# AlignIT: Enhancing Prompt Alignment in Customization of Text-to-Image Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18893 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18893/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 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 23 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 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, 23 of 23)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04488/) (2022)
- [Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13826/) (2023)
- [Designing an Encoder for StyleGAN Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02766/) (2021)
- [Training-Free Structured Diffusion Guidance for Compositional Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05032/) (2022)
- [SVDiff: Compact Parameter Space for Diffusion Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11305/) (2023)
- [Encoder-based Domain Tuning for Fast Personalization of Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12228/) (2023)
- [Key-Locked Rank One Editing for Text-to-Image Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01644/) (2023)
- [Linguistic Binding in Diffusion Models: Enhancing Attribute Correspondence through Attention Map Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08877/) (2023)
- [Grounded Text-to-Image Synthesis with Attention Refocusing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05427/) (2023)
- [Improved StyleGAN Embedding: Where are the Good Latents?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09036/) (2020)
- [A-STAR: Test-time Attention Segregation and Retention for Text-to-image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14544/) (2023)
- [Harnessing the Spatial-Temporal Attention of Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03869/) (2023)
- [Highly Personalized Text Embedding for Image Manipulation by Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08767/) (2023)
- [An Image is Worth Multiple Words: Multi-attribute Inversion for Constrained Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11919/) (2023)
- [CatVersion: Concatenating Embeddings for Diffusion-Based Text-to-Image Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14631/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Text Embedding is Not All You Need: Attention Control for Text-to-Image Semantic Alignment with Text Self-Attention Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15236/) (2024)
- [Per-Query Visual Concept Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09045/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We consider the problem of customizing text-to-image diffusion models with user-supplied reference images. Given new prompts, the existing methods can capture the key concept from the reference images but fail to align the generated image with the prompt. In this work, we seek to address this key issue by proposing new methods that can easily be used in conjunction with existing customization methods that optimize the embeddings/weights at various intermediate stages of the text encoding process. The first contribution of this paper is a dissection of the various stages of the text encoding process leading up to the conditioning vector for text-to-image models. We take a holistic view of existing customization methods and notice that key and value outputs from this process differs substantially from their corresponding baseline (non-customized) models (e.g., baseline stable diffusion). While this difference does not impact the concept being customized, it leads to other parts of the generated image not being aligned with the prompt. Further, we also observe that these keys and values allow independent control various aspects of the final generation, enabling semantic manipulation of the output. Taken together, the features spanning these keys and values, serve as the basis for our next contribution where we fix the aforementioned issues with existing methods. We propose a new post-processing algorithm, AlignIT, that infuses the keys and values for the concept of interest while ensuring the keys and values for all other tokens in the input prompt are unchanged. Our proposed method can be plugged in directly to existing customization methods, leading to a substantial performance improvement in the alignment of the final result with the input prompt while retaining the customization quality.