: Universal Text Editing Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10825/) (2023)
- [TextCtrl: Diffusion-based Scene Text Editing with Prior Guidance Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10133/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Text-to-Image Evaluation with Gecko: On Metrics, Prompts, and Human Ratings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16820/) (2024)
- [If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again: Faithful Diffusion-based Text-to-Image Generation by Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13308/) (2023)
- [FonTS: Text Rendering with Typography and Style Controls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00136/) (2024)
- [DesignDiffusion: High-Quality Text-to-Design Image Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01645/) (2025)
- [PosterLlama: Bridging Design Ability of Langauge Model to Contents-Aware Layout Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00995/) (2024)
- [LLMs Meet Multimodal Generation and Editing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19334/) (2024)
- [GlyphDraw: Seamlessly Rendering Text with Intricate Spatial Structures in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17870/) (2023)
- [Scalable Ranked Preference Optimization for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18013/) (2024)
- [Divide, Evaluate, and Refine: Evaluating and Improving Text-to-Image Alignment with Iterative VQA Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04749/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current image generation models struggle to reliably produce well-formed visual text. In this paper, we investigate a key contributing factor: popular text-to-image models lack character-level input features, making it much harder to predict a word's visual makeup as a series of glyphs. To quantify this effect, we conduct a series of experiments comparing character-aware vs. character-blind text encoders. In the text-only domain, we find that character-aware models provide large gains on a novel spelling task (WikiSpell). Applying our learnings to the visual domain, we train a suite of image generation models, and show that character-aware variants outperform their character-blind counterparts across a range of novel text rendering tasks (our DrawText benchmark). Our models set a much higher state-of-the-art on visual spelling, with 30+ point accuracy gains over competitors on rare words, despite training on far fewer examples.