Text-to-Image Models Need Less from Text Encoders Than You Think

Text-to-image models rely on text prompts as their primary interface to human intent. Prompts are encoded by a text encoder into embeddings that condition the image generation process. Beyond individual token meanings, text embeddings encode contextual information across the full prompt, such as compositionality and attribute binding. However, whether image models actually exploit this richer information remains underexplored. Here, we address the question: Which aspects of text representation are essential for image generation? We show that text-to-image diffusion transformer-based models commonly rely only on two relatively straightforward aspects of text representations: (i) the merging of adjacent tokens into a word representation, for words spanning multiple tokens, and (ii) word order, which is imprinted by the positional embedding of the text-encoder. To show this, we construct a new text embedding that encodes only individual word meanings and order but lacks any contextual information about the full prompt. We find that this bag of position-tagged words representation is sufficient to successfully guide image generation, achieving visual quality and text fidelity that are on par with full text embedding-guided generation. This demonstrates that, contrary to common belief, text-to-image models often do not use the rich information encoded in the text embedding beyond individual word meanings and word order. Instead, the decoding of complex linguistic structures is performed by the image model itself. Project webpage: https://nsping13.github.io/contextless-TTI/