mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Information Theoretic Text-to-Image Alignment

arXiv 2405.20759 ↗First posted 31 May 2024cs.LG cs.CVcited by 8

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

  1. 2023Prompting Hard or Hardly Prompting: Prompt Inversion for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models19 Dec
  2. 2023CONFORM: Contrast is All You Need For High-Fidelity Text-to-Image Diffusion Models11 Dec
  3. 2023TokenCompose: Text-to-Image Diffusion with Token-level Supervision6 Dec
  4. 2023Dense Text-to-Image Generation with Attention Modulation24 Aug
  5. 2023Subject-Diffusion:Open Domain Personalized Text-to-Image Generation without Test-time Fine-tuning21 Jul
  6. 2023Divide & Bind Your Attention for Improved Generative Semantic Nursing20 Jul
  7. 2023A-STAR: Test-time Attention Segregation and Retention for Text-to-image Synthesis26 Jun
  8. 2023Linguistic Binding in Diffusion Models: Enhancing Attribute Correspondence through Attention Map Alignment15 Jun
  9. 2023Are Diffusion Models Vision-And-Language Reasoners?25 May
  10. 2023If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again: Faithful Diffusion-based Text-to-Image Generation by Selection22 May
  11. 2023Generating images of rare concepts using pre-trained diffusion models27 Apr
  12. 2023Harnessing the Spatial-Temporal Attention of Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Text-to-Image Synthesis7 Apr
8 more
  1. 2023Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models31 Jan
  2. 2022Training-Free Structured Diffusion Guidance for Compositional Text-to-Image Synthesis9 Dec
  3. 2022eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers2 Nov
  4. 2022DiffusionDB: A Large-scale Prompt Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Image Generative Models26 Oct
  5. 2022What the DAAM: Interpreting Stable Diffusion Using Cross Attention10 Oct
  6. 2022Compositional Visual Generation with Composable Diffusion Models3 Jun
  7. 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding23 May
  8. 2022Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents13 Apr

Other references · 53

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
  3. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,604
  4. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,694
  5. 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,084
  6. 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 8,964
  7. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,185
  8. 2023Segment Anythingcited by 8,158
  9. 2018Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Codingcited by 7,662
  10. 2015Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamicscited by 7,005
  11. 2023BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Modelscited by 6,069
  12. 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,717
38 more
  1. 2023SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesiscited by 4,290
  2. 2019Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distributioncited by 4,067
  3. 2023MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Modelscited by 2,689
  4. 2021CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioningcited by 2,388
  5. 2018Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximizationcited by 1,265
  6. 2021Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Conceptscited by 1,209
  7. 2021Variational Diffusion Modelscited by 1,145
  8. 2020Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Modelscited by 1,036
  9. 2023ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 1,010
  10. 2016Deep Variational Information Bottleneckcited by 915
  11. 2016InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Netscited by 858
  12. 2023Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesiscited by 847
  13. 2023Diffusion Model Alignment Using Direct Preference Optimizationcited by 767
  14. 2017Masked Autoregressive Flow for Density Estimationcited by 680
  15. 2018MINE: Mutual Information Neural Estimationcited by 680
  16. 2022Make-A-Scene: Scene-Based Text-to-Image Generation with Human Priorscited by 487
  17. 2023DPOK: Reinforcement Learning for Fine-tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 431
  18. 2023Directly Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models on Differentiable Rewardscited by 431
  19. 2023TIFA: Accurate and Interpretable Text-to-Image Faithfulness Evaluation with Question Answeringcited by 416
  20. 2023Human Preference Score: Better Aligning Text-to-Image Models with Human Preferencecited by 284
  21. 2023T2I-CompBench++: An Enhanced and Comprehensive Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-image Generationcited by 253
  22. 2021Design Guidelines for Prompt Engineering Text-to-Image Generative Modelscited by 216
  23. 2018Formal Limitations on the Measurement of Mutual Informationcited by 189
  24. 2019Understanding the Limitations of Variational Mutual Information Estimatorscited by 140
  25. 2021Simple multi-dataset detectioncited by 126
  26. 2020Telescoping Density-Ratio Estimationcited by 108
  27. 2024Improving Text-to-Image Consistency via Automatic Prompt Optimizationcited by 88
  28. 2024Self-Play Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Models for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 85
  29. 2022Testing Relational Understanding in Text-Guided Image Generationcited by 59
  30. 2023Interpretable Diffusion via Information Decompositioncited by 37
  31. 2023MINDE: Mutual Information Neural Diffusion Estimationcited by 31
  32. 2024Getting it Right: Improving Spatial Consistency in Text-to-Image Modelscited by 30
  33. 2023Diffusion Model with Perceptual Losscited by 21
  34. 2023TIAM -- A Metric for Evaluating Alignment in Text-to-Image Generationcited by 18
  35. 2018Mutual Information Maximization for Simple and Accurate Part-Of-Speech Inductioncited by 17
  36. 2020Evaluating Lossy Compression Rates of Deep Generative Modelscited by 16
  37. 2022Copula Density Neural Estimationcited by 13
  38. 2018GILBO: One Metric to Measure Them Allcited by 9

50 most cited of 53 All 53 (JSON)

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 2; 2026: 5.

8 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025RFMI: Estimating Mutual Information on Rectified Flow for Text-to-Image Alignment
  2. 2025Aligning Text to Image in Diffusion Models is Easier Than You Think
  3. 2024Improving Long-Text Alignment for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
  4. 2025Free Lunch Alignment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Preference Image Pairs
  5. 2024CoMat: Aligning Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with Image-to-Text Concept Matching
  6. 2025M3T2IBench: A Large-Scale Multi-Category, Multi-Instance, Multi-Relation Text-to-Image Benchmark
  7. 2023Divide, Evaluate, and Refine: Evaluating and Improving Text-to-Image Alignment with Iterative VQA Feedback
  8. 2024ELLA: Equip Diffusion Models with LLM for Enhanced Semantic Alignment