# CoMPaSS: Enhancing Spatial Understanding in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13195 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13195/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 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 68 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 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 68)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13301/) (2023)
- [GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11513/) (2023)
- [Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09341/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Model Alignment Using Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12908/) (2023)
- [Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13826/) (2023)
- [Compositional Visual Generation with Composable Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01714/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Progressive Prompt Detailing for Improved Alignment in Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17794/) (2025)
- [Data-Driven Loss Functions for Inference-Time Optimization in Text-to-Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02295/) (2025)
- [Circuit Mechanisms for Spatial Relation Generation in Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06338/) (2026)
- [Guided Trajectory Optimization with Sparse Scaling for Test-Time Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21907/) (2026)
- [ESPLoRA: Enhanced Spatial Precision with Low-Rank Adaption in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for High-Definition Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13745/) (2025)
- [Anchoring and Steering Diffusion: Enhancing the Faithfulness of Text-to-Image Generation at Inference Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26647/) (2026)
- [Math2Visual-X: A Modular Framework for Pedagogically Aligned Lower-Primary Math Visuals Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22647/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models excel at generating photorealistic images but often fail to render accurate spatial relationships. We identify two core issues underlying this common failure: 1) the ambiguous nature of data concerning spatial relationships in existing datasets, and 2) the inability of current text encoders to accurately interpret the spatial semantics of input descriptions. We propose CoMPaSS, a versatile framework that enhances spatial understanding in T2I models. It first addresses data ambiguity with the Spatial Constraints-Oriented Pairing (SCOP) data engine, which curates spatially-accurate training data via principled constraints. To leverage these priors, CoMPaSS also introduces the Token ENcoding ORdering (TENOR) module, which preserves crucial token ordering information lost by text encoders, thereby reinforcing the prompt's linguistic structure. Extensive experiments on four popular T2I models (UNet and MMDiT-based) show CoMPaSS sets a new state of the art on key spatial benchmarks, with substantial relative gains on VISOR (+98%), T2I-CompBench Spatial (+67%), and GenEval Position (+131%). Code is available at https://github.com/blurgyy/CoMPaSS.