# AlignGen: Boosting Personalized Image Generation with Cross-Modality Prior Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21911 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21911/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [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)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [OminiControl: Minimal and Universal Control for Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15098/) (2024)
- [SVDiff: Compact Parameter Space for Diffusion Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11305/) (2023)
- [FastComposer: Tuning-Free Multi-Subject Image Generation with Localized Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10431/) (2023)
- [Break-A-Scene: Extracting Multiple Concepts from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16311/) (2023)
- [Subject-Diffusion:Open Domain Personalized Text-to-Image Generation without Test-time Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11410/) (2023)
- [Cones: Concept Neurons in Diffusion Models for Customized Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05125/) (2023)
- [Prodigy: An Expeditiously Adaptive Parameter-Free Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06101/) (2023)
- [A Neural Space-Time Representation for Text-to-Image Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15391/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Self-Distillation for Zero-Shot Customized Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18616/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [PanoWorld-X: Generating Explorable Panoramic Worlds via Sphere-Aware Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24997/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Personalized image generation aims to integrate user-provided concepts into text-to-image models, enabling the generation of customized content based on a given prompt. Recent zero-shot approaches, particularly those leveraging diffusion transformers, incorporate reference image information through multi-modal attention mechanism. This integration allows the generated output to be influenced by both the textual prior from the prompt and the visual prior from the reference image. However, we observe that when the prompt and reference image are misaligned, the generated results exhibit a stronger bias toward the textual prior, leading to a significant loss of reference content. To address this issue, we propose AlignGen, a Cross-Modality Prior Alignment mechanism that enhances personalized image generation by: 1) introducing a learnable token to bridge the gap between the textual and visual priors, 2) incorporating a robust training strategy to ensure proper prior alignment, and 3) employing a selective cross-modal attention mask within the multi-modal attention mechanism to further align the priors. Experimental results demonstrate that AlignGen outperforms existing zero-shot methods and even surpasses popular test-time optimization approaches.