Information Theoretic Text-to-Image Alignment
On the map: Diffusion models → Image generation, text-to-image and editing
Abstract (arXiv)
Diffusion models for Text-to-Image (T2I) conditional generation have recently achieved tremendous success. Yet, aligning these models with user's intentions still involves a laborious trial-and-error process, and this challenging alignment problem has attracted considerable attention from the research community. In this work, instead of relying on fine-grained linguistic analyses of prompts, human annotation, or auxiliary vision-language models, we use Mutual Information (MI) to guide model alignment. In brief, our method uses self-supervised fine-tuning and relies on a point-wise (MI) estimation between prompts and images to create a synthetic fine-tuning set for improving model alignment. Our analysis indicates that our method is superior to the state-of-the-art, yet it only requires the pre-trained denoising network of the T2I model itself to estimate MI, and a simple fine-tuning strategy that improves alignment while maintaining image quality. Code available at https://github.com/Chao0511/mitune.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 73 of its 84 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 May 2024.
Builds on
73 of 84 references.
Closest ancestors · 20
Same direction, newest first
- 2023Prompting Hard or Hardly Prompting: Prompt Inversion for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models19 Dec
- 2023CONFORM: Contrast is All You Need For High-Fidelity Text-to-Image Diffusion Models11 Dec
- 2023TokenCompose: Text-to-Image Diffusion with Token-level Supervision6 Dec
- 2023Dense Text-to-Image Generation with Attention Modulation24 Aug
- 2023Subject-Diffusion:Open Domain Personalized Text-to-Image Generation without Test-time Fine-tuning21 Jul
- 2023Divide & Bind Your Attention for Improved Generative Semantic Nursing20 Jul
- 2023A-STAR: Test-time Attention Segregation and Retention for Text-to-image Synthesis26 Jun
- 2023Linguistic Binding in Diffusion Models: Enhancing Attribute Correspondence through Attention Map Alignment15 Jun
- 2023Are Diffusion Models Vision-And-Language Reasoners?25 May
- 2023If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again: Faithful Diffusion-based Text-to-Image Generation by Selection22 May
- 2023Generating images of rare concepts using pre-trained diffusion models27 Apr
- 2023Harnessing the Spatial-Temporal Attention of Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Text-to-Image Synthesis7 Apr
8 more
- 2023Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models31 Jan
- 2022Training-Free Structured Diffusion Guidance for Compositional Text-to-Image Synthesis9 Dec
- 2022eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers2 Nov
- 2022DiffusionDB: A Large-scale Prompt Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Image Generative Models26 Oct
- 2022What the DAAM: Interpreting Stable Diffusion Using Cross Attention10 Oct
- 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
Other references · 53
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
- 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,604
- 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,694
- 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,084
- 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 8,964
- 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,185
- 2023Segment Anythingcited by 8,158
- 2018Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Codingcited by 7,662
- 2015Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamicscited by 7,005
- 2023BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Modelscited by 6,069
- 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,717
38 more
- 2023SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,290
- 2019Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distributioncited by 4,067
- 2023MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Modelscited by 2,689
- 2021CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioningcited by 2,388
- 2018Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximizationcited by 1,265
- 2021Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Conceptscited by 1,209
- 2021Variational Diffusion Modelscited by 1,145
- 2020Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Modelscited by 1,036
- 2023ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 1,010
- 2016Deep Variational Information Bottleneckcited by 915
- 2016InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Netscited by 858
- 2023Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesiscited by 847
- 2023Diffusion Model Alignment Using Direct Preference Optimizationcited by 767
- 2017Masked Autoregressive Flow for Density Estimationcited by 680
- 2018MINE: Mutual Information Neural Estimationcited by 680
- 2022Make-A-Scene: Scene-Based Text-to-Image Generation with Human Priorscited by 487
- 2023DPOK: Reinforcement Learning for Fine-tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 431
- 2023Directly Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models on Differentiable Rewardscited by 431
- 2023TIFA: Accurate and Interpretable Text-to-Image Faithfulness Evaluation with Question Answeringcited by 416
- 2023Human Preference Score: Better Aligning Text-to-Image Models with Human Preferencecited by 284
- 2023T2I-CompBench++: An Enhanced and Comprehensive Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-image Generationcited by 253
- 2021Design Guidelines for Prompt Engineering Text-to-Image Generative Modelscited by 216
- 2018Formal Limitations on the Measurement of Mutual Informationcited by 189
- 2019Understanding the Limitations of Variational Mutual Information Estimatorscited by 140
- 2021Simple multi-dataset detectioncited by 126
- 2020Telescoping Density-Ratio Estimationcited by 108
- 2024Improving Text-to-Image Consistency via Automatic Prompt Optimizationcited by 88
- 2024Self-Play Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Models for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 85
- 2022Testing Relational Understanding in Text-Guided Image Generationcited by 59
- 2023Interpretable Diffusion via Information Decompositioncited by 37
- 2023MINDE: Mutual Information Neural Diffusion Estimationcited by 31
- 2024Getting it Right: Improving Spatial Consistency in Text-to-Image Modelscited by 30
- 2023Diffusion Model with Perceptual Losscited by 21
- 2023TIAM -- A Metric for Evaluating Alignment in Text-to-Image Generationcited by 18
- 2018Mutual Information Maximization for Simple and Accurate Part-Of-Speech Inductioncited by 17
- 2020Evaluating Lossy Compression Rates of Deep Generative Modelscited by 16
- 2022Copula Density Neural Estimationcited by 13
- 2018GILBO: One Metric to Measure Them Allcited by 9
50 most cited of 53 All 53 (JSON)
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 2; 2026: 5.
8 papers.
- 2024Alignment of Diffusion Models: Fundamentals, Challenges, and Futurecited by 34
- 2026The Entropic Signature of Class Speciation in Diffusion Modelscited by 7
- 2026Noise Scheduling as Information-Guided Allocation in Diffusion Trainingcited by 4
- 2025On the Separability of Information in Diffusion Modelscited by 2
- 2025InfSplign: Inference-Time Spatial Alignment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1
- 2026Concept Removal Guidance: Evidence-Calibrated Negative Guidance for Safe Diffusion Samplingcited by 0
- 2026Towards Diverse and Comprehensive Benchmarks for Mutual Information Estimationcited by 0
- 2026Concept Guidance: Precise, Training-Free Latent Control for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 0
- 2026Concept Guidance: Precise, Training-Free Latent Control for Text-to-Image Generation14 Aug 2026
- 2026Towards Diverse and Comprehensive Benchmarks for Mutual Information Estimation3 Jul 2026
- 2026Concept Removal Guidance: Evidence-Calibrated Negative Guidance for Safe Diffusion Sampling29 Jun 2026
- 2026Noise Scheduling as Information-Guided Allocation in Diffusion Training20 Feb 2026
- 2026The Entropic Signature of Class Speciation in Diffusion Models10 Feb 2026
- 2025InfSplign: Inference-Time Spatial Alignment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models19 Dec 2025
- 2025On the Separability of Information in Diffusion Models28 Sep 2025
- 2024Alignment of Diffusion Models: Fundamentals, Challenges, and Future11 Sep 2024
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025RFMI: Estimating Mutual Information on Rectified Flow for Text-to-Image Alignment
- 2025Aligning Text to Image in Diffusion Models is Easier Than You Think
- 2024Improving Long-Text Alignment for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
- 2025Free Lunch Alignment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Preference Image Pairs
- 2024CoMat: Aligning Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with Image-to-Text Concept Matching
- 2025M3T2IBench: A Large-Scale Multi-Category, Multi-Instance, Multi-Relation Text-to-Image Benchmark
- 2023Divide, Evaluate, and Refine: Evaluating and Improving Text-to-Image Alignment with Iterative VQA Feedback
- 2024ELLA: Equip Diffusion Models with LLM for Enhanced Semantic Alignment