RealCustom++: Representing Images as Real Textual Word for Real-Time Customization

Given a text and an image of a specific subject, text-to-image customization aims to generate new images that align with both the text and the subject's appearance. Existing works follow the pseudo-word paradigm, which represents the subject as a non-existent pseudo word and combines it with other text to generate images. However, the pseudo word causes semantic conflict from its different learning objective and entanglement from overlapping influence scopes with other texts, resulting in a dual-optimum paradox where subject similarity and text controllability cannot be optimal simultaneously. To address this, we propose RealCustom++, a novel real-word paradigm that represents the subject with a non-conflicting real word to firstly generate a coherent guidance image and corresponding subject mask, thereby disentangling the influence scopes of the text and subject for simultaneous optimization. Specifically, RealCustom++ introduces a train-inference decoupled framework: (1) during training, it learns a general alignment between visual conditions and all real words in the text; and (2) during inference, a dual-branch architecture is employed, where the Guidance Branch produces the subject guidance mask and the Generation Branch utilizes this mask to customize the generation of the specific real word exclusively within subject-relevant regions. In contrast to previous methods that excel in either controllability or similarity, RealCustom++ achieves superior performance in both, with improvements of 7.48% in controllability, 3.04% in similarity, and 76.43% in generation quality. For multi-subject customization, RealCustom++ further achieves improvements of 4.6% in controllability and 6.34% in multi-subject similarity. Our work has been applied in JiMeng of ByteDance, and codes are released at https://github.com/bytedance/RealCustom.