# Conceptrol: Concept Control of Zero-shot Personalized Image Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06568 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06568/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 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 23 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2025.

## 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, 23 of 23)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [IP-Adapter: Text Compatible Image Prompt Adapter for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06721/) (2023)
- [Generative Multimodal Models are In-Context Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13286/) (2023)
- [BLIP-Diffusion: Pre-trained Subject Representation for Controllable Text-to-Image Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14720/) (2023)
- [DiffuMask: Synthesizing Images with Pixel-level Annotations for Semantic Segmentation Using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11681/) (2023)
- [DreamBench++: A Human-Aligned Benchmark for Personalized Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16855/) (2024)
- [Compositional Text-to-Image Synthesis with Attention Map Control of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13921/) (2023)
- [Rectified Diffusion: Straightness Is Not Your Need in Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07303/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Self-Distillation for Zero-Shot Customized Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18616/) (2024)
- [Open-Vocabulary Attention Maps with Token Optimization for Semantic Segmentation in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14291/) (2024)
- [MaskDiffusion: Boosting Text-to-Image Consistency with Conditional Mask](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04399/) (2023)
- [Masked-Attention Diffusion Guidance for Spatially Controlling Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06027/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [EditMGT: Unleashing Potentials of Masked Generative Transformers in Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11715/) (2025)
- [REAR: Rethinking Visual Autoregressive Models via Generator-Tokenizer Consistency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04450/) (2025)
- [CharCom: Composable Identity Control for Multi-Character Story Illustration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10135/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Image Prompt Adapter for Scalable Zero-shot Personalized Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09814/) (2025)
- [ID-Sim: An Identity-Focused Similarity Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05039/) (2026)
- [VPG: Visual Prefix Guidance for Autoregressive Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30317/) (2026)
- [Visually Grounded Narratives: Reducing Cognitive Burden in Researcher-Participant Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00381/) (2025)
- [ImageAuditor: Membership Inference Attack against Image-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03354/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Personalized image generation with text-to-image diffusion models generates unseen images based on reference image content. Zero-shot adapter methods such as IP-Adapter and OminiControl are especially interesting because they do not require test-time fine-tuning. However, they struggle to balance preserving personalized content and adherence to the text prompt. We identify a critical design flaw resulting in this performance gap: current adapters inadequately integrate personalization images with the textual descriptions. The generated images, therefore, replicate the personalized content rather than adhere to the text prompt instructions. Yet the base text-to-image has strong conceptual understanding capabilities that can be leveraged. We propose Conceptrol, a simple yet effective framework that enhances zero-shot adapters without adding computational overhead. Conceptrol constrains the attention of visual specification with a textual concept mask that improves subject-driven generation capabilities. It achieves as much as 89% improvement on personalization benchmarks over the vanilla IP-Adapter and can even outperform fine-tuning approaches such as Dreambooth LoRA. The source code is available at https://github.com/QY-H00/Conceptrol.