# ST-LDM: A Universal Framework for Text-Grounded Object Generation in Real Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.10004 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10004/

## 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 38 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2024.

## 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 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (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)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00796/) (2022)
- [Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05442/) (2016)
- [GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07093/) (2023)
- [DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11427/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Scene: Scene-Based Text-to-Image Generation with Human Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13131/) (2022)
- [Blended Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02779/) (2022)
- [LAVT: Language-Aware Vision Transformer for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02244/) (2021)
- [Training-Free Layout Control with Cross-Attention Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03373/) (2023)
- [Vision Transformer with Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00520/) (2022)
- [Human Preference Score: Better Aligning Text-to-Image Models with Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14420/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Transformer and Query Generation for Referring Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05565/) (2021)
- [Break-A-Scene: Extracting Multiple Concepts from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16311/) (2023)

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

- [Pinco: Position-induced Consistent Adapter for Diffusion Transformer in Foreground-conditioned Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03812/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a novel image editing scenario termed Text-grounded Object Generation (TOG), defined as generating a new object in the real image spatially conditioned by textual descriptions. Existing diffusion models exhibit limitations of spatial perception in complex real-world scenes, relying on additional modalities to enforce constraints, and TOG imposes heightened challenges on scene comprehension under the weak supervision of linguistic information. We propose a universal framework ST-LDM based on Swin-Transformer, which can be integrated into any latent diffusion model with training-free backward guidance. ST-LDM encompasses a global-perceptual autoencoder with adaptable compression scales and hierarchical visual features, parallel with deformable multimodal transformer to generate region-wise guidance for the subsequent denoising process. We transcend the limitation of traditional attention mechanisms that only focus on existing visual features by introducing deformable feature alignment to hierarchically refine spatial positioning fused with multi-scale visual and linguistic information. Extensive Experiments demonstrate that our model enhances the localization of attention mechanisms while preserving the generative capabilities inherent to diffusion models.
