# In-Context Learning Unlocked for Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.01115 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01115/

## Key facts

- Cited by 104 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 65 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 May 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 65)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 104)

- [To Generate or Not? Safety-Driven Unlearned Diffusion Models Are Still Easy To Generate Unsafe Images ... For Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11868/) (2023)
- [UniControl: A Unified Diffusion Model for Controllable Visual Generation In the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11147/) (2023)
- [InstructDiffusion: A Generalist Modeling Interface for Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03895/) (2023)
- [StableNormal: Reducing Diffusion Variance for Stable and Sharp Normal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16864/) (2024)
- [OMG-LLaVA: Bridging Image-level, Object-level, Pixel-level Reasoning and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19389/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Multi-LoRA Composition for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16843/) (2024)
- [PhyT2V: LLM-Guided Iterative Self-Refinement for Physics-Grounded Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00596/) (2024)
- [In-Context Learning with Iterative Demonstration Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09881/) (2023)
- [Towards Synergistic, Generalized, and Efficient Dual-System for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08001/) (2024)
- [CoDi-2: In-Context, Interleaved, and Interactive Any-to-Any Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18775/) (2023)
- [Prompt-Free Diffusion: Taking "Text" out of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16223/) (2023)
- [Visual Prompting in Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15310/) (2024)
- [UnlearnCanvas: Stylized Image Dataset for Enhanced Machine Unlearning Evaluation in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11846/) (2024)
- [Smooth Diffusion: Crafting Smooth Latent Spaces in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04410/) (2023)
- [VisualCloze: A Universal Image Generation Framework via Visual In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07960/) (2025)
- [Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Generalizable Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18832/) (2023)
- [Image Segmentation in Foundation Model Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12957/) (2024)
- [Diffusion-RPO: Aligning Diffusion Models through Relative Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06382/) (2024)
- [PixWizard: Versatile Image-to-Image Visual Assistant with Open-Language Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15278/) (2024)
- [Analogist: Out-of-the-box Visual In-Context Learning with Image Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10316/) (2024)
- [X-SAM: From Segment Anything to Any Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04655/) (2025)
- [Visual Instruction Inversion: Image Editing via Visual Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14331/) (2023)
- [DiffClass: Diffusion-Based Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05016/) (2024)
- [Score Forgetting Distillation: A Swift, Data-Free Method for Machine Unlearning in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11219/) (2024)
- [Context Diffusion: In-Context Aware Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03584/) (2023)
- [LaVin-DiT: Large Vision Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11505/) (2024)
- [ImageRAG: Dynamic Image Retrieval for Reference-Guided Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09411/) (2025)
- [Generative AI Misuse: A Taxonomy of Tactics and Insights from Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13843/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Prompt Diffusion, a framework for enabling in-context learning in diffusion-based generative models. Given a pair of task-specific example images, such as depth from/to image and scribble from/to image, and a text guidance, our model automatically understands the underlying task and performs the same task on a new query image following the text guidance. To achieve this, we propose a vision-language prompt that can model a wide range of vision-language tasks and a diffusion model that takes it as input. The diffusion model is trained jointly over six different tasks using these prompts. The resulting Prompt Diffusion model is the first diffusion-based vision-language foundation model capable of in-context learning. It demonstrates high-quality in-context generation on the trained tasks and generalizes effectively to new, unseen vision tasks with their respective prompts. Our model also shows compelling text-guided image editing results. Our framework aims to facilitate research into in-context learning for computer vision. We share our code and pre-trained models at https://github.com/Zhendong-Wang/Prompt-Diffusion.