Improving In-Context Learning in Diffusion Models with Visual Context-Modulated Prompts
On the map: Diffusion models → Image generation, text-to-image and editing
Abstract (arXiv)
In light of the remarkable success of in-context learning in large language models, its potential extension to the vision domain, particularly with visual foundation models like Stable Diffusion, has sparked considerable interest. Existing approaches in visual in-context learning frequently face hurdles such as expensive pretraining, limiting frameworks, inadequate visual comprehension, and limited adaptability to new tasks. In response to these challenges, we introduce improved Prompt Diffusion (iPromptDiff) in this study. iPromptDiff integrates an end-to-end trained vision encoder that converts visual context into an embedding vector. This vector is subsequently used to modulate the token embeddings of text prompts. We show that a diffusion-based vision foundation model, when equipped with this visual context-modulated text guidance and a standard ControlNet structure, exhibits versatility and robustness across a variety of training tasks and excels in in-context learning for novel vision tasks, such as normal-to-image or image-to-line transformations. The effectiveness of these capabilities relies heavily on a deep visual understanding, which is achieved through relevant visual demonstrations processed by our proposed in-context learning architecture.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 44 of its 45 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 2023.
Builds on
44 of 45 references.
Closest ancestors · 7
Same direction, newest first
- 2023UniControl: A Unified Diffusion Model for Controllable Visual Generation In the Wild18 May
- 2023In-Context Learning Unlocked for Diffusion Models1 May
- 2023Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models10 Feb
- 2022eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers2 Nov
- 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding23 May
- 2022Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents13 Apr
- 2021DiffusionCLIP: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Robust Image Manipulation6 Oct
Other references · 37
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
- 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
- 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 29,915
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
- 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,694
- 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
- 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
- 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 8,964
- 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,185
- 2015Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamicscited by 7,005
- 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 5,931
- 2022PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathwayscited by 5,304
25 more
- 2016Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networkscited by 4,510
- 2022Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learningcited by 4,337
- 2019Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distributioncited by 4,067
- 2021Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learnerscited by 3,747
- 2022Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Modelscited by 2,994
- 2022An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversioncited by 2,231
- 2021Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spacescited by 1,665
- 2021What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?cited by 1,184
- 2017StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translationcited by 1,036
- 2022Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translationcited by 897
- 2017Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networkscited by 602
- 2021Argmax Flows and Multinomial Diffusion: Learning Categorical Distributionscited by 566
- 2021MetaICL: Learning to Learn In Contextcited by 450
- 2022Images Speak in Images: A Generalist Painter for In-Context Visual Learningcited by 317
- 2022Visual Prompting via Image Inpaintingcited by 248
- 2022Active Example Selection for In-Context Learningcited by 195
- 2021Pixel Difference Networks for Efficient Edge Detectioncited by 167
- 2023What Makes Good Examples for Visual In-Context Learning?cited by 150
- 2023Compositional Exemplars for In-context Learningcited by 143
- 2021Image-to-Image Translation: Methods and Applicationscited by 116
- 2022Learning to generate line drawings that convey geometry and semanticscited by 82
- 2018Conditional Image-to-Image Translationcited by 30
- 2023Diffusion-based Image Translation with Label Guidance for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentationcited by 27
- 2023Beta Diffusioncited by 17
- 2023Learning to Jump: Thinning and Thickening Latent Counts for Generative Modelingcited by 15
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 4; 2025: 2; 2026: 3.
9 papers.
- 2024Controllable Generation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: A Surveycited by 82
- 2024InstructBrush: Learning Attention-based Instruction Optimization for Image Editingcited by 10
- 2025In-Context Brush: Zero-shot Customized Subject Insertion with Context-Aware Latent Space Manipulationcited by 7
- 2026Geometric Image Editing via Effects-Sensitive In-Context Inpainting with Diffusion Transformerscited by 1
- 2026From Static to Interactive: Adapting Visual in-Context Learners for User-Driven Taskscited by 1
- 2024In-Context Translation: Towards Unifying Image Recognition, Processing, and Generationcited by 0
- 2024EchoAlign: Bridging Generative and Discriminative Learning under Noisy Labelscited by 0
- 2025Underlying Semantic Diffusion for Effective and Efficient In-Context Learningcited by 0
- 2026OPRO: Orthogonal Panel-Relative Operators for Panel-Aware In-Context Image Generationcited by 0
- 2026From Static to Interactive: Adapting Visual in-Context Learners for User-Driven Tasks8 Apr 2026
- 2026OPRO: Orthogonal Panel-Relative Operators for Panel-Aware In-Context Image Generation29 Mar 2026
- 2026Geometric Image Editing via Effects-Sensitive In-Context Inpainting with Diffusion Transformers9 Feb 2026
- 2025In-Context Brush: Zero-shot Customized Subject Insertion with Context-Aware Latent Space Manipulation26 May 2025
- 2025Underlying Semantic Diffusion for Effective and Efficient In-Context Learning6 Mar 2025
- 2024EchoAlign: Bridging Generative and Discriminative Learning under Noisy Labels21 May 2024
- 2024In-Context Translation: Towards Unifying Image Recognition, Processing, and Generation15 Apr 2024
- 2024InstructBrush: Learning Attention-based Instruction Optimization for Image Editing27 Mar 2024
- 2024Controllable Generation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: A Survey7 Mar 2024
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025Stable Diffusion Models are Secretly Good at Visual In-Context Learning
- 2023Harnessing Diffusion Models for Visual Perception with Meta Prompts
- 2023Unleashing Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Visual Perception
- 2025I Think, Therefore I Diffuse: Enabling Multimodal In-Context Reasoning in Diffusion Models
- 2023Prompting Hard or Hardly Prompting: Prompt Inversion for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
- 2023Prompt-Free Diffusion: Taking "Text" out of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
- 2024Analogist: Out-of-the-box Visual In-Context Learning with Image Diffusion Model
- 2024Implicit and Explicit Language Guidance for Diffusion-based Visual Perception