# Guiding What Not to Generate: Automated Negative Prompting for Text-Image Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07702 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07702/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 66 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [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)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05977/) (2023)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17811/) (2025)
- [GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07093/) (2023)
- [Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18869/) (2024)
- [Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12528/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11039/) (2024)
- [ELLA: Equip Diffusion Models with LLM for Enhanced Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05135/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [GEMS: Agent-Native Multimodal Generation with Memory and Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28088/) (2026)
- [Diagnosing and Correcting Concept Omission in Multimodal Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14270/) (2026)
- [Position: Natural Language Should Not Fully Replace Formal Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20432/) (2026)
- [Learning Sampling Parameters for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23488/) (2026)
- [TIDE: Trajectory-Informed Skill Distillation for Efficient Text-to-Video Prompt Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15098/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite substantial progress in text-to-image generation, achieving precise text-image alignment remains challenging, particularly for prompts with rich compositional structure or imaginative elements. To address this, we introduce Negative Prompting for Image Correction (NPC), an automated pipeline that improves alignment by identifying and applying negative prompts that suppress unintended content. We begin by analyzing cross-attention patterns to explain why both targeted negatives-those directly tied to the prompt's alignment error-and untargeted negatives-tokens unrelated to the prompt but present in the generated image-can enhance alignment. To discover useful negatives, NPC generates candidate prompts using a verifier-captioner-proposer framework and ranks them with a salient text-space score, enabling effective selection without requiring additional image synthesis. On GenEval++ and Imagine-Bench, NPC outperforms strong baselines, achieving 0.571 vs. 0.371 on GenEval++ and the best overall performance on Imagine-Bench. By guiding what not to generate, NPC provides a principled, fully automated route to stronger text-image alignment in diffusion models. Code is released at https://github.com/wiarae/NPC.