# How to Continually Adapt Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Flexible Customization?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.17594 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17594/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 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 66 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 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, 30 of 66)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09794/) (2022)
- [Continual Learning with Deep Generative Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08690/) (2017)
- [Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04488/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04747/) (2022)
- [GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07093/) (2023)
- [Vector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14822/) (2021)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13826/) (2023)
- [Lifelong Learning with Dynamically Expandable Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01547/) (2017)
- [ELITE: Encoding Visual Concepts into Textual Embeddings for Customized Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13848/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [K-LoRA: Unlocking Training-Free Fusion of Any Subject and Style LoRAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18461/) (2025)
- [PhysGame: Uncovering Physical Commonsense Violations in Gameplay Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01800/) (2024)
- [Personalized Image Generation with Deep Generative Models: A Decade Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13081/) (2025)
- [PixelVLA: Advancing Pixel-level Understanding in Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01571/) (2025)
- [Mod-Adapter: Tuning-Free and Versatile Multi-concept Personalization via Modulation Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18612/) (2025)
- [Continual Learning for Generative AI: From LLMs to MLLMs and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13045/) (2025)
- [CE-SDWV: Effective and Efficient Concept Erasure for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via a Semantic-Driven Word Vocabulary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15562/) (2025)
- [ConceptGuard: Continual Personalized Text-to-Image Generation with Forgetting and Confusion Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10358/) (2025)
- [FreeLoRA: Enabling Training-Free LoRA Fusion for Autoregressive Multi-Subject Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01792/) (2025)
- [When LoRA Betrays: Backdooring Text-to-Image Models by Masquerading as Benign Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21977/) (2026)
- [Continual Personalization for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02296/) (2025)
- [Federated Incremental Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11623/) (2024)
- [Structure Disruption: Subverting Malicious Diffusion-Based Inpainting via Self-Attention Query Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19425/) (2025)
- [R^2MoE: Redundancy-Removal Mixture of Experts for Lifelong Concept Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13107/) (2025)
- [Exploring Stability-Plasticity Trade-offs for Continual Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03259/) (2025)
- [Coffee: Controllable Diffusion Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14113/) (2025)
- [Forget Less by Learning Together through Concept Consolidation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01963/) (2026)
- [Crafting Your Evolving Dreams: Concept-Incremental Versatile Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04797/) (2026)
- [DiFA: Inference-Time Forward-Process Alignment for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17972/) (2026)
- [Information-Theoretic Complementary Prompts for Improved Continual Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20933/) (2025)
- [Deep Generative Continual Learning using Functional LoRA: FunLoRA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02631/) (2025)
- [NP-LoRA: Null Space Projection for Subject-Style LoRA Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11051/) (2025)
- [Forget Less by Learning from Parents Through Hierarchical Relationships](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01892/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Training-Free Fusion of Subject and Style LoRAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15539/) (2026)
- [PureCC: Pure Learning for Text-to-Image Concept Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07561/) (2026)
- [EvoTale: Continual Character Customization for Expanding Story Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16285/) (2026)
- [MS-CustomNet: Controllable Multi-Subject Customization with Hierarchical Relational Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21136/) (2026)
- [FREE-Switch: Frequency-based Dynamic LoRA Switch for Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10023/) (2026)
- [ReConText3D: Replay-based Continual Text-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13730/) (2026)
- [Squeezing Capacity from Multimodal Large Language Models for Subject-driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26111/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Custom diffusion models (CDMs) have attracted widespread attention due to their astonishing generative ability for personalized concepts. However, most existing CDMs unreasonably assume that personalized concepts are fixed and cannot change over time. Moreover, they heavily suffer from catastrophic forgetting and concept neglect on old personalized concepts when continually learning a series of new concepts. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Concept-Incremental text-to-image Diffusion Model (CIDM), which can resolve catastrophic forgetting and concept neglect to learn new customization tasks in a concept-incremental manner. Specifically, to surmount the catastrophic forgetting of old concepts, we develop a concept consolidation loss and an elastic weight aggregation module. They can explore task-specific and task-shared knowledge during training, and aggregate all low-rank weights of old concepts based on their contributions during inference. Moreover, in order to address concept neglect, we devise a context-controllable synthesis strategy that leverages expressive region features and noise estimation to control the contexts of generated images according to user conditions. Experiments validate that our CIDM surpasses existing custom diffusion models. The source codes are available at https://github.com/JiahuaDong/CIFC.