mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

InfSplign: Inference-Time Spatial Alignment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

arXiv 2512.17851 ↗First posted 19 Dec 2025cs.CV cs.AIcited by 1

On the map: Diffusion models → Image generation, text-to-image and editing

Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models generate high-quality images but often fail to capture the spatial relations specified in text prompts. This limitation can be traced to two factors: lack of fine-grained spatial supervision in training data and inability of text embeddings to encode spatial semantics. We introduce InfSplign, a training-free inference-time method that improves spatial alignment by adjusting the noise through a compound loss in every denoising step. Proposed loss leverages different levels of cross-attention maps extracted from the backbone decoder to enforce accurate object placement and a balanced object presence during sampling. The method is lightweight, plug-and-play, and compatible with any diffusion backbone. Our comprehensive evaluations on VISOR and T2I-CompBench show that InfSplign establishes a new state-of-the-art (to the best of our knowledge), achieving substantial performance gains over the strongest existing inference-time baselines and even outperforming the fine-tuning-based methods. Codebase is available at GitHub.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper 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 50 of its 53 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2025.

Builds on

50 of 53 references.

Closest ancestors · 25

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Spatial Transport Optimization by Repositioning Attention Map for Training-Free Text-to-Image Synthesis28 Mar
  2. 2024Rare-to-Frequent: Unlocking Compositional Generation Power of Diffusion Models on Rare Concepts with LLM Guidance29 Oct
  3. 2024The Crystal Ball Hypothesis in diffusion models: Anticipating object positions from initial noise4 Jun
  4. 2024Information Theoretic Text-to-Image Alignment31 May
  5. 2024InitNO: Boosting Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Initial Noise Optimization6 Apr
  6. 2024Contrastive Prompts Improve Disentanglement in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models21 Feb
  7. 2024Spatial-Aware Latent Initialization for Controllable Image Generation29 Jan
  8. 2023Learning from Mistakes: Iterative Prompt Relabeling for Text-to-Image Diffusion Model Training23 Dec
  9. 2023FreeControl: Training-Free Spatial Control of Any Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with Any Condition12 Dec
  10. 2023CONFORM: Contrast is All You Need For High-Fidelity Text-to-Image Diffusion Models11 Dec
  11. 2023Unlocking Spatial Comprehension in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models28 Nov
  12. 2023Check, Locate, Rectify: A Training-Free Layout Calibration System for Text-to-Image Generation27 Nov
13 more
  1. 2023Grounded Text-to-Image Synthesis with Attention Refocusing8 Jun
  2. 2023Controllable Text-to-Image Generation with GPT-429 May
  3. 2023LLM-grounded Diffusion: Enhancing Prompt Understanding of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Large Language Models23 May
  4. 2023SceneGenie: Scene Graph Guided Diffusion Models for Image Synthesis28 Apr
  5. 2023Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models10 Feb
  6. 2023Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models31 Jan
  7. 2023GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generation17 Jan
  8. 2022Training-Free Structured Diffusion Guidance for Compositional Text-to-Image Synthesis9 Dec
  9. 2022Sketch-Guided Text-to-Image Diffusion Models24 Nov
  10. 2022Compositional Visual Generation with Composable Diffusion Models3 Jun
  11. 2022Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding23 May
  12. 2022Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents13 Apr
  13. 2021GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models20 Dec

Other references · 25

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  3. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,713
  4. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
  5. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,255
  6. 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,847
  7. 2016Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networkscited by 4,527
  8. 2022BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generationcited by 4,322
  9. 2021Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generationcited by 4,288
  10. 2021Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 3,761
  11. 2016Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)cited by 3,502
  12. 2022Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Controlcited by 2,431
13 more
  1. 2019Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalizationcited by 1,299
  2. 2022Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generationcited by 1,295
  3. 2024SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilitiescited by 706
  4. 2023Directly Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models on Differentiable Rewardscited by 448
  5. 2023Training-Free Layout Control with Cross-Attention Guidancecited by 313
  6. 2023Diffusion Self-Guidance for Controllable Image Generationcited by 305
  7. 2022Benchmarking Spatial Relationships in Text-to-Image Generationcited by 97
  8. 2024Large-scale Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Modelscited by 78
  9. 2024Compositional Text-to-Image Generation with Dense Blob Representationscited by 38
  10. 2023Interpretable Diffusion via Information Decompositioncited by 37
  11. 2023Matting Anythingcited by 31
  12. 2024ReGround: Improving Textual and Spatial Grounding at No Costcited by 6
  13. 2024REVISION: Rendering Tools Enable Spatial Fidelity in Vision-Language Modelscited by 6

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

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Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024CoMPaSS: Enhancing Spatial Understanding in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
  2. 2025ESPLoRA: Enhanced Spatial Precision with Low-Rank Adaption in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for High-Definition Synthesis
  3. 2026Discrete Diffusion Bridges for Spatiotemporally Aligned Image Translation and Generation
  4. 2025I Think, Therefore I Diffuse: Enabling Multimodal In-Context Reasoning in Diffusion Models
  5. 2023Harnessing the Spatial-Temporal Attention of Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Text-to-Image Synthesis
  6. 2026Anchoring and Steering Diffusion: Enhancing the Faithfulness of Text-to-Image Generation at Inference Time
  7. 2025Test-Time Alignment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Null-Text Embedding Optimisation
  8. 2024Box It to Bind It: Unified Layout Control and Attribute Binding in T2I Diffusion Models