# PhotoMaker: Customizing Realistic Human Photos via Stacked ID Embedding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04461 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04461/

## Key facts

- Cited by 328 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (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)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (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)
- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 328)

- [InstantID: Zero-shot Identity-Preserving Generation in Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07519/) (2024)
- [OminiControl: Minimal and Universal Control for Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15098/) (2024)
- [StoryDiffusion: Consistent Self-Attention for Long-Range Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01434/) (2024)
- [In-Context LoRA for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23775/) (2024)
- [Identity-Preserving Text-to-Video Generation by Frequency Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17440/) (2024)
- [PuLID: Pure and Lightning ID Customization via Contrastive Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16022/) (2024)
- [MS-Diffusion: Multi-subject Zero-shot Image Personalization with Layout Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07209/) (2024)
- [ID-Animator: Zero-Shot Identity-Preserving Human Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15275/) (2024)
- [EasyControl: Adding Efficient and Flexible Control for Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07027/) (2025)
- [Transparent Image Layer Diffusion using Latent Transparency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17113/) (2024)
- [UniReal: Universal Image Generation and Editing via Learning Real-world Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07774/) (2024)
- [Arc2Face: A Foundation Model for ID-Consistent Human Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11641/) (2024)
- [Lumina-Image 2.0: A Unified and Efficient Image Generative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21758/) (2025)
- [MovieDreamer: Hierarchical Generation for Coherent Long Visual Sequence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16655/) (2024)
- [StableAnimator: High-Quality Identity-Preserving Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17697/) (2024)
- [Controllable Generation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04279/) (2024)
- [DreamO: A Unified Framework for Image Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16915/) (2025)
- [SkyReels-A2: Compose Anything in Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02436/) (2025)
- [OpenS2V-Nexus: A Detailed Benchmark and Million-Scale Dataset for Subject-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20292/) (2025)
- [ConceptMaster: Multi-Concept Video Customization on Diffusion Transformer Models Without Test-Time Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04698/) (2025)
- [Multi-subject Open-set Personalization in Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06187/) (2025)
- [OMG: Occlusion-friendly Personalized Multi-concept Generation in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10983/) (2024)
- [EditVerse: Unifying Image and Video Editing and Generation with In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20360/) (2025)
- [AnyText2: Visual Text Generation and Editing With Customizable Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15245/) (2024)
- [MoA: Mixture-of-Attention for Subject-Context Disentanglement in Personalized Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11565/) (2024)
- [Is Artificial Intelligence Generated Image Detection a Solved Problem?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12335/) (2025)
- [LCM-Lookahead for Encoder-based Text-to-Image Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03620/) (2024)
- [Towards Understanding the Working Mechanism of Text-to-Image Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15330/) (2024)
- [K-LoRA: Unlocking Training-Free Fusion of Any Subject and Style LoRAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18461/) (2025)
- [DreamStory: Open-Domain Story Visualization by LLM-Guided Multi-Subject Consistent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12899/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in text-to-image generation have made remarkable progress in synthesizing realistic human photos conditioned on given text prompts. However, existing personalized generation methods cannot simultaneously satisfy the requirements of high efficiency, promising identity (ID) fidelity, and flexible text controllability. In this work, we introduce PhotoMaker, an efficient personalized text-to-image generation method, which mainly encodes an arbitrary number of input ID images into a stack ID embedding for preserving ID information. Such an embedding, serving as a unified ID representation, can not only encapsulate the characteristics of the same input ID comprehensively, but also accommodate the characteristics of different IDs for subsequent integration. This paves the way for more intriguing and practically valuable applications. Besides, to drive the training of our PhotoMaker, we propose an ID-oriented data construction pipeline to assemble the training data. Under the nourishment of the dataset constructed through the proposed pipeline, our PhotoMaker demonstrates better ID preservation ability than test-time fine-tuning based methods, yet provides significant speed improvements, high-quality generation results, strong generalization capabilities, and a wide range of applications. Our project page is available at https://photo-maker.github.io/