# Intermediate Text Representation Guided Text-to-Image Generation for Enhancing One-and-Only Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30262 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30262/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 53 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)
- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [Diffusion and multimodal model alignment](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/diffusion-and-multimodal-model-alignment/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09341/) (2023)
- [Extracting Training Data from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13188/) (2023)
- [Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13826/) (2023)
- [Object Hallucination in Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02156/) (2018)
- [ELLA: Equip Diffusion Models with LLM for Enhanced Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05135/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Text-to-Visual Generation with Image-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01291/) (2024)
- [TIFA: Accurate and Interpretable Text-to-Image Faithfulness Evaluation with Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11897/) (2023)
- [DiffusionDB: A Large-scale Prompt Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14896/) (2022)
- [Visual Relationship Detection with Language Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00187/) (2016)
- [Connecting Vision and Language with Localized Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03098/) (2019)
- [Teaching CLIP to Count to Ten](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12066/) (2023)
- [Linguistic Binding in Diffusion Models: Enhancing Attribute Correspondence through Attention Map Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08877/) (2023)
- [Davidsonian Scene Graph: Improving Reliability in Fine-grained Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18235/) (2023)
- [Grounded Text-to-Image Synthesis with Attention Refocusing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05427/) (2023)
- [Fair Diffusion: Instructing Text-to-Image Generation Models on Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10893/) (2023)
- [Debiasing Vision-Language Models via Biased Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00070/) (2023)
- [Editing Implicit Assumptions in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08084/) (2023)
- [A Hierarchical Approach for Generating Descriptive Image Paragraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06607/) (2016)
- [Character-Aware Models Improve Visual Text Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10562/) (2022)
- [Finetuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07604/) (2023)
- [Breaking Common Sense: WHOOPS! A Vision-and-Language Benchmark of Synthetic and Compositional Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07274/) (2023)
- [The Bias Amplification Paradox in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00755/) (2023)
- [DreamSync: Aligning Text-to-Image Generation with Image Understanding Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17946/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Models Generate Images Like Painters: an Analytical Theory of Outline First, Details Later](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02490/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models often fail to faithfully render explicit textual descriptions, instead defaulting to strongly learned visual priors due to a phenomenon referred to as concept association bias. We show that such bias is particularly strong for one-and-only (OAO) objects, entities that exist in a single canonical form, such as celestial bodies, landmarks, and artworks. The deeply ingrained visual identity for these concepts often resists modification through prompting alone. Addressing this challenge, we first identify through an information-theoretic analysis that the final text embedding discards concept-level information present in the intermediate-layer text representations, reducing the mutual information available to the subsequent denoising process. We then propose Intermediate Text Representation (IR)-guided diffusion, which injects intermediate hidden states of the text encoder into the conditioning signal during early denoising steps, recovering suppressed concepts without any additional training, optimization, or external models. To systematically evaluate the challenging task of aligning generative outputs with unusual prompts for OAO objects, we introduce OAO-AttackBench, a benchmark comprising counterfactual prompts that directly conflict with the core visual identity of OAO objects. Experiments on four benchmarks, including OAO-AttackBench, show that our method achieves up to a 19.1 percentage-point improvement in VQAScore while preserving generation fidelity and human preference. Project page: https://soyoun-won.github.io/one-and-only-ir-guidance/.