# Create Your World: Lifelong Text-to-Image Diffusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.04430 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04430/

## Key facts

- Cited by 46 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 36 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Sep 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 36)

- [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)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (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)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Magic3D: High-Resolution Text-to-3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10440/) (2022)
- [Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04488/) (2022)
- [eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01324/) (2022)
- [Vector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14822/) (2021)
- [On Distillation of Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03142/) (2022)
- [Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13826/) (2023)
- [Lifelong Learning with Dynamically Expandable Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01547/) (2017)
- [Training-Free Structured Diffusion Guidance for Compositional Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05032/) (2022)
- [DiffusionDB: A Large-scale Prompt Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14896/) (2022)
- [Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04803/) (2023)
- [DER: Dynamically Expandable Representation for Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16788/) (2021)
- [SVDiff: Compact Parameter Space for Diffusion Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11305/) (2023)
- [DyTox: Transformers for Continual Learning with DYnamic TOken eXpansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11326/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Controllable Generation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04279/) (2024)
- [MagicTime: Time-lapse Video Generation Models as Metamorphic Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05014/) (2024)
- [DreamStory: Open-Domain Story Visualization by LLM-Guided Multi-Subject Consistent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12899/) (2024)
- [MetaEarth: A Generative Foundation Model for Global-Scale Remote Sensing Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13570/) (2024)
- [Anim-Director: A Large Multimodal Model Powered Agent for Controllable Animation Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09787/) (2024)
- [How to Continually Adapt Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Flexible Customization?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17594/) (2024)
- [BELM: Bidirectional Explicit Linear Multi-step Sampler for Exact Inversion in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07273/) (2024)
- [PixelVLA: Advancing Pixel-level Understanding in Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01571/) (2025)
- [FiTv2: Scalable and Improved Flexible Vision Transformer for Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13925/) (2024)
- [Novel Object Synthesis via Adaptive Text-Image Harmony](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20823/) (2024)
- [Continual Learning for Generative AI: From LLMs to MLLMs and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13045/) (2025)
- [Never-Ending Behavior-Cloning Agent for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00336/) (2024)
- [MuseumMaker: Continual Style Customization without Catastrophic Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16612/) (2024)
- [Erasing Concepts, Steering Generations: A Comprehensive Survey of Concept Suppression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19398/) (2025)
- [Multi-modal Generative AI: Multi-modal LLMs, Diffusions, and the Unification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14993/) (2024)
- [CE-SDWV: Effective and Efficient Concept Erasure for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via a Semantic-Driven Word Vocabulary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15562/) (2025)
- [X-Dreamer: Creating High-quality 3D Content by Bridging the Domain Gap Between Text-to-2D and Text-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00085/) (2023)
- [ConceptGuard: Continual Personalized Text-to-Image Generation with Forgetting and Confusion Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10358/) (2025)
- [CLoG: Benchmarking Continual Learning of Image Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04584/) (2024)
- [ERDDCI: Exact Reversible Diffusion via Dual-Chain Inversion for High-Quality Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14247/) (2024)
- [Lifelong Language-Conditioned Robotic Manipulation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05160/) (2026)
- [Improving Multi-Subject Consistency in Open-Domain Image Generation with Isolation and Reposition Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19261/) (2024)
- [Continual Personalization for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02296/) (2025)
- [ConceptSplit: Decoupled Multi-Concept Personalization of Diffusion Models via Token-wise Adaptation and Attention Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04668/) (2025)
- [Assessing Open-world Forgetting in Generative Image Model Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14159/) (2024)
- [Towards Lifelong Few-Shot Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05544/) (2024)
- [Detecting Malicious Concepts without Image Generation in AI-Generated Content (AIGC)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08921/) (2025)
- [Data-Free Class-Incremental Gesture Recognition with Prototype-Guided Pseudo Feature Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20049/) (2025)
- [Bring Your Dreams to Life: Continual Text-to-Video Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05802/) (2025)
- [All-day Multi-scenes Lifelong Vision-and-Language Navigation with Tucker Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14276/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-image generative models can produce diverse high-quality images of concepts with a text prompt, which have demonstrated excellent ability in image generation, image translation, etc. We in this work study the problem of synthesizing instantiations of a use's own concepts in a never-ending manner, i.e., create your world, where the new concepts from user are quickly learned with a few examples. To achieve this goal, we propose a Lifelong text-to-image Diffusion Model (L2DM), which intends to overcome knowledge "catastrophic forgetting" for the past encountered concepts, and semantic "catastrophic neglecting" for one or more concepts in the text prompt. In respect of knowledge "catastrophic forgetting", our L2DM framework devises a task-aware memory enhancement module and a elastic-concept distillation module, which could respectively safeguard the knowledge of both prior concepts and each past personalized concept. When generating images with a user text prompt, the solution to semantic "catastrophic neglecting" is that a concept attention artist module can alleviate the semantic neglecting from concept aspect, and an orthogonal attention module can reduce the semantic binding from attribute aspect. To the end, our model can generate more faithful image across a range of continual text prompts in terms of both qualitative and quantitative metrics, when comparing with the related state-of-the-art models. The code will be released at https://wenqiliang.github.io/.
