# TextDiffuser: Diffusion Models as Text Painters

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10855 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10855/

## Key facts

- Cited by 229 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 82 of its 107 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 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 82)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15282/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00796/) (2022)
- [eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01324/) (2022)
- [Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14818/) (2021)
- [Training Deep Nets with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06174/) (2016)
- [Vector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14822/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 229)

- [AnyText: Multilingual Visual Text Generation And Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03054/) (2023)
- [CFG++: Manifold-constrained Classifier Free Guidance for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08070/) (2024)
- [TextDiffuser-2: Unleashing the Power of Language Models for Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16465/) (2023)
- [GenArtist: Multimodal LLM as an Agent for Unified Image Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05600/) (2024)
- [AutoDIR: Automatic All-in-One Image Restoration with Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10123/) (2023)
- [ShareGPT-4o-Image: Aligning Multimodal Models with GPT-4o-Level Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18095/) (2025)
- [KOSMOS-2.5: A Multimodal Literate Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11419/) (2023)
- [Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Models: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02567/) (2025)
- [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)
- [SVGDreamer: Text Guided SVG Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16476/) (2023)
- [Advantage Weighted Matching: Aligning RL with Pretraining in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25050/) (2025)
- [UDiffText: A Unified Framework for High-quality Text Synthesis in Arbitrary Images via Character-aware Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04884/) (2023)
- [Harmonizing Visual Text Comprehension and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16364/) (2024)
- [AnyText2: Visual Text Generation and Editing With Customizable Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15245/) (2024)
- [Glyph-ByT5-v2: A Strong Aesthetic Baseline for Accurate Multilingual Visual Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10208/) (2024)
- [FLUX-Text: A Simple and Advanced Diffusion Transformer Baseline for Scene Text Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03329/) (2025)
- [TextCtrl: Diffusion-based Scene Text Editing with Prior Guidance Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10133/) (2024)
- [Brush Your Text: Synthesize Any Scene Text on Images via Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12232/) (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)
- [PosterCraft: Rethinking High-Quality Aesthetic Poster Generation in a Unified Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10741/) (2025)
- [LLMs Meet Multimodal Generation and Editing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19334/) (2024)
- [ViMo: A Generative Visual GUI World Model for App Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13936/) (2025)
- [Flow-OPD: On-Policy Distillation for Flow Matching Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08063/) (2026)
- [AIGI-Holmes: Towards Explainable and Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection via Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02664/) (2025)
- [DiagrammerGPT: Generating Open-Domain, Open-Platform Diagrams via LLM Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12128/) (2023)
- [GlyphDraw2: Automatic Generation of Complex Glyph Posters with Diffusion Models and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02252/) (2024)
- [Sparkles: Unlocking Chats Across Multiple Images for Multimodal Instruction-Following Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16463/) (2023)
- [TextAtlas5M: A Large-scale Dataset for Dense Text Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07870/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models have gained increasing attention for their impressive generation abilities but currently struggle with rendering accurate and coherent text. To address this issue, we introduce TextDiffuser, focusing on generating images with visually appealing text that is coherent with backgrounds. TextDiffuser consists of two stages: first, a Transformer model generates the layout of keywords extracted from text prompts, and then diffusion models generate images conditioned on the text prompt and the generated layout. Additionally, we contribute the first large-scale text images dataset with OCR annotations, MARIO-10M, containing 10 million image-text pairs with text recognition, detection, and character-level segmentation annotations. We further collect the MARIO-Eval benchmark to serve as a comprehensive tool for evaluating text rendering quality. Through experiments and user studies, we show that TextDiffuser is flexible and controllable to create high-quality text images using text prompts alone or together with text template images, and conduct text inpainting to reconstruct incomplete images with text. The code, model, and dataset will be available at urlhttps://aka.ms/textdiffuser.