# DiffCloth: Diffusion Based Garment Synthesis and Manipulation via Structural Cross-modal Semantic Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.11206 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11206/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [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)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14818/) (2021)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13826/) (2023)
- [CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13290/) (2021)
- [AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10485/) (2017)
- [Compositional Visual Generation with Composable Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01714/) (2022)
- [PointRend: Image Segmentation as Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08193/) (2019)
- [Training-Free Structured Diffusion Guidance for Compositional Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05032/) (2022)
- [DM-GAN: Dynamic Memory Generative Adversarial Networks for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01310/) (2019)
- [VQGAN-CLIP: Open Domain Image Generation and Editing with Natural Language Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08583/) (2022)
- [Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04702/) (2021)
- [Imagen Editor and EditBench: Advancing and Evaluating Text-Guided Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06909/) (2022)
- [A Note on the Inception Score](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01973/) (2018)
- [DF-GAN: A Simple and Effective Baseline for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05865/) (2020)
- [Object-driven Text-to-Image Synthesis via Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10740/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [IMAGGarment: Fine-Grained Garment Generation for Controllable Fashion Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13176/) (2025)
- [CosmicMan: A Text-to-Image Foundation Model for Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01294/) (2024)
- [TryOffDiff: Virtual-Try-Off via High-Fidelity Garment Reconstruction using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18350/) (2024)
- [RAGDiffusion: Faithful Cloth Generation via External Knowledge Assimilation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19528/) (2024)
- [HieraFashDiff: Hierarchical Fashion Design with Multi-stage Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07450/) (2024)
- [MGT: Extending Virtual Try-Off to Multi-Garment Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13078/) (2025)
- [Quality and Quantity: Unveiling a Million High-Quality Images for Text-to-Image Synthesis in Fashion Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12067/) (2023)
- [HiGarment: Cross-modal Harmony Based Diffusion Model for Flat Sketch to Realistic Garment Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23186/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Models for Hyperspectral Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11158/) (2025)
- [FashionFail: Addressing Failure Cases in Fashion Object Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08582/) (2024)
- [OmniDiT: Extending Diffusion Transformer to Omni-VTON Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19643/) (2026)
- [CLIP Meets Diffusion: A Synergistic Approach to Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11772/) (2025)
- [Fine-Grained Customized Fashion Design with Image-into-Prompt benchmark and dataset from LMM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09324/) (2025)
- [AlignVTOFF: Texture-Spatial Feature Alignment for High-Fidelity Virtual Try-Off](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02038/) (2026)
- [VersaVogue: Visual Expert Orchestration and Preference Alignment for Unified Fashion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07210/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-modal garment synthesis and manipulation will significantly benefit the way fashion designers generate garments and modify their designs via flexible linguistic interfaces.Current approaches follow the general text-to-image paradigm and mine cross-modal relations via simple cross-attention modules, neglecting the structural correspondence between visual and textual representations in the fashion design domain. In this work, we instead introduce DiffCloth, a diffusion-based pipeline for cross-modal garment synthesis and manipulation, which empowers diffusion models with flexible compositionality in the fashion domain by structurally aligning the cross-modal semantics. Specifically, we formulate the part-level cross-modal alignment as a bipartite matching problem between the linguistic Attribute-Phrases (AP) and the visual garment parts which are obtained via constituency parsing and semantic segmentation, respectively. To mitigate the issue of attribute confusion, we further propose a semantic-bundled cross-attention to preserve the spatial structure similarities between the attention maps of attribute adjectives and part nouns in each AP. Moreover, DiffCloth allows for manipulation of the generated results by simply replacing APs in the text prompts. The manipulation-irrelevant regions are recognized by blended masks obtained from the bundled attention maps of the APs and kept unchanged. Extensive experiments on the CM-Fashion benchmark demonstrate that DiffCloth both yields state-of-the-art garment synthesis results by leveraging the inherent structural information and supports flexible manipulation with region consistency.