# Towards Deeper Emotional Reflection: Crafting Affective Image Filters with Generative Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17376 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17376/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (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)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04488/) (2022)
- [On Layer Normalization in the Transformer Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04745/) (2020)
- [Plug-and-Play Diffusion Features for Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12572/) (2022)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [DiffusionCLIP: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Robust Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02711/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [A Benchmark and Multi-Agent System for Instruction-driven Cinematic Video Compilation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10456/) (2026)
- [Emotion-Director: Bridging Affective Shortcut in Emotion-Oriented Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19479/) (2025)
- [AffectDelta: Beyond Emotion Labels for Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02616/) (2026)
- [ReContraster: Making Your Posters Stand Out with Regional Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10442/) (2026)
- [PALATE: Personalized Aesthetic Learning through Adaptive Taste Evolution for Multi-User Portrait Retouching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18622/) (2026)
- [Beyond Emotion Prompts: Fine-Grained Text-to-Image Generation Driven by Valence-Arousal-Dominance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24215/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Social media platforms enable users to express emotions by posting text with accompanying images. In this paper, we propose the Affective Image Filter (AIF) task, which aims to reflect visually-abstract emotions from text into visually-concrete images, thereby creating emotionally compelling results. We first introduce the AIF dataset and the formulation of the AIF models. Then, we present AIF-B as an initial attempt based on a multi-modal transformer architecture. After that, we propose AIF-D as an extension of AIF-B towards deeper emotional reflection, effectively leveraging generative priors from pre-trained large-scale diffusion models. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that AIF models achieve superior performance for both content consistency and emotional fidelity compared to state-of-the-art methods. Extensive user study experiments demonstrate that AIF models are significantly more effective at evoking specific emotions. Based on the presented results, we comprehensively discuss the value and potential of AIF models.