# TextCenGen: Attention-Guided Text-Centric Background Adaptation for Text-to-Image Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11824 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11824/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [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)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01324/) (2022)
- [GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07093/) (2023)
- [DiffusionDB: A Large-scale Prompt Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14896/) (2022)
- [MLLM-as-a-Judge: Assessing Multimodal LLM-as-a-Judge with Vision-Language Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04788/) (2024)
- [Uni-ControlNet: All-in-One Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16322/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Self-Guidance for Controllable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00986/) (2023)
- [BoxDiff: Text-to-Image Synthesis with Training-Free Box-Constrained Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10816/) (2023)
- [SEINE: Short-to-Long Video Diffusion Model for Generative Transition and Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20700/) (2023)
- [TextDiffuser: Diffusion Models as Text Painters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10855/) (2023)
- [SpaText: Spatio-Textual Representation for Controllable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14305/) (2022)
- [More Control for Free! Image Synthesis with Semantic Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05744/) (2021)
- [AnyText: Multilingual Visual Text Generation And Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03054/) (2023)
- [GPT-4V(ision) is a Human-Aligned Evaluator for Text-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04092/) (2024)
- [LayoutDM: Discrete Diffusion Model for Controllable Layout Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08137/) (2023)
- [Localizing Object-level Shape Variations with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11306/) (2023)
- [TextDiffuser-2: Unleashing the Power of Language Models for Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16465/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Consensus Entropy: Harnessing Multi-VLM Agreement for Self-Verifying and Self-Improving OCR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11101/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Layered Graphic Design Generation with a Top-Down Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05601/) (2025)
- [Planning and Rendering in Concert: DeepFusion of Autoregressive Layouts and Diffusion for Visual Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22916/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has made remarkable progress in producing high-quality images, but a fundamental challenge remains: creating backgrounds that naturally accommodate text placement without compromising image quality. This capability is non-trivial for real-world applications like graphic design, where clear visual hierarchy between content and text is essential. Prior work has primarily focused on arranging layouts within existing static images, leaving unexplored the potential of T2I models for generating text-friendly backgrounds. We present TextCenGen, a training-free dynamic background adaptation in the blank region for text-friendly image generation. Instead of directly reducing attention in text areas, which degrades image quality, we relocate conflicting objects before background optimization. Our method analyzes cross-attention maps to identify conflicting objects overlapping with text regions and uses a force-directed graph approach to guide their relocation, followed by attention excluding constraints to ensure smooth backgrounds. Our method is plug-and-play, requiring no additional training while well balancing both semantic fidelity and visual quality. Evaluated on our proposed text-friendly T2I benchmark of 27,000 images across four seed datasets, TextCenGen outperforms existing methods by achieving 23% lower saliency overlap in text regions while maintaining 98% of the semantic fidelity measured by CLIP score and our proposed Visual-Textual Concordance Metric (VTCM).