# Harnessing the Spatial-Temporal Attention of Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Text-to-Image Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03869 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03869/

## Key facts

- Cited by 51 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 50 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 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 50)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [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)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [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)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (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)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [LayoutGPT: Compositional Visual Planning and Generation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15393/) (2023)
- [T2I-CompBench++: An Enhanced and Comprehensive Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06350/) (2023)
- [Subject-Diffusion:Open Domain Personalized Text-to-Image Generation without Test-time Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11410/) (2023)
- [T2V-CompBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14505/) (2024)
- [SparseCtrl: Adding Sparse Controls to Text-to-Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16933/) (2023)
- [Linguistic Binding in Diffusion Models: Enhancing Attribute Correspondence through Attention Map Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08877/) (2023)
- [Grounded Text-to-Image Synthesis with Attention Refocusing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05427/) (2023)
- [Improving Text-to-Image Consistency via Automatic Prompt Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17804/) (2024)
- [Compositional Text-to-Image Synthesis with Attention Map Control of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13921/) (2023)
- [Controllable Generation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04279/) (2024)
- [Large-scale Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12244/) (2024)
- [CONFORM: Contrast is All You Need For High-Fidelity Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06059/) (2023)
- [Boosting Consistency in Story Visualization with Rich-Contextual Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02482/) (2024)
- [A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Principled Recaptioning Improves Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16656/) (2023)
- [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)
- [PALP: Prompt Aligned Personalization of Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06105/) (2024)
- [Token Merging for Training-Free Semantic Binding in Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07132/) (2024)
- [FastCache: Fast Caching for Diffusion Transformer Through Learnable Linear Approximation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20353/) (2025)
- [MaskDiffusion: Boosting Text-to-Image Consistency with Conditional Mask](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04399/) (2023)
- [Reason out Your Layout: Evoking the Layout Master from Large Language Models for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17126/) (2023)
- [Correcting Diffusion Generation through Resampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06038/) (2023)
- [Discffusion: Discriminative Diffusion Models as Few-shot Vision and Language Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10722/) (2023)
- [PICTURE: PhotorealistIC virtual Try-on from UnconstRained dEsigns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04534/) (2023)
- [Compositional Video Generation as Flow Equalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06182/) (2024)
- [Concept Replacer: Replacing Sensitive Concepts in Diffusion Models via Precision Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01244/) (2024)
- [CompGS: Unleashing 2D Compositionality for Compositional Text-to-3D via Dynamically Optimizing 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20723/) (2024)
- [Spatial Transport Optimization by Repositioning Attention Map for Training-Free Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22168/) (2025)
- [Attention Overlap Is Responsible for The Entity Missing Problem in Text-to-image Diffusion Models!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20972/) (2024)
- [HyperSDFusion: Bridging Hierarchical Structures in Language and Geometry for Enhanced 3D Text2Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00372/) (2024)
- [XReal: Realistic Anatomy and Pathology-Aware X-ray Generation via Controllable Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09240/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on text-to-image synthesis tasks. However, one critical limitation of these models is the low fidelity of generated images with respect to the text description, such as missing objects, mismatched attributes, and mislocated objects. One key reason for such inconsistencies is the inaccurate cross-attention to text in both the spatial dimension, which controls at what pixel region an object should appear, and the temporal dimension, which controls how different levels of details are added through the denoising steps. In this paper, we propose a new text-to-image algorithm that adds explicit control over spatial-temporal cross-attention in diffusion models. We first utilize a layout predictor to predict the pixel regions for objects mentioned in the text. We then impose spatial attention control by combining the attention over the entire text description and that over the local description of the particular object in the corresponding pixel region of that object. The temporal attention control is further added by allowing the combination weights to change at each denoising step, and the combination weights are optimized to ensure high fidelity between the image and the text. Experiments show that our method generates images with higher fidelity compared to diffusion-model-based baselines without fine-tuning the diffusion model. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/Diffusion-SpaceTime-Attn.