Object-Attribute Binding in Text-to-Image Generation: Evaluation and Control
On the map: Diffusion models → Image generation, text-to-image and editing
Abstract (arXiv)
Current diffusion models create photorealistic images given a text prompt as input but struggle to correctly bind attributes mentioned in the text to the right objects in the image. This is evidenced by our novel image-graph alignment model called EPViT (Edge Prediction Vision Transformer) for the evaluation of image-text alignment. To alleviate the above problem, we propose focused cross-attention (FCA) that controls the visual attention maps by syntactic constraints found in the input sentence. Additionally, the syntax structure of the prompt helps to disentangle the multimodal CLIP embeddings that are commonly used in T2I generation. The resulting DisCLIP embeddings and FCA are easily integrated in state-of-the-art diffusion models without additional training of these models. We show substantial improvements in T2I generation and especially its attribute-object binding on several datasets.footnoteCode and data will be made available upon acceptance.
Key facts. Cited by 10 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 27 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2024.
Builds on
27 of 40 references.
Closest ancestors · 10
Same direction, newest first
- 2023BoxDiff: Text-to-Image Synthesis with Training-Free Box-Constrained Diffusion20 Jul
- 2023Linguistic Binding in Diffusion Models: Enhancing Attribute Correspondence through Attention Map Alignment15 Jun
- 2023Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models10 Feb
- 2023Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models31 Jan
- 2022SpaText: Spatio-Textual Representation for Controllable Image Generation25 Nov
- 2022Versatile Diffusion: Text, Images and Variations All in One Diffusion Model15 Nov
- 2022Compositional Visual Generation with Composable Diffusion Models3 Jun
- 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding23 May
- 2022Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents13 Apr
- 2021GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models20 Dec
Other references · 17
- 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
- 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 30,186
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
- 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,713
- 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
- 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,608
- 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
- 2022LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text modelscited by 4,152
- 2016Improved Techniques for Training GANscited by 2,970
- 2016Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotationscited by 2,656
- 2022Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Controlcited by 2,431
5 more
- 2021CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioningcited by 2,424
- 2023Training-Free Layout Control with Cross-Attention Guidancecited by 313
- 2017Visual Translation Embedding Network for Visual Relation Detectioncited by 112
- 2022DALLE-2 is Seeing Double: Flaws in Word-to-Concept Mapping in Text2Image Modelscited by 51
- 2022Human Evaluation of Text-to-Image Models on a Multi-Task Benchmarkcited by 41
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 2; 2025: 6; 2026: 2.
10 papers.
- 2024Token Merging for Training-Free Semantic Binding in Text-to-Image Synthesiscited by 35
- 2025CLIP Behaves like a Bag-of-Words Model Cross-modally but not Uni-modallycited by 31
- 2025Draw ALL Your Imagine: A Holistic Benchmark and Agent Framework for Complex Instruction-based Image Generationcited by 30
- 2025Does Object Binding Naturally Emerge in Large Pretrained Vision Transformers?cited by 19
- 2025Role Bias in Diffusion Models: Diagnosing and Mitigating through Intermediate Decompositioncited by 4
- 2024SPDiffusion: Semantic Protection Diffusion Models for Multi-concept Text-to-image Generationcited by 1
- 2026Self-Supervised Learning from Structural Invariancecited by 1
- 2025ComposeAnything: Composite Object Priors for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 0
- 2025Food Image Generation on Multi-Noun Categoriescited by 0
- 2026Intermediate Text Representation Guided Text-to-Image Generation for Enhancing One-and-Only Alignmentcited by 0
- 2026Intermediate Text Representation Guided Text-to-Image Generation for Enhancing One-and-Only Alignment29 Jun 2026
- 2026Self-Supervised Learning from Structural Invariance2 Feb 2026
- 2025Food Image Generation on Multi-Noun Categories9 Dec 2025
- 2025Does Object Binding Naturally Emerge in Large Pretrained Vision Transformers?28 Oct 2025
- 2025Draw ALL Your Imagine: A Holistic Benchmark and Agent Framework for Complex Instruction-based Image Generation30 May 2025
- 2025ComposeAnything: Composite Object Priors for Text-to-Image Generation30 May 2025
- 2025Role Bias in Diffusion Models: Diagnosing and Mitigating through Intermediate Decomposition13 Mar 2025
- 2025CLIP Behaves like a Bag-of-Words Model Cross-modally but not Uni-modally5 Feb 2025
- 2024Token Merging for Training-Free Semantic Binding in Text-to-Image Synthesis11 Nov 2024
- 2024SPDiffusion: Semantic Protection Diffusion Models for Multi-concept Text-to-image Generation2 Sep 2024
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2024Object-Conditioned Energy-Based Attention Map Alignment in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
- 2025VSC: Visual Search Compositional Text-to-Image Diffusion Model
- 2024Towards Better Text-to-Image Generation Alignment via Attention Modulation
- 2024Text Embedding is Not All You Need: Attention Control for Text-to-Image Semantic Alignment with Text Self-Attention Maps
- 2024Magnet: We Never Know How Text-to-Image Diffusion Models Work, Until We Learn How Vision-Language Models Function
- 2023Compositional Text-to-Image Synthesis with Attention Map Control of Diffusion Models
- 2024CoMat: Aligning Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with Image-to-Text Concept Matching
- 2023Improving Compositional Text-to-image Generation with Large Vision-Language Models