# How far can we go with ImageNet for Text-to-Image generation?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.21318 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21318/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 82 of its 103 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 82)

- [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)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Elucidating the Design Space of Diffusion-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00364/) (2022)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [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)
- [ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05977/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Better Source, Better Flow: Learning Condition-Dependent Source Distribution for Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05951/) (2026)
- [Diffusion Reinforcement Learning via Centered Reward Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14128/) (2026)
- [Training-Free Synthetic Data Generation with Dual IP-Adapter Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22635/) (2025)
- [Ambient Dataloops: Generative Models for Dataset Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15417/) (2026)
- [Test-Time Conditioning with Representation-Aligned Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03753/) (2026)
- [IdEst: Assessing Self-Supervised Learning Representations via Intrinsic Dimension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03338/) (2026)
- [MIRO: MultI-Reward cOnditioned pretraining improves T2I quality and efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25897/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Image Generation with Explicit Modeling of Data Manifold Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00094/) (2026)
- [From SRA to Self-Flow: Data Augmentation or Self-Supervision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02508/) (2026)
- [Diffusable Latents from Structure-Agnostic Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39657/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent text-to-image (T2I) generation models have achieved remarkable sucess by training on billion-scale datasets, following a `bigger is better' paradigm that prioritizes data quantity over availability (closed vs open source) and reproducibility (data decay vs established collections). We challenge this established paradigm by demonstrating that one can achieve capabilities of models trained on massive web-scraped collections, using only ImageNet enhanced with well-designed text and image augmentations. With this much simpler setup, we reach the performance of FLUX and achieve a +5 overall score over SD3 on GenEval and +12 on DPGBench over SDXL while using just 1/1000th the training images and 3x to 10x less parameters. This opens the way for more reproducible research as ImageNet is widely available and the proposed standardized training setup only requires 500 hours of H100 to train a text-to-image model.