# IC-Custom: Diverse Image Customization via In-Context Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01926 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01926/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (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)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (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)
- [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)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [AnyDoor: Zero-shot Object-level Image Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09481/) (2023)
- [OminiControl: Minimal and Universal Control for Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15098/) (2024)
- [Break-A-Scene: Extracting Multiple Concepts from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16311/) (2023)
- [In-Context LoRA for Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23775/) (2024)
- [Less-to-More Generalization: Unlocking More Controllability by In-Context Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02160/) (2025)

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

- [HiFi-Inpaint: Towards High-Fidelity Reference-Based Inpainting for Generating Detail-Preserving Human-Product Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02210/) (2026)
- [Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.28185/) (2026)
- [MagicQuillV2: Precise and Interactive Image Editing with Layered Visual Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03046/) (2025)
- [InnoText: A Unified Model for Visual Text Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22101/) (2026)
- [Towards In-Context Tone Style Transfer with A Large-Scale Triplet Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16114/) (2026)
- [PostureObjectstitch: Anomaly Image Generation Considering Assembly Relationships in Industrial Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13863/) (2026)
- [Squeezing Capacity from Multimodal Large Language Models for Subject-driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26111/) (2026)
- [VICR: Visual In-Context Restoration for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00704/) (2026)
- [LCG: Long-Context Consistent Image Generation with Sparse Relational Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26171/) (2026)
- [ReGain: Restoring Subject Fidelity in Personalization on Synthetic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38680/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image customization, a crucial technique for industrial media production, aims to generate content that is consistent with reference images. However, current approaches conventionally separate image customization into position-aware and position-free customization paradigms and lack a universal framework for diverse customization, limiting their applications across various scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose IC-Custom, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates position-aware and position-free image customization through in-context learning. IC-Custom concatenates reference images with target images to a polyptych, leveraging DiT's multi-modal attention mechanism for fine-grained token-level interactions. We propose the In-context Multi-Modal Attention (ICMA) mechanism, which employs learnable task-oriented register tokens and boundary-aware positional embeddings to enable the model to effectively handle diverse tasks and distinguish between inputs in polyptych configurations. To address the data gap, we curated a 12K identity-consistent dataset with 8K real-world and 4K high-quality synthetic samples, avoiding the overly glossy, oversaturated look typical of synthetic data. IC-Custom supports various industrial applications, including try-on, image insertion, and creative IP customization. Extensive evaluations on our proposed ProductBench and the publicly available DreamBench demonstrate that IC-Custom significantly outperforms community workflows, closed-source models, and state-of-the-art open-source approaches. IC-Custom achieves about 73% higher human preference across identity consistency, harmony, and text alignment metrics, while training only 0.4% of the original model parameters. Project page: https://liyaowei-stu.github.io/project/ICCustom