# Empowering Backbone Models for Visual Text Generation with Input Granularity Control and Glyph-Aware Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04439 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04439/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 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 22 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Oct 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, 22 of 22)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [eDiff-I: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with an Ensemble of Expert Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01324/) (2022)
- [Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13826/) (2023)
- [ByT5: Towards a token-free future with pre-trained byte-to-byte models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13626/) (2021)
- [TextDiffuser: Diffusion Models as Text Painters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10855/) (2023)
- [LCM-LoRA: A Universal Stable-Diffusion Acceleration Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05556/) (2023)
- [PP-OCR: A Practical Ultra Lightweight OCR System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09941/) (2020)
- [TextDiffuser-2: Unleashing the Power of Language Models for Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16465/) (2023)
- [GlyphControl: Glyph Conditional Control for Visual Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18259/) (2023)
- [Character-Aware Models Improve Visual Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10562/) (2022)
- [UDiffText: A Unified Framework for High-quality Text Synthesis in Arbitrary Images via Character-aware Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04884/) (2023)
- [Translatotron-V(ison): An End-to-End Model for In-Image Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02894/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [BizGen: Advancing Article-level Visual Text Rendering for Infographics Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20672/) (2025)
- [ControlText: Unlocking Controllable Fonts in Multilingual Text Rendering without Font Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10999/) (2025)
- [Type-R: Automatically Retouching Typos for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18159/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion-based text-to-image models have demonstrated impressive achievements in diversity and aesthetics but struggle to generate images with legible visual texts. Existing backbone models have limitations such as misspelling, failing to generate texts, and lack of support for Chinese text, but their development shows promising potential. In this paper, we propose a series of methods, aiming to empower backbone models to generate visual texts in English and Chinese. We first conduct a preliminary study revealing that Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenization and the insufficient learning of cross-attention modules restrict the performance of the backbone models. Based on these observations, we make the following improvements: (1) We design a mixed granularity input strategy to provide more suitable text representations; (2) We propose to augment the conventional training objective with three glyph-aware training losses, which enhance the learning of cross-attention modules and encourage the model to focus on visual texts. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our methods can effectively empower backbone models to generate semantic relevant, aesthetically appealing, and accurate visual text images, while maintaining their fundamental image generation quality.