# Meta ControlNet: Enhancing Task Adaptation via Meta Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.01255 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01255/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 32 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 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 32)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [On First-Order Meta-Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02999/) (2018)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07093/) (2023)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [Holistically-Nested Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06375/) (2015)
- [Rapid Learning or Feature Reuse? Towards Understanding the Effectiveness of MAML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09157/) (2019)
- [Uni-ControlNet: All-in-One Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16322/) (2023)
- [Composer: Creative and Controllable Image Synthesis with Composable Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09778/) (2023)
- [Learned Initializations for Optimizing Coordinate-Based Neural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02189/) (2020)
- [MetaSDF: Meta-learning Signed Distance Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09662/) (2020)
- [Let 2D Diffusion Model Know 3D-Consistency for Robust Text-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07937/) (2023)
- [MetaDiff: Meta-Learning with Conditional Diffusion for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16424/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Controllable Generation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04279/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion-based image synthesis has attracted extensive attention recently. In particular, ControlNet that uses image-based prompts exhibits powerful capability in image tasks such as canny edge detection and generates images well aligned with these prompts. However, vanilla ControlNet generally requires extensive training of around 5000 steps to achieve a desirable control for a single task. Recent context-learning approaches have improved its adaptability, but mainly for edge-based tasks, and rely on paired examples. Thus, two important open issues are yet to be addressed to reach the full potential of ControlNet: (i) zero-shot control for certain tasks and (ii) faster adaptation for non-edge-based tasks. In this paper, we introduce a novel Meta ControlNet method, which adopts the task-agnostic meta learning technique and features a new layer freezing design. Meta ControlNet significantly reduces learning steps to attain control ability from 5000 to 1000. Further, Meta ControlNet exhibits direct zero-shot adaptability in edge-based tasks without any finetuning, and achieves control within only 100 finetuning steps in more complex non-edge tasks such as Human Pose, outperforming all existing methods. The codes is available in https://github.com/JunjieYang97/Meta-ControlNet.