# Prompt-Softbox-Prompt: A Free-Text Embedding Control for Image Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13623 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13623/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 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 49 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 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 49)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (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)
- [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)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [MasaCtrl: Tuning-Free Mutual Self-Attention Control for Consistent Image Synthesis and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08465/) (2023)
- [AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10485/) (2017)
- [DiffEdit: Diffusion-based semantic image editing with mask guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11427/) (2022)
- [DiffusionCLIP: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Robust Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02711/) (2021)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [ELITE: Encoding Visual Concepts into Textual Embeddings for Customized Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13848/) (2023)
- [AnyDoor: Zero-shot Object-level Image Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09481/) (2023)
- [DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09788/) (2022)
- [InstantBooth: Personalized Text-to-Image Generation without Test-Time Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03411/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Models for Plug-and-Play Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08995/) (2023)
- [VideoFusion: Decomposed Diffusion Models for High-Quality Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08320/) (2023)
- [Training-Free Layout Control with Cross-Attention Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03373/) (2023)
- [SmartBrush: Text and Shape Guided Object Inpainting with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05034/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Applications: Segmentation, Editing, and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09977/) (2025)
- [Personalize Your LLM: Fake it then Align it](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01048/) (2025)
- [SplitFlux: Learning to Decouple Content and Style from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15258/) (2025)
- [DiffStyle3D: Consistent 3D Gaussian Stylization via Attention Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19717/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While text-driven diffusion models demonstrate remarkable performance in image editing, the critical components of their text embeddings remain underexplored. The ambiguity and entanglement of these embeddings pose challenges for precise editing. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of text embeddings in Stable Diffusion XL, offering three key insights: (1) textitaug embedding~footnotetextitaug embedding is obtained by combining the pooled output of the final text encoder with the timestep embeddings. https://github.com/huggingface/diffusers retains complete textual semantics but contributes minimally to image generation as it is only fused via the ResBlocks. More text information weakens its local semantics while preserving most global semantics. (2) textitBOS and textitpadding embedding do not contain any semantic information. (3) textitEOS holds the semantic information of all words and stylistic information. Each word embedding is important and does not interfere with the semantic injection of other embeddings. Based on these insights, we propose PSP (Prompt-Softbox-Prompt), a training-free image editing method that leverages free-text embedding. PSP enables precise image editing by modifying text embeddings within the cross-attention layers and using Softbox to control the specific area for semantic injection. This technique enables the addition and replacement of objects without affecting other areas of the image. Additionally, PSP can achieve style transfer by simply replacing text embeddings. Extensive experiments show that PSP performs remarkably well in tasks such as object replacement, object addition, and style transfer. Our code is available at https://github.com/yangyt46/PSP.