# GlueGen: Plug and Play Multi-modal Encoders for X-to-image Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10056 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10056/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 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 62 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2023.

## 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 62)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [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)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Generating Images with Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17216/) (2023)
- [Kosmos-G: Generating Images in Context with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02992/) (2023)
- [Controllable Generation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04279/) (2024)
- [ControlAR: Controllable Image Generation with Autoregressive Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02705/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Diffusion Based Image Generation Models: Issues and Their Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13142/) (2023)
- [Language-Guided Joint Audio-Visual Editing via One-Shot Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07463/) (2024)
- [ClassDiffusion: More Aligned Personalization Tuning with Explicit Class Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17532/) (2024)
- [MultiFusion: Fusing Pre-Trained Models for Multi-Lingual, Multi-Modal Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15296/) (2023)
- [SonicDiffusion: Audio-Driven Image Generation and Editing with Pretrained Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00878/) (2024)
- [X2I: Seamless Integration of Multimodal Understanding into Diffusion Transformer via Attention Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06134/) (2025)
- [Language-driven Scene Synthesis using Multi-conditional Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15948/) (2023)
- [UniFusion: Vision-Language Model as Unified Encoder in Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12789/) (2025)
- [Align, Adapt and Inject: Sound-guided Unified Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11504/) (2023)
- [PEA-Diffusion: Parameter-Efficient Adapter with Knowledge Distillation in non-English Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17086/) (2023)
- [Sound2Vision: Generating Diverse Visuals from Audio through Cross-Modal Latent Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06209/) (2024)
- [Visual Echoes: A Simple Unified Transformer for Audio-Visual Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14598/) (2024)
- [Label-free Neural Semantic Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01790/) (2024)
- [MuLan: Adapting Multilingual Diffusion Models for Hundreds of Languages with Negligible Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01271/) (2024)
- [Breaking Dual Bottlenecks: Evolving Unified Multimodal Models into Self-Adaptive Interleaved Visual Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14709/) (2026)
- [Artificial Intelligence for Biomedical Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07619/) (2024)
- [MACS: Multi-source Audio-to-image Generation with Contextual Significance and Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10287/) (2025)
- [On the Limitations of Cross-Lingual Consistency in Multilingual Text-to-image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11002/) (2026)
- [SounDiT: Geo-Contextual Soundscape-to-Landscape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12734/) (2025)
- [SeeingSounds: Learning Audio-to-Visual Alignment via Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11738/) (2025)
- [Towards Expressive and Faithful Audio-to-Image Generation: A Unified Multimodal Dataset and Synthesis Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09529/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-image (T2I) models based on diffusion processes have achieved remarkable success in controllable image generation using user-provided captions. However, the tight coupling between the current text encoder and image decoder in T2I models makes it challenging to replace or upgrade. Such changes often require massive fine-tuning or even training from scratch with the prohibitive expense. To address this problem, we propose GlueGen, which applies a newly proposed GlueNet model to align features from single-modal or multi-modal encoders with the latent space of an existing T2I model. The approach introduces a new training objective that leverages parallel corpora to align the representation spaces of different encoders. Empirical results show that GlueNet can be trained efficiently and enables various capabilities beyond previous state-of-the-art models: 1) multilingual language models such as XLM-Roberta can be aligned with existing T2I models, allowing for the generation of high-quality images from captions beyond English; 2) GlueNet can align multi-modal encoders such as AudioCLIP with the Stable Diffusion model, enabling sound-to-image generation; 3) it can also upgrade the current text encoder of the latent diffusion model for challenging case generation. By the alignment of various feature representations, the GlueNet allows for flexible and efficient integration of new functionality into existing T2I models and sheds light on X-to-image (X2I) generation.