# ClassDiffusion: More Aligned Personalization Tuning with Explicit Class Guidance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17532 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17532/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 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 78 of its 92 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 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 78)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [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)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04488/) (2022)
- [Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02905/) (2024)
- [eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01324/) (2022)
- [Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09341/) (2023)
- [Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04378/) (2023)
- [Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13826/) (2023)
- [CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13290/) (2021)
- [Muse: Text-To-Image Generation via Masked Generative Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00704/) (2023)
- [Compositional Visual Generation with Composable Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01714/) (2022)
- [BLIP-Diffusion: Pre-trained Subject Representation for Controllable Text-to-Image Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14720/) (2023)
- [Universal Guidance for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07121/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [DreamBench++: A Human-Aligned Benchmark for Personalized Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16855/) (2024)
- [CoRe: Context-Regularized Text Embedding Learning for Text-to-Image Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15914/) (2024)
- [MagicFace: Training-free Universal-Style Human Image Customized Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07433/) (2024)
- [Steering Guidance for Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00319/) (2025)
- [PanoWorld-X: Generating Explorable Panoramic Worlds via Sphere-Aware Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24997/) (2025)
- [IMG: Calibrating Diffusion Models via Implicit Multimodal Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26231/) (2025)
- [ACCORD: Alleviating Concept Coupling through Dependence Regularization for Text-to-Image Diffusion Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01122/) (2025)
- [Preserve and Personalize: Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Distributional Drift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19519/) (2025)
- [Adversarial Concept Distillation for One-Step Diffusion Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20512/) (2025)
- [Memory-Efficient Fine-Tuning Diffusion Transformers via Dynamic Patch Sampling and Block Skipping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20755/) (2026)
- [Single Image Iterative Subject-driven Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16025/) (2025)
- [Guiding Diffusion with Deep Geometric Moments: Balancing Fidelity and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12486/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Semantic Collapse in Generative Personalization with Test-Time Embedding Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22685/) (2025)
- [Per-Query Visual Concept Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09045/) (2025)
- [Semantic Anchoring for Robust Personalization in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22245/) (2025)
- [PureCC: Pure Learning for Text-to-Image Concept Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07561/) (2026)
- [SEAL: Semantic-aware Single-image Sticker Personalization with a Large-scale Sticker-tag Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26883/) (2026)
- [Adaptive Subspace Projection for Generative Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07257/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent text-to-image customization works have proven successful in generating images of given concepts by fine-tuning diffusion models on a few examples. However, tuning-based methods inherently tend to overfit the concepts, resulting in failure to create the concept under multiple conditions (*e.g.*, headphone is missing when generating "a `dog wearing a headphone"). Interestingly, we notice that the base model before fine-tuning exhibits the capability to compose the base concept with other elements (*e.g.*, "a dog wearing a headphone"), implying that the compositional ability only disappears after personalization tuning. We observe a semantic shift in the customized concept after fine-tuning, indicating that the personalized concept is not aligned with the original concept, and further show through theoretical analyses that this semantic shift leads to increased difficulty in sampling the joint conditional probability distribution, resulting in the loss of the compositional ability. Inspired by this finding, we present **ClassDiffusion**, a technique that leverages a **semantic preservation loss** to explicitly regulate the concept space when learning a new concept. Although simple, this approach effectively prevents semantic drift during the fine-tuning process of the target concepts. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that the use of semantic preservation loss effectively improves the compositional abilities of fine-tuning models. Lastly, we also extend our ClassDiffusion to personalized video generation, demonstrating its flexibility.
